The first home Forrest Li made in Singapore was a single rented bedroom in a three-room public housing flat in Braddell. He shared it with his wife, whom he had met at Stanford. Between them they carried about US$100,000 in student loans.
He was a long way from Tianjin, where he was born in the late 1970s, and from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where he studied engineering. After graduating he worked at Motorola and Corning, then went to Stanford for an MBA. There he heard Steve Jobs tell graduates to stay hungry and stay foolish. Li has credited that speech with turning him toward starting a company.
A small company with a Braddell-sized balance sheet suddenly held one of the most played games on earth.
He did not start with a grand plan for a regional giant. In 2009 he founded Garena in Singapore, a gaming platform for Southeast Asia. The region had millions of young players, internet cafes full of them, and almost no credit cards. Selling games there meant building the payment rails yourself.
The turn came in 2010, when Riot Games gave Garena the rights to publish League of Legends across Southeast Asia. A small company with a Braddell-sized balance sheet suddenly held one of the most played games on earth. Garena sold prepaid cards through shops, ran the servers and ran the esports. By 2014 it was valued at about US$1 billion. A year later Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan invested at a valuation above US$2.5 billion.
Then Li did the thing that surprised the industry. In 2015 he launched Shopee, an online marketplace, using the money and the instincts gaming had given him. In 2017 the group raised US$550 million, renamed itself Sea and listed on the New York Stock Exchange, the first big US listing from a Southeast Asian tech company.
The price came later. Sea raised US$6 billion in 2021, the largest such raise in the region at the time. Then the boom ended. In January 2022 Tencent sold a US$3 billion stake. The investment arm was shut down. Profit disappeared in 2022 and the company had to cut hard.
It came back. In 2023 Sea posted its first profitable year since listing, US$162.7 million. For 2024 revenue reached US$16.8 billion and net income US$444 million. Free Fire peaked at more than 100 million daily players that year.
Li, now a billionaire at around US$3.6 billion by Forbes' 2024 count, spends part of his time on a football club he bought from a state-linked owner and now leads the national football association.
The lesson is not about size. It is about what a founder does with the narrow thing he has. Li had debt, one room and a gaming company in a region that could not pay online. He solved that one problem so well that everything else was built on top of it.