TikTok’s Harvard graduate CEO Shou Zi Chew battles for the US market
Shou Zi Chew has said the most gruelling experience of his life was a five-day survival course in the jungles of Borneo when he was serving as a conscript in Singapore’s armed forces.
The TikTok chief executive, whose trans-global academic and business career has rapidly propelled him to the top job at one of the world’s biggest tech companies, will need to display some of that mettle as he battles to ensure the corporate survival of the controversial but immensely popular social video app.
The 40-year-old Singaporean-born, who faces questioning by US lawmakers on Thursday amid talk of a possible ban in the US, came from a relatively modest background: his father worked in construction and mother in bookkeeping. His fate was transformed at the age of 12 when high marks on a national exam got him into an elite high school, where he added fluency in Mandarin to his native English.
Following his military service – Chew is a reservist officer in the Singaporean army until he is 50 – he obtained a bachelor’s degree in economics from University College London.
He stayed on in the UK capital, becoming a banker at Goldman Sachs for two years, investment experience that would eventually lead him to meet a young Zhang Yiming, the founder of TikTok’s parent, ByteDance, when he was developing the company in a crammed apartment in Beijing’s university district.
In 2010, Chew gained his MBA from Harvard Business School, where he got his first experience of life in the tech sector with an internship at Facebook while the social networking company was still in start-up mode before going public in 2012.
It was also where he met his Taiwanese-American future wife Vivian Kao, with whom he has two children. Chew – whoseTikTok profile was created
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