Part IThe Story
He wrote the memo lying down. In the early months of 2022, Forrest Li was laid up in bed in Singapore with Covid. He had a burning fever and a cough that would not let go. He was also, by the arithmetic of the previous summer, the richest man in the country. He propped himself up on a pillow and typed out instructions to his leadership team. Over the following months those instructions would take apart a good portion of what he had spent thirteen years building. The memo's argument was short. Sea, the company he had founded in a shophouse off Maxwell Road in 2009, would stop chasing growth and start chasing profit. And it would leave India.
What followed has been reported in the flat, inventory-like way that corporate austerity tends to be reported. Roughly 7,500 people lost their jobs, about a tenth of the workforce, although Sea declined to confirm the figure. Pay was frozen. Li and his leadership team gave up their salaries entirely, pending what the company called "self-sufficiency," a date no one would name. Business class was abolished, and everyone flew economy no matter how far they were going. Meals on the road were capped at $30 a day and hotels at $150 a night. The office snacks disappeared. TWG, the Singaporean luxury tea brand whose canisters look like they belong in a jewelry case, was replaced with Lipton. In at least some of the company's restrooms, two-ply toilet paper gave way to one-ply.
It is the toilet paper people remember. When Fortune added Li to its list of the 100 most powerful people in business in 2025, the citation managed to mention it within four sentences, as if the single-ply roll were the decisive artifact of his career. In a sense it might be. The company that installed it had once been valued at more than $200 billion. It had burned through more than $8 billion since its founding without posting a single profitable quarter. Its founder had, for most of a year in 2005 and 2006, replayed a commencement speech two or three times a day to work up the nerve to quit his job. The speech ended with the words stay foolish.
"We cared about every single dollar, every single cent," Li said in May 2023, sitting in his Singapore office for his first interview in more than two years. Then he said something more revealing, the closest thing to a confession in the public record of a man who almost never offers one: "You can have a big dream and a big ambition, but what if you cannot survive? You always have this kind of noise back in your mind saying we may be running out of money."
The noise is worth staying with. Li built the largest internet company in Southeast Asia. That meant a video-game publisher that became a game developer, that became an e-commerce platform, that became a logistics network, that became a bank. He did it in a region the global industry had written off, from a country that was not his by birth, under a name he had borrowed from a Hollywood movie. Somewhere beneath all of it, from the internet café in Shanghai to the rented bedroom in Braddell to the sickbed in 2022, there is a man listening for the sound of money running out. The bigger question, the one the rest of this story circles, is what it means to build something that large while never quite believing you have arrived.
By the Numbers
The Sea Ledger
$16.8BSea revenue in 2024
$444MSea net income in 2024, triple the prior year
$8B+Cumulative losses before Sea's first quarterly profit
87%Peak-to-trough fall in Sea's share price, Oct. 2021 to Nov. 2022
$22BLi's peak fortune in 2021, per Bloomberg
100M+Free Fire daily active users at its February 2024 peak
$100,000Student debt Li carried when he arrived in Singapore in 2006
A Name Borrowed From a Movie
He was born Li Xiaodong (李小冬) in Tianjin, the port city southeast of Beijing, in 1977 or 1978. Even the year is not settled, which suits a man who has spent his public life declining to fill in the blanks. His parents spent their entire careers inside state-owned companies. Forbes described them as salaried workers, and that is nearly all anyone outside the family knows about them. It is a sparse origin and a telling one. Li grew up inside the institutional certainty of the Chinese state economy, where the résumé was written for you on the day you were hired and then copied out, unchanged, until retirement.
He went to Shanghai Jiaotong University to study engineering. By his own account he did not spend much of that time studying. "I mean, I admit actually I probably play like too much games," he said in a conversation hosted by Stripe in 2026, "compared to in the classroom." Contemporaneous accounts are less coy. He spent most nights at an internet café playing until dawn. The internet café of late-1990s China was its own institution: a fluorescent room of rented machines and cigarette smoke, where a generation of young men learned that the most absorbing world available to them was one they could enter for a few yuan an hour. Li would later build a business, and then a fortune, on the fact that a very large number of people around the world were in rooms like that one.
The name came in an English class. An American lecturer asked each student to choose a Western name. Li thought of Tom Hanks's Oscar-winning portrayal of Forrest Gump and took the first name. It is easy to smirk at this, the billionaire who named himself after a holy fool. Li has never smirked. He has returned to the film again and again across two decades of otherwise guarded interviews, as if it were a scripture he had been assigned. In a 2025 conversation with Nicolai Tangen, head of Norway's sovereign wealth fund, one stretch of the discussion was given over entirely to the film's most famous line, about life and a box of chocolates. He explained the attraction most fully to The Straits Times:
— Forrest Li, to The Straits TimesNot always the smartest person, or the strongest one physically, among his peers, but he has a very good heart. Because of his persistence and his courage, he lived a very successful and very meaningful life… by helping a lot of other people.
Look at what he admires. He does not admire genius. He admires a certain kind of earnestness, and above all endurance. Gump runs. He keeps running long after the reason for running has fallen away, and the world rearranges itself around his persistence. For the son of state-company lifers, the appeal of this American fable is easy to reconstruct. It is a story in which an ordinary person, by refusing to stop, ends up present at every important event of his century.
After graduation, Li spent four years as a recruiter in Shanghai, hiring for Western multinationals: Motorola and Corning, the glass and fiber-optics manufacturer. He found the work dull, and he kept playing games at night partly to escape it. But the dull job taught him something, and he later described the lesson to Forbes Asia with a precision that suggests he had turned it over many times. "Every résumé is a personal story, right?" he said. "So by reading other people's stories, I started to think about how I wanted my résumé to read like in the future. If I kept doing what I was doing, I kind of knew what my résumé would look like."
This is the hinge of the early life. A young man reads hundreds of strangers' careers, each one compressed onto a page, and realizes that his own could be predicted from where he was sitting. He could see the end of the document. That was the problem.
The Speech, on Repeat
The way out ran through Stanford. Li was admitted to the Graduate School of Business for its Class of 2006. By one account he was one of only four students from mainland China in the cohort, and he financed the degree with a loan of $120,000. That was a staggering sum for the child of salaried state employees. It was also a wager that only made sense if the résumé that followed looked nothing like the one he had already foreseen.
At Stanford he met Ma Liqian, the woman he would marry. On June 12, 2005, he sat in the audience at her graduation ceremony. The commencement speaker that year was Steve Jobs, recently recovered from surgery for pancreatic cancer. Jobs gave a short address about connecting dots, about love and loss, and about death as "life's change agent." He closed with a line borrowed from the back cover of The Whole Earth Catalog: "Stay hungry. Stay foolish."
The speech would become one of the most-watched commencement addresses in history, and many people claim it changed their lives. Li's version of the claim is unusual for its specificity and for a certain sheepish candor about how much repetition the change required. "I remember during those days," he told an audience in 2020, "I re-watched the speech, probably, like two, three times a day for months, to accumulate the courage to be an entrepreneur."
Accumulate is the right verb, and it is not the verb of a natural risk-taker. Li did not hear the speech and leap. He heard it, and then he collected it, in daily doses, the way a nervous swimmer stands at the edge of a cold pool and counts. He has described what he took from it in terms that make the courage sound almost like a renunciation of thinking:
— Forrest Li, Cutting Edge forum, July 30, 2020The spirit of that speech is, you should do what you're really passionate about in your life. Don't really think about a lot of practical reasons. Just follow your heart, and eventually we will be at the destination.
Note the slip from you to we in that last sentence. It is the kind of grammatical drift that is easy to miss and hard to forget once noticed. Li speaks in the plural almost reflexively. The destination is never his alone.
It matters, too, that the two American texts at the center of Li's self-mythology, a Robert Zemeckis film and a Steve Jobs speech, are both about the same thing: an unlikely person following an impulse past the point where practical reasons would have stopped him. Li has said that he culturally "leans stateside." What he took from America was not mainly a business model. He took a permission. The business models he would get from China.
A Room in Braddell
He did not go home. After Stanford, in 2006, Li moved to Singapore with the woman he had met there. He was twenty-eight, with nothing in the bank and roughly $100,000 still owed on his student loans. The couple rented a single bedroom in a three-room flat built by the Housing and Development Board, the government agency whose concrete towers house most of Singapore's population, in the neighborhood of Braddell. They earned enough to cover that and not much more.
The detail has become Singapore folklore, and it is repeated in nearly every local profile of Li in the same three or four clauses: China-born, deep in debt, a room in Braddell. It is repeated because it inverts the usual direction of money in the city-state. Singapore attracts the already rich. It is where family offices are domiciled and where tycoons from across Asia park their wealth and their children. It is not, in the popular imagination, where an indebted immigrant in a rented room starts from nothing. Li knew this, and when Singapore's business establishment named him Businessman of the Year in November 2020, he made the inversion the center of his acceptance speech:
— Forrest Li, Singapore Business Awards, November 24, 2020There is a stereotype out there, that businessmen only come to places like Singapore after they have found success elsewhere. That is not my story... Long before I had any success, [the Singaporean community] made me feel welcome, and let me and my family make our home here.
The first attempt failed. Li started a gaming company called GG Game, which ran from roughly 2006 to 2008 and went nowhere. The record of it is so thin that it survives mainly as a line item in the longer story, the bombed first act that every founder myth seems to require. What can be said is that it failed in the window between Stanford and the global financial crisis. By the time Li tried again, in May 2009, the world's capital markets were still in shock.
The second company was called Garena. Li started it with two partners, Gang Ye and David Chen, whom he had met in Singapore. That geographic fact was important enough to him that he singled it out in the same awards speech. The public record of the two co-founders is thinner even than Li's, which is itself a kind of characterization. Ye became chief operating officer, the operator in the trio. By 2021 his stake was worth $10.8 billion, and he has given almost no interviews. Chen became the product mind behind Shopee, its chief product officer, worth $3.6 billion at the same peak and no longer a billionaire by the end of 2022. Neither ever appears to have sought the microphone. It is a founding team in which the most talkative member is a man his own former head of public relations described as "very soft-spoken and very reserved."
Garena's first office was a shophouse off Maxwell Road in Tanjong Pagar, in the old commercial district a few hundred meters from the hawker center where office workers queue for chicken rice. Shophouses are narrow, two- or three-story buildings with a business on the ground floor and, historically, a family living above. It is hard to imagine an address that better fits a company whose founder would spend the next fifteen years talking about humility. Li later called the space "pokey."
There was no institutional money. "Basically, nobody was really looking at South-east Asia as a promising investment opportunity," Li recalled. "We pretty much just used our own money, and some money from our family and friends. That's how we got started." The founders funded the company themselves, in a recession, in a region the global industry had decided to ignore.
The Region Nobody Wanted
The thing to understand about Southeast Asia in 2009, from the point of view of the global games industry, is that it barely existed. "If you ask any executive from the game industry," Li said in 2026, recalling that period, "they say... 'we never see any revenue and we never see any kind of a business case from Southeast Asia.'" It was a region of more than 600 million people speaking dozens of languages, using half a dozen currencies, playing pirated games on shared computers in rooms not unlike the internet café in Shanghai where Li had spent his nights. Nobody had figured out how to make them pay.
Garena began as a platform, a kind of social layer where gamers in the region could find each other, chat, and play together online. It was a distributor before it was anything else. Its two early breaks came almost simultaneously. In 2010, Riot Games, then a young Los Angeles studio with a free-to-play strategy game called League of Legends, awarded Garena the rights to publish the game in Southeast Asia, its first launch in the region. Around the same time, Tencent, the Shenzhen internet colossus that had pioneered free-to-play monetization in China, took a stake of about 40 percent in the company, a large infusion of cash. Li has been careful to credit how that relationship began. It was Singapore's Economic Development Board, the government agency charged with luring investment, that introduced the Garena founders to Tencent.
That sequence reveals something about Li's method. He did not begin by making things. He began by learning how other people's products behaved when they landed in a fragmented market, which titles worked in Thailand and not in Vietnam, how players in Indonesia paid differently from players in Taiwan. "It's a very fragmented market," he would say a decade later. "People speak different languages, have different traditions and preferences. So over the years, we have developed that sense of sensitivity to the subtle differences across the market." The distributor's business is mostly a business of attention to these differences, and Li spent his first six years paying it.
The Garena+ platform launched in 2010. By 2014, the company was valued at $1 billion and The Economist ranked it the largest internet company in Singapore. In March 2015, the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, one of the largest pension funds in the world, invested at a valuation of more than $2.5 billion. The schoolteachers of Ontario were now, indirectly, betting on gamers in Jakarta.
The gaming business broke even within five or six years of its founding, by Li's count. It would turn out to matter more than anything else about Garena. A profitable game publisher generates something rarer in a startup ecosystem than a good idea, which is money that answers to nobody outside the company. Li understood this before he had a use for it. The use was coming.
Daddy Will Build One
In 2014, Sea, still called Garena, launched an e-wallet business called AirPay in Vietnam and Thailand. It was a modest beginning in payments that few outside the company noticed. The larger turn came the following year, and Li has given it an origin story so domestic it could be a children's book.
On a family vacation, he asked his young daughter what she missed most about home. Her answer was Taobao, the sprawling Chinese online marketplace run by Alibaba. "Okay then," Li told her, by his own account, "Daddy will build one for you."
Shopee launched in Singapore in 2015 and soon expanded across seven markets in Southeast Asia. The joke had become a company. It is a charming story, and it is also a little too neat, the kind of anecdote that founders polish because it makes an enormous strategic bet sound like a gift. The strategic bet is spelled out more plainly elsewhere. Li had set out, as one profile put it, to adapt the two most valuable business models in China, online games on the model of Tencent and e-commerce on the model of Alibaba, for a market that did not yet have either. His daughter's homesickness and the analyst's thesis point to the same conclusion. Southeast Asia lacked something China already had, and someone who knew both places could see the gap.
What made Shopee survivable, and then dominant, was the shape of the company around it. Garena's games kept making money, and the money went to Shopee. "We are in a very good situation because Garena has been profitable—actually it's pretty profitable, and this gives us the resources to invest in Shopee, invest in SeaMoney," Li said in November 2020. Then he added the sentence that explains the entire strategy and much of what came after: "We always have our very predictable and certain funding source for whatever the new business we'd love to invest in. We don't have to rely on external investors, the capital markets. This has allowed us to have a very long-term view."
Asked in the same interview when Shopee would turn a profit, he gave an answer that is either supremely confident or slightly evasive, depending on your temperament: "Let me put it this way, it can be profitable anytime. But I think what's really important to us is we think it's still very early days for e-commerce development." Shopee was already profitable in Taiwan. Everywhere else, Li chose losses deliberately, as the price of market share. "We care more about the growth and we care more about the market share," he said. "We really aim big."
The losses bought dominance. Shopee became the largest e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia and Taiwan. Its rise reportedly frightened two of the region's best-funded local champions, the ride-hailing company Gojek and the marketplace Tokopedia, into merging. It hired Cristiano Ronaldo, Li's favorite footballer, as a brand ambassador, and Jackie Chan. But the deeper advantage was not marketing. It was logistics. Southeast Asia is a region of opaque addresses, informal neighborhoods, island chains, and roads that do not appear on maps, and a parcel there is a problem to be solved block by block. When Li looked back in 2025 on why Shopee had beaten better-capitalized rivals, he talked about delivery routes. Sea built its own delivery network, SPX Express, which grew into one of the largest logistics operators in the region. It is very hard to compete with a company that has already learned, at great expense, where everybody lives.
The Fortnite of Singapore
For eight years Garena distributed games that other people made. In 2017 it released one of its own, and the decision changed the company's fortunes more than any other.
Free Fire was a battle royale: a game in which dozens of players parachute onto an island, scavenge for weapons, and fight until one survives. The genre was already crowded. What distinguished Free Fire was not its premise but its engineering. It was built to run on cheap phones. "We optimized it for mobile devices with lower specifications," Li explained, "making it available to a wider audience." In much of the world, the device in a young person's pocket was a budget Android handset with modest memory, and the blockbuster shooters of the moment would barely run on it. Free Fire would.
Li made a second choice, which he would later present as a matter of principle. "When it started to take off, some said it would make more sense to charge people to play," he said in 2021. "We chose not to." The game was free. It made money from optional purchases, cosmetic outfits and the like. The players who could not pay played anyway, and they kept coming back.
The result was enormous. Free Fire was the fourth most-downloaded game on Apple and Google's app stores in 2018 and the most downloaded game on Google Play in 2019. By March 2019 it had more than 40 million players logging in each day and 350 million registered users, from Brazil to Indonesia. By 2021, it had passed a billion downloads on Google Play, and in August of that year it hit a peak of 150 million daily players. Bloomberg called it "the Fortnite of Singapore." In some ways it was bigger than Fortnite, because it reached the people Fortnite's hardware requirements left behind. The internet café generation had moved onto their phones, and Li had made the game that fit those phones.
The company was renamed in the same year. In May 2017, after raising $550 million, Garena became Sea Limited, with Garena retained as the name of the gaming division. The new name was short and almost aggressively plain, and it was meant to cover what the company had become, games, commerce and payments, under one regional banner. Employees would come to be addressed in internal memos as "Sailors." Five months later, in October 2017, Sea listed on the New York Stock Exchange, the first major American IPO by a Southeast Asian technology company. The shares closed their first day up 8 percent.
In March 2019, after Sea's stock jumped 45 percent, Li became a billionaire, at forty-one, on the strength of a stake worth roughly $1 billion. Free Fire was largely the reason. A game had paid for a marketplace, and a man who had spent his university years playing games until dawn was now rich from other people doing the same.
Can't See the Ceiling
Then came the pandemic, and with it a rally that almost nobody, including Li, could have planned for.
"We always believe that digital transformation is on the way, so we are preparing ourselves for the future," he said in mid-2020. "And suddenly the future comes in a very dramatic way." In Singapore, the government's lockdown, called the "circuit breaker," turned Shopee into an essential service overnight. Across the region, people who had never shopped online were forced to learn. People who had never gamed found themselves with time to spare. In May 2020, Li called the crisis "a step change in the growth of the digital economy globally, materially accelerating a shift to online lifestyles that is broad, deep, and, in our view, irreversible."
Irreversible is the word to remember.
The stock tripled in 2020 and had risen more than 1,000 percent since early 2019. Sea became the most valuable public company in Singapore, worth about $69 billion that September, and still losing money. Nobody seemed to mind, least of all Li, who told Forbes that he couldn't "see the ceiling." In August 2020 he appeared on the cover of Forbes Asia. In December, Sea won one of Singapore's coveted digital banking licenses. In the second quarter of 2021, Sea's revenue rose 159 percent, to $2.3 billion. Payments through its mobile wallet services rose almost 150 percent, to more than $4.1 billion.
On August 31, 2021, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index named Li the richest person in Singapore, worth $19.8 billion. The man he displaced, Goh Cheng Liang, was a paint tycoon, the founder of a fortune built on the slow, unglamorous, very Singaporean business of coating walls. The man who passed him had arrived in the country fifteen years earlier with debt and a rented room. Li's fortune peaked somewhere around $22 billion. Gang Ye, the silent co-founder, was briefly worth more than $12 billion.
On September 9, 2021, Sea raised $6 billion in an equity and convertible bond sale, the largest fundraising in Southeast Asian history, earmarked for strategic investments and acquisitions. Shopee was pushing into Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Spain, France, Poland and India. The company employed more than 67,000 people by the end of the year. Earlier that spring it had given S$50 million to the National University of Singapore's School of Computing, the largest corporate gift in the university's history. In 2020 it had committed to hire and train 500 Singaporeans in technical roles, the largest company-led program of its kind under the government's TechSkills Accelerator.
On October 19, 2021, Sea's American depositary receipts peaked. The company's market value exceeded $200 billion.
Here, at the top, the story turns. In November 2021, Bloomberg later reported, Li had a premonition that trouble was coming, and he invited his leadership team to his Singapore home for dinner. What was said at that table has not been made public. What happened in the following five months has.
Five Months
The unraveling had a sequence, and the sequence had a cruel logic. Each blow fell on a different pillar of the company.
In November 2021, a disappointing quarterly report prompted a bout of profit-taking. The pandemic's tailwinds were dying. Shoppers were going back to shops and gamers were going outside.
On January 4, 2022, Tencent, Sea's largest backer since the days of the shophouse, announced it was cutting its stake from 21.3 percent to 18.7 percent, selling roughly $3 billion worth of shares. In the same maneuver, Tencent converted all its high-vote Class B shares into ordinary stock. That reduced its voting rights to under 10 percent and left Li as the beneficial owner of every outstanding Class B share. His voting power rose to about 57 percent. In the same week that the market began to doubt him, he gained clear control of the company. The stock fell 6.6 percent the next day, to $184.72.
In February, India banned Free Fire, the most popular game Sea owned, in a market it had spent years cultivating.
In early March came what Bloomberg called "horrendous" quarterly earnings, followed by Sea's third-biggest single-day stock decline. On Monday, March 7, Li sent a 900-word email to every employee in the company. Until then he had written to the whole company mainly to celebrate milestones. This was different. "This drop is painful," he wrote, "and you might be feeling frustrated, disheartened, or worried about Sea's future. Do not fear: we are in a strong position internally, and we are clear on our next steps. This is short-term pain that we have to endure to truly maximise our long-term potential." By March 15, the stock was trading just above $89. It had been about $367 at its peak. Sea had lost three-quarters of its value, roughly $150 billion, in five months.
The memo was wrong about one thing. The pain was not short-term.
Some time in that period came the fever and the pillow, and the instruction to exit India and focus on profit. Shopee shut its Indian operation that March. Then it pulled out of France. Then Argentina. Then it trimmed or closed operations in Mexico, Chile, Spain and Poland, and cut ShopeeFood and ShopeePay staff in Southeast Asia. By May 2022, Li's fortune had fallen to $4.7 billion, too little to make Bloomberg's list of the 500 richest people on earth. By November it was a little over $3 billion. The stock was down 87 percent from its peak, and his co-founders had lost a combined $13.5 billion.
On September 15, 2022, he wrote again, a thousand words this time, addressed "Dear Sailors." The tone had changed completely. "We can now see that this is not a quickly passing storm," he wrote. "These negative conditions will likely persist into the medium term." He named the macro blows one after another: war in Europe, supply chain disruptions, inflation, the threat of recession. Then he made the admission that a company like Sea had never had to make: "With investors fleeing for 'safe haven' investments, we do not anticipate being able to raise funds in the market." A year earlier the capital markets had handed Sea $6 billion in a single sale. Now they were closed. The independence Li had once credited to Garena's profits, the freedom not to "rely on external investors, the capital markets," was the only thing left to defend.
"Our number one objective for the next 12-18 months," he wrote, "is achieving self-sufficiency." Then came the clause that turned the toilet paper into something like a moral position: "The leadership team has decided that we will not take any cash compensation until the company reaches self-sufficiency."
The word self-sufficiency appears again and again in Li's memos from this period. It is worth asking why a man who had once been worth $22 billion reached for a word from the vocabulary of thrift. Self-sufficiency is what you want when you are twenty-eight, in a rented bedroom, $100,000 in debt. It means not depending on anyone. Li had spent the boom years insisting that Sea did not depend on the capital markets, and in the bust he went back to the same promise. In that letter he set it out as the reason for all the suffering: "We will be more relaxed, less affected by the external ups and downs that are hurting us today."
It worked faster than almost anyone expected. In March 2023, Sea reported the first quarterly profit in its fourteen-year history: $427 million in net income under standard accounting rules. The stock jumped 22 percent. In an internal memo, Li told staff the worst was over. Then, characteristically, he warned against believing it. "We need to prove—not just to our investors, but to ourselves—that we can remain profitable for the long haul," he wrote. The task, he said, was "doing less, but doing it better and getting the core of the business right." In May, most employees got a 5 percent raise. Grab was still losing more than $300 million a quarter. GoTo, the company Gojek and Tokopedia had formed in part to fend off Shopee, was losing more than $250 million.
"Sea read the market much earlier," said Amit Kunal, a Singapore private equity investor, "took appropriate steps—and delivered."
One more unwinding belongs in this section. In 2023, Riot Games took back the publishing rights to League of Legends in Southeast Asia, ending the arrangement that had given Garena its first big break thirteen years earlier. The deal that started the company had expired, and the company barely noticed.
The Quiet Man and the Noise
For most of his career Li was close to invisible. "Forrest Li is very soft-spoken and very reserved," Tan Siwei, Sea's former head of public relations, said in a public talk in 2017. "He is typically very media shy and does not like to be in the limelight." One Singaporean commentator noted that he lacked the outspokenness of Jack Ma, the media savvy of Richard Branson, and the charisma of the AirAsia founder Tony Fernandes. Most Singaporeans who used Shopee had no idea the same man was behind Garena. He rarely talked about his ambitions at public forums, and left the company's communications to Yanjun Wang, the group chief corporate officer, a lawyer The Straits Times described as tight-lipped. Even in the Bloomberg phrasing that followed him through 2022, shy kept sliding toward secretive.
The crash changed this, though not willingly. In the spring of 2022, fund managers began urging Sea to be more open about its strategy and its numbers. On the March earnings call, Li spoke at unusual length. Sea released, for the first time, annual guidance for its financial services arm and unit economics for Shopee in Brazil and in its home markets. "If not for the declining share prices," said Kelvin Seetoh, a shareholder and co-founder of the Singapore investor group 10X Capital, "Sea might not have disclosed so many metrics." Employees were hungry for information too. More than 400 people, Shopee staff among them, signed up for an outside webinar titled Off the Record—Behind Shopee's Doors, to hear researchers with no connection to the company explain how their own employer worked.
So the memos became Li's public voice, written in his own name but sent inward to his staff, and they reached the outside world mostly through leaks. They are notable for how directly they talk about money and how plainly they talk about fear. The man rarely speaks, and when he does, the subject is usually the noise in the back of the mind.
On October 20, 2023, the sixth anniversary of the IPO, Sea's shares were still down 87.6 percent from their peak. Li wrote to employees defending the decision to go public at all. He said he had never regretted it, and then he wrote a sentence that reads, depending on the day, as either serenity or stubbornness: "Let's work on building up our company's intrinsic value—and rest assured that the market, when it's ready, will catch up with us."
The market took its time and then did catch up. In March 2024, Sea reported its first profitable full year since the IPO: $162.7 million for 2023. For 2024, revenue rose 29 percent to $16.8 billion and net income roughly tripled to $444 million. Free Fire recovered too, hitting a peak of more than 100 million daily users in February 2024. MariBank, Sea's Singapore digital bank, had opened to the public by invitation in March 2023, alongside banking operations in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. The financial services arm made small loans of $100 to $200 to more than 10 million users in Indonesia, a country where few people held credit cards. Its loan book passed $5 billion. On May 8, 2025, Li renamed the unit. SeaMoney became Monee. He explained the choice with a simplicity that verges on comedy: it was "simple, cute, and just like Sea, easy to write and pronounce."
By September 2025, Forbes ranked him the sixth-richest person in Singapore, worth $11.2 billion. Fortune added him to its list of the 100 most powerful people in business. In conversation with Nicolai Tangen that October, he talked about artificial intelligence as the road to a company ten times larger than the one he now ran, a trillion-dollar Sea. He also talked about humility, which he calls the foundation of the five values he has given the company: serve, run, adapt, commit, stay humble. "Staying humble is the core," he has said. "It's only if you're able to stay humble that you can serve, run, adapt and commit."
There is a tension here that Li does not seem to feel. He speaks of a trillion dollars and of humility in the same breath, and he wants the world's largest-scale business ambitions and the soft-spokenness of a man who would rather not be photographed. The two do not resolve. They coexist, much as the man who replayed stay foolish every day for months also installed single-ply.
Why Not Football?
In February 2020, weeks before the pandemic closed the world, Sea bought a football club. It was called Home United, a Singapore Premier League side long associated with the city-state's Home Team, its police and civil defense services. It was the first privatization of a club in the league's history. Li renamed it the Lion City Sailors. In a photograph from the period, he stands with Winston Wong, Home United's chairman, and Lim Kia Tong, then president of the Football Association of Singapore. Each man is holding up a jersey bearing the new name.
He said at the time that he wanted to lift the local game and build a world-class training environment for young Singaporean players. In July 2022, in the middle of the austerity, the same months as the economy-class flights and the Lipton, the Sailors opened a S$10 million training center spread across 28,000 square meters. Even in the leanest year, the pitch was spared.
On April 28, 2025, Li was elected unopposed as president of the Football Association of Singapore. The national team had underperformed for years. The country's football culture had faded since its heyday in the 1990s, when the Lions drew crowds and Singaporeans argued about them at dinner. Li said his priority would be youth development. He said he wanted to bring "pride and joy" back.
On August 6, 2025, marking a hundred days in office, he spoke at the FAS media day, held at the Shangri-La hotel in Singapore. He also sits on the board of the Shangri-La hotel group. "We have the best city planning, the best airport, best highways," he said. "A lot of things are world-class—why not football? I know it's a moonshot, it's a long journey. At this moment, we're not talking about world-class, we're really left behind." The diagnosis was a businessman's: the worst thing a product can suffer is not criticism but indifference. He reached for the analogy of a restaurant. "When the customers still comment on a certain restaurant, that's a good thing for the restaurant," he said. "The moment nobody talks about it ... that's the end."
It is a surprising fear for this particular man. Li has spent his career avoiding being talked about. He let Garena speak for him and left Shopee's founding unattributed. He deferred to a tight-lipped lawyer. His speeches are rare enough that investment newsletters call any interview with him "rare." Yet the thing he fears most for the national game is silence.
He told the reporters what success would look like. It was not a trophy. "I hope one day," he said, "when we announce the next national team coach, that will be the conversation at every dinner table in every house that evening in Singapore."
Every dinner table, in every house: the towers of three-room flats, the shophouses, the bungalows in the good districts, and the rented rooms where people newly arrived in the city sit down to eat with whatever they have.
The club he bought had been called Home United. He gave it a new name, and then he stayed.
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows is an attempt to extract method from biography. Li is not a theorist. He does not write books, gives few speeches, and his management philosophy comes mostly in internal memos that leaked and in a handful of interviews spread over fifteen years. The principles below are inferred from what he did, especially the sequence of his decisions, more than from what he said. Some cut against familiar startup orthodoxy. Others are orthodoxy applied with unusual discipline. A few, especially those from the crisis of 2022, are lessons he seems to have learned at great cost.
The principles
- 1.Write the résumé backward.
- 2.Go where the industry has stopped looking.
- 3.Distribute before you develop.
- 4.Build the cash engine before the moonshot.
- 5.Design for the cheapest phone in the room.
- 6.Assume the markets rhyme.
- 7.Own the unglamorous layer.
- 8.Cut before the market forces you to.
- 9.Make austerity visible, and start at the top.
- 10.Secure control, then use it to wait.
- 11.Speak rarely, then speak in full.
- 12.Treat indifference as the real enemy.
Principle 1
Write the résumé backward
The decisive insight of Li's twenties came while reading other people's résumés. Four years of recruiting for Motorola and Corning showed him that a career on its default track was legible, almost predictable, from the start. "If I kept doing what I was doing, I kind of knew what my résumé would look like." Most people make career decisions by asking what the next sensible step is. Li asked what the finished document would say, and whether he could stand to read it.
The same habit shows up again and again. He took the name of a fictional character whose life he wanted to resemble. He replayed a speech daily until its argument became his own. He described Sea's goal not in quarters but in the language of a lifetime: a company that would "last for generations." In each case he chose the ending first and worked backward to the present.
This is less mystical than it sounds. If you can predict your own trajectory, you are not making decisions, only following a path. The test is whether your future can be read off your present.
Tactic: Write the one-paragraph biography you would have if nothing changed for ten years. If it is predictable, treat that as the problem to solve, not the safe option.
Principle 2
Go where the industry has stopped looking
In 2009, the global games industry's view of Southeast Asia was, in Li's paraphrase, "we never see any revenue and we never see any kind of a business case." Capital agreed. Garena's founders paid for the company themselves and with money from family and friends, because "nobody was really looking at South-east Asia as a promising investment opportunity."
The scorn was the opportunity. Markets that incumbents have written off are not empty. They are unserved, often for reasons that are real but not permanent, such as payment systems, fragmentation, and hardware. A company willing to solve those frictions in an ignored region faces no competition during the years it takes to solve them. By the time the region looked attractive, Garena had already built the relationships with Riot and Tencent and the cultural knowledge that latecomers would have to pay heavily for.
The pattern repeated. Shopee targeted a region with very low e-commerce penetration. Monee lent to Indonesians who had no credit cards. Li's later language, about serving "communities that are traditionally underserved," is the same bet restated as a moral position.
Tactic: List the markets your industry dismisses as "no business case," and for each one, name the single friction that makes it unprofitable today. That friction is your product.
Principle 3
Distribute before you develop
Garena did not make its own hit game until 2017, eight years after it was founded. For most of the decade it was a distributor and publisher. It took League of Legends from Riot and other titles from other studios and adapted them for a dozen markets with different languages, payment habits and tastes.
This looked like a lack of ambition. It was actually a school. Distribution taught Garena what worked in Thailand and failed in Vietnam, how Indonesian players paid, which mechanics travelled and which did not. Li calls the result "sensitivity to the subtle differences across the market." By the time Garena built Free Fire, it was not guessing. It knew exactly what kind of game a budget Android phone in São Paulo or Jakarta could run, and what its owner would pay for.
The principle reaches beyond games. Distributing other people's products is the cheapest way to learn what customers in a new market will buy. You get the data without the development risk, and you are paid while you learn.
Tactic: Before building your own product for a new market, spend a defined period selling or distributing someone else's, and treat the margin as tuition.
Principle 4
Build the cash engine before the moonshot
The structure of Sea seemed odd to many observers: a profitable games company attached to a money-losing e-commerce platform and an early-stage fintech. Li called the combination "counterintuitive" only to defend it. Garena broke even within five or six years and became, in his words, "a major source of funding" for Shopee. "We don't have to rely on external investors, the capital markets. This has allowed us to have a very long-term view."
S
The Three Engines
How Sea sequenced its businesses so that each one funded the next.
| Business | Launched | Role in the system | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Garena (games) | 2009 | Cash engine; broke even in five to six years and funded the rest. | Funder |
| AirPay / SeaMoney / Monee (payments, credit) | 2014 | Payments rail for games and commerce; later a lending book above $5B. | Option |
| Shopee (e-commerce) | 2015 | Moonshot funded by Garena; losses chosen deliberately to win share. | Bet |
| SPX Express (logistics) | Built alongside Shopee | Infrastructure moat; solving the region's opaque addresses. | Moat |
The flaw in this model appeared in 2021. Once the capital markets offered cheaper fuel than Garena could supply, through a $6 billion raise and a market value above $200 billion, Sea expanded to a pace that its internal engine could not sustain on its own. When the markets closed, Li went straight back to the original logic: "self-sufficiency," cash flow, independence. The crisis did not discredit the cash-engine model. It showed what happened when Sea stepped away from it.
Tactic: Do not launch a long-horizon bet until you have a business that can fund it without outside capital. When outside capital is cheap, treat it as a bonus, not the foundation.
Principle 5
Design for the cheapest phone in the room
Free Fire did not win by being the best battle royale. It won by being the one that ran on the phones most people in its markets actually owned. Li has been explicit that it was "optimized for mobile devices with lower specifications." He chose, against advice, to keep it free: "Some said it would make more sense to charge people to play. We chose not to."
The two choices were really one. Each removed a barrier for the marginal user, whether the barrier was hardware or price. The industry's flagship titles were built for top-end devices and paying customers. Garena built for the median device and the user who might never pay. That widened the audience so much that the minority who did pay produced a fortune: more than a billion downloads and a peak of 150 million daily players.
Li now frames the lesson as loyalty: when customers see that a business truly wants to help them, "it creates a loyalty that money cannot buy." Whether or not one accepts the sentiment, the arithmetic holds. Removing barriers for the median user does more to expand a market than adding features for the top end.
Tactic: Identify the cheapest realistic device, connection, or budget your target customer has, and make it the design constraint rather than an afterthought.
Principle 6
Assume the markets rhyme
Sea's whole history is a series of entries into new markets: seven Southeast Asian countries, then Taiwan, then Brazil and a brief overreach into Europe and the rest of Latin America. Li's stated philosophy of expansion sounds at first like it contradicts his emphasis on localization. "One thing we have discovered at Sea," he said in 2021, "is that the markets often have more in common than we expect and assume. By focusing on the similarities, it can give you the confidence you need to venture into a new place."
The contradiction dissolves on reflection. Localization is about how you execute in a market. The similarity heuristic is about whether you go in at all. Li's point is that young companies spend so long cataloguing differences that they talk themselves out of expanding. The differences are real, and you handle them once you are there. The decision to go should rest on what stays the same: the young user with a cheap phone, the shopper with no credit card, the address no courier can find.
Brazil, half a world from Singapore, became one of Free Fire's strongest markets and a meaningful Shopee market. That would be odd if the differences mattered most. It makes sense if the similarities do.
Tactic: When weighing a new market, list the five customer conditions it shares with your strongest market before listing any differences. Decide on the overlap, then localize the execution.
Principle 7
Own the unglamorous layer
When Li looked back in 2025 on why Shopee beat competitors with more capital, he did not talk about brand or about algorithms. He talked about delivery routes. Southeast Asian commerce runs into physical problems: vague addresses, informal settlements, archipelagos. Sea built SPX Express to solve them, and it became one of the largest logistics operators in the region. The same pattern appears in finance. In markets where credit cards are rare, Monee lent $100 and $200 at a time, using data from shopping and gaming.
These layers are expensive, slow, and hard to show off. That is the point. A competitor can copy an app in months. It cannot copy a decade of working out where people actually live. The barrier Li built was not technology, which can be bought, but accumulated local knowledge, which has to be earned.
Tactic: Find the most tedious physical or regulatory problem standing between your customer and your product, and solve it yourself rather than renting a solution. That is where the moat is.
Principle 8
Cut before the market forces you to
The timing of Sea's turnaround is the lesson. Li sensed trouble in November 2021, weeks after the peak, and gathered his leadership team at his home. The fever memo ordering a shift to profit and an exit from India came in early 2022, while rivals were still spending. "Taking major action early in the crisis, much earlier than most in the industry," he later wrote to staff, "was painful, but has put [the company] in a stronger position."
⏱
The Turn: From Peak to Profit
Fourteen months from a $200 billion valuation to the first profitable quarter.
Oct 2021
Sea's ADRs peak on October 19; market value above $200 billion.
Nov 2021
Disappointing quarterly results. Li hosts his leadership team at his home.
Jan 2022
Tencent cuts its stake to 18.7%; Li's voting power rises to about 57%.
Feb 2022
India bans Free Fire.
Mar 2022
900-word memo to staff after a $150 billion collapse. Shopee exits India.
Sep 2022
"Dear Sailors" memo: self-sufficiency in 12–18 months; leadership forgoes cash pay.
Nov 2022
Shares down 87% from peak; Li's fortune a little over $3 billion.
Mar 2023
First quarterly profit in company history: $427 million. Stock up 22%.
The cost was real. The March 2022 memo said the pain would be short-term, and by September Li conceded it was not. Some 7,500 people lost their jobs. But the comparison with competitors is clear. When Sea reported its first profit, Grab was still losing more than $300 million a quarter and GoTo more than $250 million. Moving early cost Sea its reputation for a season. Waiting cost its rivals years.
Tactic: Set the conditions in advance that would trigger a pivot to profitability, and act the moment they appear, not when the market finally demands it.
Principle 9
Make austerity visible, and start at the top
What sets Sea's cost-cutting apart from routine corporate retrenchment is how deliberately visible it was. Li could have frozen budgets quietly. Instead, the cuts reached every employee's daily life, and they began at the top.
$
Two Sea Companies
The same organization, eighteen months apart.
| Policy | Growth era (2021) | Survival era (2022–23) |
|---|---|---|
| Leadership pay | Standard compensation | Zero cash until self-sufficiency |
| Air travel | Business class available | Economy only, any distance |
| Travel meals / hotels | Reimbursed | $30 a day / $150 a night |
| Office tea | TWG | Lipton |
| Restroom supplies | Two-ply | One-ply |
| Staff pay | Rising | Frozen, then a 5% raise after profit |
The toilet paper and the Lipton were not about money in any meaningful sense, since tea bags do not move a $16 billion revenue line. They were a signal that every employee touched every day. A memo about self-sufficiency can be ignored. A cup of Lipton cannot. Because the leadership team had given up its cash pay first, the small cuts read as shared sacrifice rather than contempt. And the promise was kept on the way back up: after the first profit, most staff got a raise.
Tactic: If you have to cut, cut yourself first and publicly, then choose one small, daily, unmissable symbol so that every employee feels the new reality.
Principle 10
Secure control, then use it to wait
In January 2022, as the market turned, Tencent converted its high-vote shares and Li became the beneficial owner of all of Sea's Class B stock, with about 57 percent of the voting power. Few people noticed the timing at the time. It matters more in hindsight. The founder gained clear control of his company just as public opinion turned against it.
That control is what made the subsequent decisions possible: exiting markets, cutting deeply, and then telling staff in October 2023, with the stock still down nearly 88 percent, to "work on building up our company's intrinsic value—and rest assured that the market, when it's ready, will catch up with us." A founder without voting control who wrote that sentence might have been gone by the next shareholder meeting. Li could afford patience because nobody could force him to give it up.
Controlled companies raise legitimate governance concerns, and Sea is no exception. But the lesson of Li's case is narrow and practical. Patience is only a strategy if you are secure enough to keep exercising it.
Tactic: Before committing to a strategy that will look wrong for years, make sure your governance lets you survive the years it looks wrong.
Principle 11
Speak rarely, then speak in full
For most of Sea's history, Li barely spoke in public. He let products speak for him, left communications to a tight-lipped lawyer, and wrote to employees only to celebrate. Then the crash forced him to talk, and he wrote memos of 900 and 1,000 words that read like letters rather than press releases. They named fear directly ("you might be feeling frustrated, disheartened, or worried"), admitted mistakes ("this is not a quickly passing storm"), and stated the stakes in plain arithmetic ("we do not anticipate being able to raise funds").
The value of a rarely heard voice is that people pay attention when it speaks. Because Li had not spent his credibility on routine communication, his crisis memos carried weight. The weakness is that silence in good times builds pressure for disclosure in bad ones. Sea's sudden release of new metrics in March 2022 looked to some shareholders like transparency extracted under duress. The lesson cuts both ways: the occasional, complete letter works, but only if the silence before it has not hardened into distrust.
Tactic: Reserve your direct voice for moments that require it, and when you use it, be more candid than is comfortable, naming the fear and the numbers directly.
Principle 12
Treat indifference as the real enemy
As FAS president, Li offered a diagnosis of Singapore football that is really a theory of consumer businesses: "When the customers still comment on a certain restaurant, that's a good thing for the restaurant. The moment nobody talks about it ... that's the end." Criticism is a sign of life. Apathy is the death sentence.
This explains choices across his career that otherwise look unrelated: making Free Fire free so that nobody was excluded, spending heavily on Shopee's market share while rivals rationed, buying Cristiano Ronaldo as an ambassador, and building a S$10 million training center for a club that was not making money, in the middle of an austerity drive. Each was a bet that being present in people's daily lives mattered more than near-term margins. Li's stated measure of success for Singapore football is not a trophy. It is conversation "at every dinner table in every house."
Tactic: Measure engagement before satisfaction. If customers have stopped complaining, find out whether they have stopped caring.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Forrest Li, to Forbes Asia, on his years as a recruiterEvery résumé is a personal story, right? So by reading other people's stories, I started to think about how I wanted my résumé to read like in the future.
— Forrest Li, Cutting Edge forum, 2020Staying humble is the core. It's only if you're able to stay humble that you can serve, run, adapt and commit.
— Forrest Li, internal memo to Sea employees, September 15, 2022The leadership team has decided that we will not take any cash compensation until the company reaches self-sufficiency.
— Forrest Li, letter to employees on the anniversary of Sea's IPO, October 20, 2023Let's work on building up our company's intrinsic value – and rest assured that the market, when it's ready, will catch up with us.
— Forrest Li, FAS media day, August 6, 2025We have the best city planning, the best airport, best highways. A lot of things are world-class - why not football?
Maxims
- Read your own résumé in advance. If you can predict the ending, change the story now.
- Go where the business case is said not to exist. Neglected markets are unserved, not empty.
- Learn on someone else's product first. Distribution is the cheapest education a new market offers.
- Fund the moonshot from your own engine. Independence from capital markets is what makes a long view affordable.
- Build for the median device, not the flagship. Remove barriers for the marginal user and the market grows to meet you.
- Decide on the similarities, then execute on the differences. Markets have more in common than founders assume.
- Moats are made of tedium. Delivery routes and small loans are harder to copy than code.
- Cut early and cut yourself first. Moving before the market forces you costs reputation; waiting costs years.
- Keep your voice scarce and your candor complete. A rarely heard leader is believed when it matters.
- Fear silence more than criticism. The moment nobody talks about you, that's the end.
