The game addict was awakened by a saying, became a tycoon, everyone “voluntarily paid for”, used to be the richest lion island nation.

In the summer of 2005, Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, gave the legendary speech at the Stanford University graduation ceremony.

For Forrest Li, who was sitting in the audience with his girlfriend (and later his wife), that speech changed his life. Jobs’ final insistence, “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish,” would propel him into his later entrepreneurial journey.

Over the next decade, Li devoted himself to his work, culminating in the founding of Sea Group, a Singapore-based consumer internet company with e-commerce, gaming and technology sectors. finance. As of March 2021, Sea is the largest public company in Southeast Asia. In August of that year, Li also became the richest person in Singapore with a fortune of up to 19.8 billion USD.

“Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”

Born in 1978 in Tianjin, a large city next to the Chinese capital Beijing, Li studied engineering at Shanghai Jiaotong University. The name Forrest began to be used from this time, after an American lecturer could not pronounce his name. After graduation, he joined Motorola as the director of human resources.

Four years later, Li left that high-paying job to pursue an MBA at Stanford. After completing the program, he joined a startup company, GGgame, founded by an alumnus, Chen Ou. GGgame is a real-time online gaming platform that allows players across Europe and Asia to participate in online games and connect with each other.

Although the company grows, Li and Chen disagree on how to run the business and lead to a breakdown. In 2008, Chen sold his 35% stake in GGgame for $700,000.

After Chen’s departure, Li had to turn his own short-term venture around to focus on game publishing and rebrand the business, officially founding Garena in 2009.

In 2010, after a series of meetings with Pony Ma, co-founder and CEO of game giant Tencent, Li won the exclusive rights to publish the global hit game, League of Legends, in the East Asia region. South Asia. Not long after, Tencent also gave Garena the right to publish 3 other popular games in this region, namely Glory King, Crossfire and WeFire.

In 2014, realizing that the percentage of smartphone and Internet users in Southeast Asia was on an increasing trend, Forrest Li set up a game studio in Shanghai, switching from developing games on PC to serving exclusively for mobile. In 2016, Garena introduced the hit game Free Fire.

According to SCMP, online games are the main business of the corporation with 500 million global users. Free Fire was the world’s most downloaded app last year on Google Play and the App Store.

The success of the game helps Garena attract investment from many large corporations in the world. Also in 2016, the company successfully raised capital of 170 million USD, was valued at 3.75 billion USD and became Singapore’s first unicorn startup.

Beyond the realm of games

As his gaming empire has grown, Li has forayed into e-commerce and financial services. In 2015, he launched Shopee, an online platform that specializes in retailing consumer goods, from electronics to beauty products.

The birth of Shopee competes directly with the giant Alibaba-backed Lazada, which was founded three years earlier. With a strategy of attracting online shoppers with the concept of affordable prices and free shipping, Shopee found a foothold in the market and quickly gained an edge over Lazada.

By Q1 2019, Shopee had overtaken Lazada to become the most visited platform in Southeast Asia. According to iPrice, Shopee’s growth has mainly come from web users in Indonesia and Thailand. Shopee is also more popular than Lazada in countries like Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines, based on TMO Group’s 2021 report. Particularly in Vietnam, Shopee is considered a “national” shopping platform due to its very popularity.

Li’s company Sea is also venturing into digital payments. In April 2014, Sea launched its digital financial services arm with AirPay, an e-wallet and mobile payment solution similar to Ant Group’s Alipay in China. AirPay was later renamed to SeaMoney. As of Q2 2021, the app has 32 million users.

In May 2017, Garena officially changed its name to Sea Group. This was followed by an initial public offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange in October.

In 2019, Shopee stepped up its operations in Latin America, targeting this $105 billion market, starting with Brazil.

By December 2020, Sea’s stock price had risen to $180, giving the company a market capitalization of around $98 billion. In November 2020, the company’s stock price hit an all-time high of $358.

At the end of August 2021, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Li owns a fortune of about 19.8 billion USD and becomes the richest person in Singapore. The second richest person is paint tycoon Goh Cheng Liang, with a net worth of $17.7 billion.

However, in business, no one knows what will happen in advance. As of last year, Forrest Li was worth $22 billion and remains the richest person in Singapore. But soon after, he also became one of the people who lost the most fortune in the world. The market wobble of that time wiped $1 trillion off the fortunes of the world’s 500 richest people in 2022.

So far, Sea has faced formidable competitors, from Alibaba’s Lazada to the e-commerce TikTok Shop and a host of emerging companies in digital finance.

While it remains to be seen how Sea will navigate the rough seas, investors still see the tech company’s value clearly. In February of this year, major investment groups like Ark Invest and Hillhouse Capital increased their holdings in Sea Group—Hillhouse now owns more than 1 million shares of Sea, making the consumer internet giant a become one of the top 10 companies in terms of private equity holdings.