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In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen

Sea CEO: Gaming Empire, Southeast Asia Strategy and Humble Leadership

In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen

Norges Bank Investment Management

In Good Company, Business, Norges Bank, Nicolai Tangen

4.8 • 186 Ratings

🗓️ 15 October 2025

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What does it take to build Southeast Asia's largest tech company from scratch? Forrest Li, founder and CEO of Sea, joins Nicolai Tangen to discuss the journey of building a $100 billion technology empire. They talk about Sea's journey from video game distributor to e-commerce leader, the success of the game Free Fire with over 100 million daily players, and expanding into fintech services. Forrest shares his humble leadership approach inspired by the movie Forrest Gump and explains how solving local challenges like complex delivery routes helped Sea beat major competitors. Sea now operates across gaming, e-commerce, and financial services in multiple countries. Tune in!

In Good Company is hosted by Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management. New full episodes every Wednesday, and don't miss our Highlight episodes every Friday. 

 

The production team for this episode includes Isabelle Karlsson and PLAN-B's Niklas Figenschau Johansen, Sebastian Langvik-Hansen and Pål Huuse. Background research was conducted by Oscar Hjelde.

 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hi everybody, I'm Nicola Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian So Commonwealth Fund, and today we are in really, really good company.

0:07.2

We are in Singapore. We're talking to Forrest Lee, the founder and the CEO of C, which is the largest tech company in Southeast Asia, a market leader in video game distribution and in fintech and in e-commerce.

0:21.5

An incredible journey.

0:22.5

And a big thank you for taking the time.

0:24.6

Welcome to Singapore, Nicola.

0:26.0

Thank you for visiting us.

0:35.9

I also should say that in the fund, we are a big shareholder in C, and so we follow it very,

0:42.4

very closely.

0:43.4

But first of all, for those in Europe and the US who don't know C, what do you do?

0:49.3

Yeah, C is a Singapore technology company and with the mission to better the lives of consumers and small businesses through technology.

0:58.2

So we are a technology company by heart.

1:01.5

And it has been 16 years when we started a company.

1:05.2

And we primarily focus on Southeast Asia market as the first market.

1:10.6

And later we also enter into some new market like Taiwan, like Brazil.

1:16.6

Actually, interestingly, the name of the – we chosen the name C as our company name,

1:22.6

is actually a short form of Southeast Asia.

1:24.6

This is a kind of a shout-out of our home market. We feel very proud of that.

1:30.1

And today we primarily operate three businesses, video game business named Garena,

1:37.2

and an e-commerce business named the Shopify. And more recently, the fintech business named

1:42.6

the money.

1:51.1

And for Garena, it started as just a game distributor in Southeast Asia.

1:57.2

But later on, we've been to become one of the largest mobile game developer and publisher in the world.

...

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