Not Chinese or even Chinese "Zhou Shou Capital"

It was the end of April 2021, and ByteDance announced a new personnel appointment, and ByteDance CFO Zhou Shouzi was also the CEO of TikTok. At that time, most people believed that CFO-turned-Zhou Shouzi would start handling the listing of TikTok.

However, unexpectedly, Zhou Shouzi's most important battle began first in the US Congress - this week, TikTok CEO Zhou Shouzi attended a hearing in the US Congress and was questioned by US lawmakers for 5 hours.

Prejudice and hostility are evident. During the hearing, politicians of both parties in the United States often asked Zhou Shouzi to answer complex questions with a simple "yes or no", in addition, he frequently interrupted Zhou's answer, seemingly not interested in hearing the executive's full answer. One representative even asked TikTok how it determines a user's age, implying a reliance on biotech identification data, which Zhou was slightly speechless: users provide their age when they sign up for an account.

This is a life-and-death battle for TikTok, and it is also the hardest battle in Zhou's career.

From Singapore to Beijing, a number of Internet giants have been cast

In fact, the VC circle is no stranger to Zhou Shouzi. His life trajectory has always been talked about: born in Singapore in 1983, he joined the army at the age of 18 and retired two years later with the rank of captain; Graduated from UCL at the age of 23, he immediately joined Goldman Sachs, a top investment bank; Two years later, he resigned to pursue an MBA from Harvard Business School; At the age of 27, he joined the Russian fund DST as a partner, and then started his VC career alone from Singapore to Beijing. DST is famous today, but when Zhou accepted the invitation of DST boss Milner, this cosmic fund was not conspicuous. But at that time, he immediately chose to join DST. Many friends are curious about where his courage comes from. "If you're told to board a rocket, don't ask where you should sit, just get on first." In a later interview, Zhou Shouzi explained this. This quote from the Facebook COO profoundly influenced his career choice. At that time, as the core strength of DST in China, the young Zhou Shouzi was very popular, spending a year in Beijing to meet the key partners of more than 20 top financial consulting institutions in China, and traveled all over the technology companies, large and small. In a well-known case, DST boss Milner met with Liu Qiangdong for the first time in December 2010 under Zhou's capital arrangement, and reached an agreement for DST to buy 8.8% of JD.com for $500 million. Through this relationship, DST gradually entered the Chinese Internet circle, and later successfully invested in Alibaba. Zhou Shouzi's life credo is: "Everything has to be worked on." During his work at DST, in order to research entrepreneurial projects and observe the development of China's mobile Internet, he asked people to meet an average of 30 companies a week, and 3500 a year. Zhou Shouzi believes that investment is a kind of technical activity that requires a lot of accumulation in order to achieve a leap from quantitative change to qualitative change. A similar scene with investing in JD.com happened again. In 2011, Zhou Shouzi arranged for DST boss Milner and others to visit Xiaomi, and finally DST pocketed 7% of Xiaomi's shares with 500 million US dollars, creating another classic case. Since then, Zhou Shouzi and Lei Jun have bonded. In the years when China's mobile Internet was hot, Zhou Shouzi was one of the most active VCs. In 2013, he waited for another person who would influence the trajectory of his future life - Zhang Yiming. At that time, Zhang Yiming ran into a wall with Toutiao, and after learning more about it, Zhou Shouzi accepted him without hesitation, and exclusively invested tens of millions of dollars in Series B financing on behalf of DST. Whether it was luck or hard work, in those years, Zhou Shouzi met and invested in a group of highly creative founders in China, which also laid the groundwork for his later career.

From Xiaomi to ByteDance VC transformation path

Zhou Shouzi has always adhered to an investment principle: not only to stay close to the founders of the investment, but also to turn them into their own. In the end, this scene happened dramatically. Back in 2015, Lei Jun needed someone to inject more added value into Xiaomi; In order to build an ecosystem, investing in smart hardware companies is the most efficient choice. After a wave of screening, Xiaomi finally extended its tentacles to its own investors - DST partner Zhou was invited to join Xiaomi as CFO. In this way, Zhou Shouzi began a new journey, and in the first 3 years of joining Xiaomi, Xiaomi has invested in more than 200 companies, many of which have his figure. Fast forward to 2018, Xiaomi began to prepare for a sprint to go public, and Zhou Shouzi took over this burden and operated an IPO for the first time. To this end, he excitedly shared a picture on Weibo, which said: "In the coming year, even sleeping is a waste of time." Later, Xiaomi successfully became the first listed company on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange with "same shares and different rights", and it was also the largest IPO in the Hong Kong stock market at that time. In 2019, Zhou Shouzi was appointed as an executive director of Xiaomi on his 37th birthday and rotated as the president of Xiaomi's international department. In 2020, Zhou Shouzi became Xiaomi's youngest partner, and Lei Jun did not hide his appreciation for Zhou Shouzi, granting him 100 million shares of options, valid for 10 years, hoping to retain Zhou Shouzi. But the CEO of the iron fight, the CFO of the flowing water, and the CFO who helped the company go public often leave after completing the mission, which has almost become the consensus in the industry. And Zhou's next stop is also the company he has invested in, ByteDance. In March 2021, Zhou Shouzi announced that he had joined ByteDance as CFO. At that time, ByteDance's internal appointment letter mentioned that "Zhou Shouzi is very familiar with our business, team and culture, he knew us during his time at DST, and drove DST to invest in ByteDance at a very early stage." However, for Zhou Shouzi, Zhang Yiming has more expectations. On April 30, 2021, ByteDance announced a new personnel appointment, and the then CFO of ByteDance, Zhou Shouzi, was also appointed as CEO of TikTok. Zhang Yiming said in an internal letter: "The recipient is familiar with the company and the industry, has worked in the technology field for more than ten years, and led the investment in ByteDance very early. As CEO of TikTok, the grantee will be responsible for corporate governance and long-term business planning. "Joining your favored portfolio company is undoubtedly one of the most successful transformation paths for VCs. From DST to Xiaomi and ByteDance, Zhou Shouzi has obviously done it.

This is just the beginning

I just didn't expect that TikTok's journey would be so difficult. In the past two years that Zhou has been CEO, TikTok has been questioned by the US government three times. From the very beginning of the executive order, to the subsequent participation in congressional hearings; From being summoned along with other technology companies in the United States to being targeted separately, everything is obvious to all, but the other party is still so blatant.

Currently, TikTok has 150 million monthly active users in the United States, covering almost all young users in the United States. In fact, since the Trump era, TikTok has been suppressed in the United States, and Trump has twice signed executive orders against TikTok. After Biden, controls on TikTok were relatively relaxed, but since December 2022, when the US Congress voted to ban federal employees from using TikTok on government-owned devices, the situation has become serious. Ahead of the hearing, Zhou and his team traveled around Washington hoping to allay lawmakers' concerns about TikTok ahead of the hearing. He also posted a video on TikTok calling on users to speak up for the platform, which garnered more than 860,000 likes and nearly 90,000 comments 36 hours after its release.

Still, TikTok struggles to control its own destiny. TikTok's experience is undoubtedly a wake-up call for Chinese companies. At the moment, almost everyone is convinced that the time has come for China to rise to more global internet platforms. Over the years, technology companies from China have embarked on a global journey. Just as in addition to TikTok, platforms such as SHEIN and Temu are also invincible overseas. But here's the thing: when our tech companies rise and disrupt the global internet order, we need to be ready for any challenge. This battle for globalization has only just begun.