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In focus
- Melissa Goh on why maintaining a founder’s mindset can get you far
- Forrest Li on the hack that helped Shopee crack Indonesia
- Why SGX’s chief thinks the exchange is misunderstood
Hello reader,
It’s not every day you get a peek into the early days of one of Southeast Asia’s largest tech companies.
This week, Forrest Li made a rare appearance at the annual Stripe Tour in Singapore. Both firms had announced an upcoming partnership that would bring Sea’s ShopeePay and buy now, pay later solution to the Stripe network.
If you live anywhere in Southeast Asia, you’ve heard this story a hundred times: a large conglomerate arrives only to pack up a few years later after learning that an approach that worked in the US or China could fail spectacularly in the region.
But that wasn’t my key takeaway from Li’s sharing on stage.
Image credit: Ulla
Instead, I saw the kind of grit Li and the Shopee team displayed in its early days. Unable to identify unique customers based on their payment transactions, for instance, the firm varied item prices by a fraction of a cent and made that a customer’s unique identifier.
I also saw their humility to be able to accept customer feedback, despite Sea’s current scale – it served hundreds of millions of users across its ecommerce, financial services, and gaming businesses last year. Li also acknowledged that when customer feedback finds its way directly to him, it is often serious and a symptom of shortcomings in the company’s processes.
In Singapore, Li wears two hats: one in his role at Sea and another as the president of the Football Association of Singapore. Now over a year into his tenure at the association, Li candidly remarked how the role is a lot like running a startup, especially one in its early days when public belief in its success is scarce.
I’m no football fan, but I’d wager that such a stewardship style bodes well for the sport in Singapore.
Melissa Goh, senior editor
Editor’s picks
1️⃣ Forrest Li on scaling Sea, building smarter bots, and founder grit
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