Inside Garena: a look at the culture of Southeast Asia’s highest valued unicorn

This week, Tech in Asia Jobs shares insights into how successful companies operate, hire, and more.

The Garena office is quite the sight to behold.

Its familiar fiery red logo first caught our eyes as we stepped out of the elevator to the 17th floor of the Galaxis building at One-North. As my colleagues and I walked towards the entrance, we couldn’t help but notice how bright and airy the space was, with its floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a sprawling urban view.

Still slightly awestruck, we stumbled into the office. A kindly staff greeted us behind the oversized reception counter, and requested for us to sign in with dedicated iPads.

Photo credit: Garena

The office offered a panoramic view of the vast urban sprawl across One-North. Photo credit: Sim Yanting

A young lady walked by in a Vietnamese ethnic dress. I turned to look.

“We’re celebrating Racial Harmony Day today, and we’re all dressed up for that.”

I was greeted by Siwei, the PR and communications manager, and Jacqueline, an associate from the People Team. They later explained that since their move to the current office about a year ago, the company has been organising welfare and social activities like these every month or so.

“The last time we had something like this was on April Fool’s day,” said Siwei, “This time, we’re encouraging employees to put on traditional ethnic costumes by rewarding them with a pair of movie tickets each. On top of that, we’ve prepared snacks from different ethnic groups: Chinese, Malay, Indian and Vietnamese, among others.”

And those are little luxuries the company has no trouble providing.

Garena is today worth US$3.75 billion, and is the largest internet and mobile platform company in Southeast Asia. Founded by Forrest Li and friends in 2009, the company is now a 5,000-strong team across Southeast Asia and Taiwan, 500 of which are situated in their headquarters in Singapore.

The company started off as an online gaming company, but now generates its revenue from a diverse yet related set of verticals; digital content (Garena), social (BeeTalk), payments (Airpay), and most recently, ecommerce (Shopee). It serves millions of users across the globe, with a keen interest in developing countries in Southeast Asia.

The Garena office

The Garena culture

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