Shouzi Chew - From Investor to TikTok CEO

Late on March 23rd, TikTok CEO Shouzi Chew was subjected to tough questioning by U.S. politicians at a hearing held by the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee.

After the hearing, which lasted more than five hours, Chew released an internal letter within TikTok describing the hearing. In the letter, he described the hearing as "challenging" and "did not leave much room for factual clarification.”

The hearing was not only observed in the technology circle, but Chew's calmness and poise made the hearing attract the attention of more netizens. Before heading into this career test, Chew has already gone through several rounds of tests concerning his personal fate.

I. From investor to manager

"My name is Shouzi Chew and I was born in Singapore. I served in the Singapore Army, went to college in England, and then came here (to the U.S.) for business school. It's also where I met my wife, who was born just a few miles away from here."

Before hearing this typical American opening speech, people who did not know Chew, who speaks fluent Mandarin, has an East Asian face and works as an executive in a Chinese company, would probably mistake him for a Chinese.

Born and raised in the city-state of Singapore, Chow, 40, became a member of the Air Force at 18 and graduated from UCL at 23. He then joined Goldman Sachs $Goldman Sachs(GS)$ , a top international investment firm, before resigning two years later to pursue an MBA from Harvard Business School, during which time he met his future wife.

Chew Shouzi joined DST in 2010, at a time when he was not well known and was doing the groundwork of building a network. Foreign media reported that "Shouzi Chew, a Harvard MBA graduate, spent a year getting to know key partners at more than 20 of China's top financial advisory firms."

After completing the groundwork, Chow got his act together.

In 2012, DST participated in Xiaomi $Xiaomi Corp.(XIACY)$ 's Series C financing under the promotion of Shouzi Chew.

In 2013, DST placed another heavy bet on Xiaomi's Series D financing, and of course Chew played a key role.

In 2014, DST continued to follow up on Xiaomi's Series E financing. Three years of three consecutive investments, it can be seen that Chew by the capital of the love of Xiaomi. Of course, this love is not only reflected in the "money".

In 2015, Chew joined Xiaomi as CFO, and since then, his story with Xiaomi has become a popular one, and his career has taken a major turn, moving from the path of an investor to the path of an entrepreneur.

Hugo Barra, a former Xiaomi Group executive, said Chew's dual cultural background is a critical strength for Chinese companies striving to move to the global stage.

In 2021, Xiaomi Group announced the resignation of Shouzi Chew as an executive director, thus ending his career at Xiaomi, an experience that transformed Chew from an investor to a corporate executive and laid the foundation for his subsequent experience.

II. Become a CEO

The period when Shouzi Chew faced a career change was also a few years when Chinese Internet companies frequently refreshed public perception. The emergence of video applications such as TikTok has led to a spurt of short video content, making it the brightest presence in the Internet world.

ByteDance has chosen a timely strategy to go abroad.

TikTok, which was launched in May 2017, has gone on a wild ride and taken overseas markets by storm.

In the overseas market at the time, there was a similar product called Musical.ly that was quite competitive. Originally developed by a team of 10 people in Shanghai and San Francisco, this short video product has been popular among teenagers since it entered the U.S. in 2014, featuring short 15-second videos of "lip-synching + singing and dancing".

In 2016, Musical.ly had 70 million downloads in the U.S. and topped the overall U.S. App Store in 2017, with 240 million registered users worldwide.

In 2017, it was looking for a buyer as its growth gradually reached a bottleneck.

In November 2017, ByteDance announced the acquisition of Musical.ly, whose content and users were merged with TikTok, the overseas version of Douyin.

Since 2020, TikTok has been the focus of much attention on the global Internet.

The acquisition is also believed to be bytes in order to obtain Musical.ly's music copyright contract assets and pave the way for Douyin's overseas expansion.

In 2021, after ending his career at Xiaomi, Chew replaced former Disney $Walt Disney(DIS)$ executive Kevin Mayer as the global CEO of the integrated TikTok.

In 2013, Zhang Yiming came to us with TopBuzz, and Chew took the lead in investing in TopBuzz on behalf of DST.

According to people familiar with the matter, "Zhang Yiming trusts Chew quite a lot." Zhang had mentioned in his internal appointment letter for 2021 ByteDance that "Chew is very familiar with our business, team and culture, having gotten to know us during his time at DST and driven DST to invest in ByteDance at a very early stage."

According to media reports, in the last six months of his departure from Xiaomi, Chew was influenced by the fact that he had been in close contact with Zhang Yiming, who happened to need such an elite in the Western world to influence the Western political and business community, and that "it was hard to find a more ideal person than him".

A senior Internet analyst said in a media interview that this appointment of Chew as Tiktok CEO clearly indicates that Tiktok is also starting to deliberate its next round of financing plan. "And with its influence and volume, I believe an IPO is highly likely even in the near future."

Before Chew was joined by the capital, TikTok had already fallen into a dark moment. in August 2020, the then president of the United States, Donald Trump issued two presidential executive orders requiring TikTok to be taken off the shelves in the United States and stripped from bytes, kicking off TikTok's struggle to mediate in the U.S. market.

From the various performances of Shouzi Chew, he did not retreat in front of the situation on all sides.

In January 2023, Chew agreed to attend the U.S. Congressional hearings, which led to the "war of words" on March 23.

One U.S. media reporter said on a social media platform, "I've covered many hearings of tech CEOs and this is probably the most pointed one I've ever seen."

"This is a critical moment for us". This could take TikTok away from 150 million of you", Chew said, standing in front of the Capitol. In addition, he also stressed that blocking the app would hurt a large number of individuals and businesses that make a living or profit from TikTok.