Forrest Li on building Sea from prepaid cards to a $10B loan book
Key takeaways from the Stripe fireside interview with Sea founder and CEO Forrest LiDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, in conversation with Stripe's Tyler Bryson (September 2026):
Payments cracked gaming first. Li recounted founding Garena in 2009 around Southeast Asia's gaming passion, only to find the real barrier was payments — teenage gamers had no credit cards, so Sea designed and physically distributed its own prepaid cards to internet cafes.
Three businesses from one entrepreneurial culture. Li credited Sea's rare success across Garena, Shopee and SeaMoney to a startup mindset drilled through a graduate rotation programme, telling recruits: "remember you are joining a startup, not a big company" — despite 60,000 employees.
Bottom-up localisation over imported playbooks. He argued outsiders fail in the fragmented region by copying US or China playbooks; in Indonesia, Sea matched anonymous ATM payments by selling identical goods at ten fractionally different prices so it could identify each buyer.
Brazil was a logistics bet. After Free Fire took off there, Sea entered Brazilian e-commerce in 2019 spotting that ~$5-per-parcel logistics made online shopping a luxury — a gap it could close with hard-won Southeast Asian logistics experience.
A $10B consumer loan book. SeaMoney's pay-later credit — born from Shopee's payment friction — now has over $10 billion outstanding to roughly 50 million people (about $200 each), serving markets where credit-card penetration sits below 20%.
AI already at scale in operations. Li said more than 80% of customer inquiries are now fully handled by AI at higher satisfaction than humans, while AI generates game art and powers smart bots that onboard solo players in Free Fire, played by over 100 million people daily.
Culture and "never give up." He described Sea's five values — serve, run, adapt, commit, stay humble — reads every customer email himself, and cited relentless persistence through the company's darkest moments as his real "secret sauce."
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