The illustrious career of the boss of an online shopping empire: From a penniless game addict to the richest billionaire in Singapore

Game “addicted” guy with strange hobbies and endless inspiration from the Apple founder

Bruce Lee (born 1977) in Tianjin, China, in a family with parents working as civil servants. Like young people of the same generation, he soon felt the rapid change of China and went to English classes with the desire to approach the modern civilization of the West.

During his time as an Engineering student at Shanghai University, he often played games until morning at an Internet Cafe to satisfy his passion for gaming. And that made him an eccentric in the eyes of his college friends.

Coming from a family without a business background, his parents are both government officials, however, his life changed after attending the graduation ceremony of his girlfriend – who later became his wife, at Stanford University in 2005. Here, he listened to Steve Jobs’ immortal speech with the famous saying “Stay hungry, stay foolish”.

He listened to the same speech three times a day for a month and decided to start a business. “That speech became my motivation to have the courage to do what I do now,” Li told Bloomberg.

Finally, after graduating, Ly Tieu Dong went to the US to study for a master’s degree and continued to improve at the prestigious Stanford University, he excelled in the business administration major of this school. He and his girlfriend decided to work in Singapore and quickly got married. Both have good academic records, advanced degrees. However, in foreign lands, they still have to struggle to make a living. In 2005, when they first arrived on the island of lions, the couple had nothing in their hands, lived in a cheap apartment, and even had to find a way to pay off their master’s tuition debt. 100,000 USD (more than 2 billion VND).

He experienced a number of failures when starting a business before reaching the success he is today.

Not missing the opportunity, he worked for MTV Network, then decided to start a business with the GG Game project. However, this project failed and cost him a large amount of investment. He realized that he was going in the wrong direction to build an offline game company when this was the time for online games. After this first failure, 31-year-old Bruce Lee continued to launch Garena 2009 with 2 partners, Gang Ye and David Chen. His second company did not succeed overnight, but also faced some challenges in Asia as the global financial crisis unfolded.

He said the company’s leadership team had to use their own money, even borrowed from family and friends to invest. Without paying anyone, the first success to Garena was the online game segment when launching the hit game Free Fire, which earned many impressive records.

Thanks to the success of this field, Garena attracts investment from many large corporations in the world. Backed by Tencent, in 2017 Garena changed its name to Sea Group with ambitions to expand regionally, expanding operations into online payments and retail. However, Bruce Lee kept the Garena name for games and digital entertainment.

Go head-to-head with Jack Ma’s empire, become the richest billionaire in Singapore

Having attracted tens of millions of users, Bruce understands it’s time to add other technology products to the ecosystem. He found that in the Southeast Asian environment, a successful technology solution in one economy can be replicated or applied in another, creating a large cross-border market. Then, invested by Tencent, Ly Tieu Dong’s company expanded its operations to online payment and retail.

In 2015, Bruce Lee founded Shopee – a mobile shopping platform with the backing of Tencent. Shopee’s initial strategy was to focus on the Southeast Asian market including Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam.

The potential of e-commerce in Southeast Asia was soon noticed by Jack Ma. While Alibaba pushes the strategy of “expanding e-commerce across borders”, Garena’s Shopee company also emerges as a force to be reckoned with.

The confrontation between Alibaba and Shopee took place earlier than analysts expected. Alibaba continuously expands its influence by acquiring Lazada system in Southeast Asia. On the other side of the front line, Garena applied guerrilla tactics “in the vicinity”. Bruce Lee’s plan is to mobilize storage from partners to quickly reach partners. Alibaba focuses on developing infrastructure and warehousing for cross-border goods transportation.

According to reports by iPrice and SimilarWeb, in 2020, Shopee becomes the trading platform with the highest average website traffic in the region. And App Annie’s statistics also show that Shopee is the second most downloaded shopping app globally.

At the end of August, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Bruce Lee 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.

“Beyond Southeast Asia, there may be more opportunities for us. Based on what we’ve learned, we may be able to apply it to a few other markets like what happened with Free Fire,” he said. let me know.

Bruce Lee also embraces the ambition to bring better lives to users and businesses through technology. “What we have is a unique understanding of technology that can be applied to businesses where we operate, especially in an emerging market,” said the Shopee boss.

Shopee is the leading online shopping app in Southeast Asia.

The halo goes out when the asset “evaporates” because of stocks

Recently, the stock market wobble has wiped away 1 trillion USD of the super-rich around the world, including 17.3 billion USD of Bruce Lee (about 400 trillion VND). Thus, after only a few short months, the owner of Shopee is no longer in the list of 500 richest people in the world.

However, information from Bloomberg said that Bruce Lee is still among the richest people in the world with the remaining $4.7 billion in assets (about 109 trillion VND).

His career made many people respect and admire.

In addition, partners of Sea Group are still available for bad news related to the company. Especially the event that Shopee closed its e-commerce activities in India, causing the stock price to plummet without stopping. At the same time, due to the influence of other objective reasons, the source of e-commerce revenue did not achieve the expected results.

Originally an extremely private businessman, however, Bruce Lee had to come out and reassure his employees. He encouraged people not to worry too much and stay optimistic, even though the stock price is trending down to the lowest level in the past 2 years. Sharing the same view with Mr. Ly, analysts also believe that Sea Group will “recover” in the future.