Bottom-Up, One Market at a Time

Forrest Li is the founder, chairman and CEO of Sea Limited, the Singapore company behind Garena (games), Shopee (e-commerce) and Monee (digital financial services). He started Garena in 2009, when few people believed Southeast Asia could produce a large internet business, and later took Sea public on the New York Stock Exchange. Garena develops and runs Free Fire, which Li calls the largest mobile game in the world, and Shopee has grown from Southeast Asia into markets including Brazil. Outside Sea, he is president of the Football Association of Singapore and owns the Lion City Sailors. These signals are from Forrest Li's interview with Tyler Bryson on Stripe's YouTube channel, recorded at the Stripe Tour in Singapore.

1. Payments As the First Product. Garena's early breakthrough came from fixing payments for games. In 2009, Southeast Asian gamers packed internet cafes playing World of Warcraft and League of Legends, but publishers saw no revenue because most players were teenagers without credit cards. Garena designed its own prepaid cards, and half of its Chinatown shophouse office was filled with bags of them. A computer science graduate hired to write code ended up driving around Singapore delivering cards to every internet cafe, which finally let developers earn money and players buy the full game.
2. "You Are Joining a Startup." Sea now has about 60,000 employees, and Li still gives every graduating class of its graduate rotation program one message: remember you joined a startup, not a big company. The program picks 10 to 20 graduates a year for a 2-year rotation, and top leadership sits in the final interviews. Li ties that spirit to solving a specific problem rather than treating entrepreneurship as a lifestyle. Shopee began 5 years into the games business because he couldn't accept that Southeast Asia had no marketplace when the US and China already had good ones.
3. Imported Playbooks Fail Here. Sea's competitors mostly came from the US or China with playbooks optimized to win at home, and they assumed those playbooks would work in Southeast Asia. Li says the region is too fragmented to treat as one market. Singapore and Vietnam are a 2-hour flight apart but sit at very different stages of economic development. Because Singapore differs so much even from its neighbors, Sea called itself a "multinational startup" from the start and built bottom-up solutions country by country.
4. The Price Is the ID. When Shopee launched in Indonesia about 10 years ago, buyers could order on their phones but couldn't pay online. They received a code, went to an ATM or bank branch to pay, and the banks didn't disclose who had paid. Shopee's fix was to sell 10 identical bottles of water at 10 slightly different prices, differing by a fraction of a rupiah, so the amount itself identified the buyer. Hundreds of people sat in the office every day matching payments to orders. Li's comment on Amazon: it never had that problem.
5. Brazil's Logistics Gap. Li brought his leadership team to Brazil in 2019 because Free Fire had suddenly become popular there, and they found e-commerce penetration lower than Indonesia's despite Brazil's much earlier start. The cause was delivery cost of more than $5 per parcel. At that cost a $100 order can still make money, but a $10 order loses half its value to logistics, so e-commerce in Brazil was for wealthy people. Sea already knew how to build low-cost logistics networks in Southeast Asia, which gave it the conviction to enter.
6. Five Values, Half a Day. In Sea's early years, culture was set by example because everyone could see the leaders every day. Around year 5, with offices in several markets, Li took the leadership team away for a weekend, and they agreed on 5 values in half a day: we serve, we run, we adapt, we commit, and we stay humble. "We serve" puts the customer first. Li considers "stay humble" the most important, because it lets the company see its own gaps and serve customers better.
7. The CEO's Inbox. Li's email address appears to be posted online, and he gets customer emails every day. He takes each one seriously because people write to him only after other channels have failed. Each case gets reviewed with the whole leadership team watching. In more than half of them, the specific complaint points to something wrong in Sea's processes or flows.
8. Credit on Payday Rhythms. ShopeePay began in Indonesia as a way to store money in a wallet so buyers made one ATM trip instead of one per order, and it grew into one of the region's largest standalone mobile wallets. Shopee then saw purchases spike mid-month and at month-end, matching payroll cycles, and decided buyers shouldn't have to wait for payday. Credit card penetration in Indonesia is still below 20%, so many families delay purchases or borrow from loan sharks. Sea started by lending only for Shopee purchases, expanded to general and offline use as it learned borrowers' credit, and now has a loan book over $10 billion across about 50 million people, roughly $200 each.
9. AI Customer Service. Shopee handles millions of orders a day, and Sea rolled out AI chat for customer service carefully, A/B testing before launch. Li says cost was never the point: the test was whether customers stayed happy. Today more than 80% of customer inquiries are handled entirely by AI, and satisfaction is higher than with human agents.
10. Bots That Teach Teamwork. More than 100 million people play Free Fire every day. New players have always been matched against bots so they don't get crushed by veterans and quit, but the old bots were easy to spot. AI bots are now hard to tell apart from people, and Sea uses them for a specific problem: almost half of Free Fire's players only ever play solo. Pairing those players with an AI teammate gives them the team game, which Li says is "much much more fun," and nudges them toward playing with other people. AI also now does the basic concept art work Sea used to outsource, leaving senior artists to do the final touches.
11. Ninety Minutes Off. Li says entrepreneurs give up nearly every hobby, and football is the one he kept, because a 90-minute match is the only time his brain rests from the business. He picked football over golf, though golf might have helped him meet CEOs and do deals. He has led the Football Association of Singapore for about 18 months and says it feels like a startup's early days, with people insisting it can't work because it hasn't worked for 20 years. At a recent full-house loss to Thailand at Jalan Besar Stadium, nobody left after the final whistle, which to Li shows how much fans care.
12. Never Once Giving Up. Asked for his secret, Li says that across many dark moments he never once, "from bottom my heart," thought about giving up. He thinks that may simply be his character. His advice is to trust yourself, keep going, stay humble and adapt. Sometimes, he says, a problem even solves itself if you stay in the game long enough.

Watch the full video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEYGln3s9MM.