Forrest Li on scaling Sea, building smarter bots, and founder grit

Forrest Li is no stranger to the startup circuit in Singapore.

His company, Sea Limited, operates ecommerce platforms, financial services, and mobile games that are collectively used by over a hundred million people a day. Last year, Sea even briefly overtook DBS as Southeast Asia’s most valuable publicly traded company.

On August 25, Li, who is founder, CEO, and chairman of Sea Limited, spoke to Stripe’s chief revenue officer Tyler Bryson at the Singapore leg of the annual Stripe Tour.

Sea Limited founder, chairman, and CEO Forrest Li / Photo credit: Stripe

The discussion involved how Sea took a hyperlocal approach to scaling Shopee in its early days, which proved “critical” for its later success, as well as the early opportunity it saw in Brazil and the culture now guiding the firm as it scales.

Here are some of the key takeaways from Li’s fireside chat.

1. How a “bottom-up” approach was critical

Strategies that have worked in the US and China don’t always work in Southeast Asia. When tackling the region, “it’s important to come up with ‘bottom-up solutions’ in every market, Li said.

For instance, in Indonesia, where Sea launched the Shopee app in 2015, it faced a specific challenge: People couldn’t pay for orders after making purchases online, as electronic banking and payments services weren’t widely available.

“A typical user behavior is they’d make a purchase online, then we’d have to issue them a code. Then, they’d need to travel to an ATM or a bank branch to make the payment using the code. It was very, very counterintuitive – this was not ecommerce,” Li said.

He added that at the time, banks did not disclose the identity of the payor for “security reasons.” This meant that the firm “didn’t know who paid” even though it received money for transactions.

To overcome this, Shopee figuratively sold “10 bottles of water at 10 different prices,” each with a negligible price difference of about 1 rupiah (US$0.00006). “The price itself becomes the identification of the buyer,” he recalled.

2. Its Brazil origin story

In 2019, Li brought the entire leadership team to Brazil for the first time after Free Fire, the battle royale mobile game developed by its gaming unit Garena, “suddenly” became popular.

There, the team observed that ecommerce penetration in Brazil lagged behind Indonesia even though the former country had access to ecommerce platforms first. This was due to high logistics costs in the Latin American market.

3. “I receive emails from customers on a daily basis.”

4. Over 50 million customers with outstanding credit

5. AI to drive social behavior

6. Heading Singapore football is like running a startup

7. To founders: Keep going