Ten years ago, working as a young venture capital banker in Beijing, Shou Zi Chew helped lead one of the first investments in a small machine-learning start-up called ByteDance, helping it grow from its office in a four-bedroom apartment into the 150,000-employee international empire behind TikTok, one of the world's most popular apps.
Now, as TikTok's chief executive, he's become the face of what some Washington lawmakers have claimed, without evidence, is a shadowy Chinese spying and propaganda machine. When he takes the stand for his first congressional hearing Thursday, he is likely to face the grilling of a lifetime from lawmakers who argue that the app, now with 150 million U.S. users, can't be trusted and must be banned or sold.