Happy Birthday, Sea!

2021-5-8

Dear Sailors,

Today, May 8, 2021, Sea celebrates our twelfth birthday.

The past year has been a particularly exciting and high-achieving one for Sea. In my birthday note to you just three years ago, I said Sea’s dream for the next decade would be to become a 100 billion dollar company. No one, back then, could foresee how this past year would dramatically accelerate digital transformation. Sea managed to adapt, react, and ride that wave to achieving our 100 billion dollar company dream sooner than any of us thought possible.

Thanks to every Sailor’s grit, determination, and hard work, we have scaled many new heights: Free Fire is now, for two years in a row, the most downloaded mobile game in the world, and the most popular mobile game in many markets. Shopee has become part of the daily lives of people not only across Southeast Asia and Taiwan, but now also in Brazil and Mexico. ShopeePay, too, has become one of the most popular mobile wallets across multiple markets.

I am grateful for this amazing year. At the same time, I find myself arriving at our twelfth birthday feeling a little worried – about how all this success could affect how we see ourselves and how we feel about our work.

So much has changed for us in just one year. In terms of market capitalisation, we have become the biggest public company not just in Singapore but in Southeast Asia; not just in the tech sector but across all sectors. Suddenly, everyone is interested in who we are and what we do. Sea has probably received more media publicity in the past year than in our previous eleven years combined.

For some of our Sailors, especially those who have joined us recently, it may be hard to imagine us once as a small, struggling start-up – but that is what we were, not that long ago.

When companies grow this quickly, it is easy for their identity to become diluted. So I would like to use this note as an opportunity to talk about our identity: who we are as a company. In particular, I see four key qualities that, from Sea’s early days, have evolved to become part of our DNA, and have driven our success.

We stay humble

The first and most important of these qualities is humility. At Sea, as many of you know, staying humble is so much a part of our identity that we have named it as one of our Core Values. Regardless of what successes come our way, we focus on staying grateful, working hard, and not taking anything for granted. Without this mindset, we would have stopped striving years ago, and would never have come this far.

This might be the most important time in our company’s history for me to remind myself, and remind all of us, of how crucial it is to stay true to this Core Value.

Sea is riding high right now. It is easy to feel like we have made it, like we are the biggest and the best, and that others should look up to us. To start thinking this way would be a mistake.

First, it is simply not true, because success must be seen relative to ambition. One thing I value about Sea is that we have ever-growing ambitions; we are never satisfied with the status quo. Although we are bigger than ever before, I want us to feel like we are still a small company – relative to what we aspire to become.

Three years ago, I spoke of a dream of Sea becoming a 100 billion dollar company. Having achieved that, I now want us to dream bigger. Today, we are twelve years old; in the next twelve years, I believe we can become a one trillion dollar company!

Now, there are only five companies in the world with a market capitalisation of over one trillion dollars, and four of them are – like us – tech companies: Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google. We aspire to join their league one day. And compared to that aspiration, we are still a small company, only one tenth the size of what we dream to be. We are still at the start of our journey.

Second, even as we look ahead at all we hope to become, we must also never forget to look back and see where we have come from. I grew up in a modest family. When I came to Singapore, I had $100,000 in student loans to pay back, and my wife and I could only afford to rent one room of a two bedroom HDB flat (government-funded public housing). I am proud of these humble roots: they made me what I am today. I am sure most of our Sailors, like me, also came from humble beginnings, and are stronger, more passionate, and more committed today because of it.

Sea, too, started out with almost nothing to our name. In fact, in terms of our finances, we only got a chance to breathe more easily very recently. At the start of 2019, our share price was around $11, way below our IPO price of $15. The cash on our balance sheet was $1 billion, and we had more than $600 million of debt to pay back within a year. At one point, we were even worried about the company’s survival. This was just two years ago. I vividly remember the anxiety of that time, and the pain we endured to get through that. I am glad we survived and emerged stronger, but mentally, I continue to always prepare myself to face such a situation again. We all must.

We serve the under-served

The second important quality is related to another of our Core Values: we serve. But the aspect I wish to highlight today is who we serve. We have become successful by always trying to serve the under-served – connecting communities, enabling consumers, and empowering small businesses, especially those who traditionally lack access to tech platforms and the opportunities they bring.

We are proud to serve these communities, particularly in the wake of a global pandemic that has widened the gap between the rich and poor. The past year has brought Sea much success, but let us not forget that most of our customers, partners and vendors come from communities that are suffering and need more help than ever.

This is why, even as we pursue business opportunities, we must always ask ourselves: are we still serving our communities?

Every quarter, about 90% of our 600 million users play Free Fire without paying a cent for it. Far from being something we are unhappy about, this was deliberate: we choose to provide Free Fire at no cost, to all players, for life. We are glad to be able to provide hours of immersive and enjoyable entertainment to a huge number of people, regardless of what they can afford. And even for the minority who choose to spend money to enhance their game experience, we keep those options affordable. Most pay three to five dollars a month on the game, less than the price of a movie ticket. And this is more than enough for Free Fire to be incredibly commercially successful.

The same desire to serve defines our approach with Shopee. We learned so much from watching the pioneers of e-commerce go global, including to cities across our region, from Jakarta to Bangkok. But we noticed that once you drive an hour outside the city centres, you find communities cut off from these platforms, which were not built to cater to them.

These were the communities we set out to serve. Getting everyone onto online retail platforms helps to close the gap between white- and blue-collar communities, giving both consumers and small businesses more options to mutually benefit from. This is good for all of our customers, but it makes the hugest difference to those who were previously being left behind. This is one reason why we spend so much time traveling to rural areas in our communities, to show business owners and consumers how to harness the power of mobile e-commerce to improve their lives.

The same goes for SeaMoney. Today, the rich are already well-served by existing banks and private wealth managers. So we asked: where can we make the biggest difference? The answer again lies in the under-served. Late last year, we started giving out credit loans to Shopee buyers, each typically less than $50 in value. No traditional bank would issue such small loans, but this means many people have no access to credit at all, many of whom just need enough to buy daily essentials.

So my message to all Sailors is this: even at our most successful, we must never forget our humble roots, and we must never forget our mission to serve those who are traditionally left out or forgotten. Most of all, we must never, ever see ourselves as ‘better than’ our customers or think that they should be the ones doing things for us instead of the other way around. We are a part of them and they are a part of us, and without the loyalty of these communities, Sea would never be as successful as we are today. We serve them, we are grateful for them, and we must do all we can to retain their support.

We embrace being global

The third quality underpinning our success is that we see ourselves as a global company. Twelve years ago, we started in Singapore as a small tech start up. We now have teams in 15 countries – and, in time to come, more!

Our customers are everywhere (Free Fire is played in 130 countries – more than two thirds of the world!). Remarkably, we have been able to succeed in markets that are very different from each other. We are doing great in Indonesia, but we are also doing great in Brazil, and we are also doing great in India: huge countries that are both internally diverse and so different from each other, in culture, languages, habits, and interests.

How have we been able to succeed in such different markets? Because we are just as diverse in our team. Our Sailors span more than 50 nationalities, and this diversity is a source of our strength. Diverse teams bring the wisdom of different backgrounds and cultures into play, which produces better ideas. Our teams around the world are encouraged to challenge conventional thinking instead of relying on tried and tested methods from other markets. I love seeing all of you innovate based on your deep understanding of your ground, doing incredible work customising the experience each market has, making our global platforms feel hyper-local.

I am proud that there is no single dominating culture in Sea. We are open to all talent, regardless of nationality, race, religion, or any other marker. No matter who you are or where you are from, if you have passion, drive, and the ability to contribute, we welcome you with open arms at Sea! And, more than that, we want you to thrive here.

One way I hope you will thrive is by taking advantage of our global nature. Like a sailor on a ship, sail around Sea! We are in many businesses doing many things: explore your interests, try new areas of work, and go where you think you can make the biggest impact. Most of all, I urge you to flow between our geographical offices. Think beyond the country you originally come from or the market you currently serve. Where is future growth going to be fastest, the most exciting, and most able to benefit from what you have to offer? What part of the world have you always been curious about, or passionate about working on? Put your hand up; go there with us. Don’t be afraid to enter new markets – it is the only way to capture global opportunities with Sea. Let us sail far and wide together.

We keep technology at our core

The fourth key quality is our devotion to technology. As we have grown bigger and moved into more sectors – from games to e-commerce to finance – people often ask me, what kind of company is Sea? And my answer is always the same: We are a tech company.

What does this mean? It means that we fundamentally believe in the power of technology, and believe that the biggest value creation in the future will come from technology.

Sea should not and cannot be defined simply by the businesses we happen to venture into. Everything we do is powered by technology, and we remain competitive only because we are able to constantly improve that technology.

Our desire across all our businesses is the same: to push the boundaries of what technology can do to improve lives. This can be done in many ways: by creating enjoyable entertainment, giving consumers and small businesses a platform, creating new financial instruments, or in other areas we haven’t explored – yet.

The potential of technology is everywhere. I challenge all Sailors, even as we go about our current work, to always keep an eye to the horizon. Think about what other differences we can make through technology, even if it’s in a field we have no exposure to. We started Shopee when the only experience we had was in games, and we sought a digital banking licence without much experience in financial markets, which many saw as crazy moves. The only question that matters is: Is there something we believe we can use technology to do better? If so, we should explore doing it.

In fact, we are now at a stage of our growth that we can start to think not just of how we can use existing technology to do new things, but also about how to create new technologies altogether. Sea has benefitted from many technological breakthroughs that came before us: the Internet, smartphones, and more. With the resources we now have, what is stopping us from inventing the next big breakthrough technology, to benefit those that come after us? This is one reason behind our launch of the Sea Artificial Intelligence Labs (SAIL) earlier this year. It is our first big foray into fundamental research that we hope will change the tech landscape of the future, and it won’t be our last.

Take pride in our goals, not our status

Earlier, I talked about resetting Sea’s goal from being a 100 billion dollar company to being a trillion dollar company. What sets today’s trillion dollar tech companies apart from the rest, more than their size or market capitalisation, is the impact they want to make and can make on humankind. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google have fundamentally changed how people all around the world live, work, play, and rest. Their innovations have touched every corner of society, and life today would be unrecognisable without them.

My dream for Sea is precisely that: to create a legacy that outlasts all of us, by innovating with technology to do great things that can improve lives everywhere. This is why we want to push the frontier of tech development: not just for the sake of making money, but to change lives.

What I want every Sailor to understand deeply is this: take pride not in our size, or our status, or how ‘rich’ a company we have become. Such things are relative, and not meaningful. Take pride instead in our ambition to make a long-lasting mark on history. Chase innovation and impact, not just dollars and cents, and we will not go wrong.

To our Sailors in every corner of the globe, whether you have been with us for a few weeks or many years: thank you for choosing Sea. I believe you did so because you believe in our mission, in our values, and in the difference we hope to make to the world. I could not be happier to have you with us.

The future for Sea is wide and bright, full of exciting new opportunities. If we can stay humble, remember our mission to serve, remain proudly global and diverse, and always keep technology at our core, I know we will be able to scale new, unimaginable heights together.

Happy birthday, Sea!