TikTok CEO Chew Shou Zi to NTU PhD Grads: 'Seek Out Rooms Where You're the Least Experienced'

As artificial intelligence reshapes the workforce at compounding speed, the most valuable career advice for Singapore's newest PhD graduates came not from a technical blueprint but from a former Goldman Sachs banker who turned a childhood gaming addiction into the helm of one of the world's most influential platforms. Speaking at NTU's PhD conferment ceremony on August 1, TikTok chief executive Chew Shou Zi told 575 doctoral graduates that curiosity — genuine, resilient, and relentlessly pursued — would be their most durable asset in an era where change is no longer constant but exponential.

Chew, 43, traced his own improbable arc from Yio Chu Kang to the global stage: hours on a computer his father bought him as a child — "I would love to tell you I was coding some brilliant software, but the reality is I was playing computer games. A lot of them" — to economics at University College London, investment banking at Goldman Sachs, Harvard Business School, CFO of Xiaomi, and ultimately TikTok CEO since 2021. The throughline, he argued, was curiosity that refused to stay contained. "That pull I felt towards technology when I was younger kept resurfacing, and that's the beautiful thing about genuine curiosity — it's incredibly resilient."

The speech landed in what Chew called a "pivotal and exciting point in history" — the convergence of AI, digital transformation, and structural workforce change that mirrors the internet revolution he rode early in his own career. His advice was pointed: "Seek out rooms where you are the least experienced person in them. Embrace uncertainty because that is where meaningful innovation happens." It's the kind of counsel that resonates differently in Singapore, where the education-to-employment pipeline has historically prized certainty and credentialing over ambiguity. For a nation betting heavily on AI — from MOE's EdTech Masterplan to the National AI Strategy — the message is a quiet challenge to institutional assumptions about what prepares graduates for the real economy.

Chew also wove a personal thread about Singapore itself: his world in primary school was "hyperlocal," bounded by his neighbourhood, until Hwa Chong Institution in Bukit Timah expanded it. "This is the same story of Singapore itself," he said — a small island that, through curiosity and resilience, has always looked outwards and upwards. The 575 PhD graduates, part of the largest batch in NTU's history at over 14,000 this year, now carry what Chew called a "passport" to take their work to the world stage.

Why it matters for Singapore: Chew's speech — equal parts autobiography and provocation — reflects a tension Singapore's AI strategy will need to reconcile: the drive to systematise AI adoption through frameworks, guidelines, and masterplans, versus the messy, non-linear, curiosity-driven path that produced one of Singapore's most globally visible tech leaders. If the goal is to produce more Chew Shou Zis, the system may need to leave more room for the computer games.