He Graduated Stanford $100,000 in Debt—Then Built Southeast Asia's Biggest Tech Company

[00:00:00]In 2006, a Chinese engineer graduated from Stanford with an MBA and $100,000 in student loan debt. Every classmate with a startup dream went back to China.

[00:00:13]He went to Singapore instead, rented one bedroom in a three- room HDB flat, and built the most valuable tech company Southeast Asia has ever produced. His real name is Lee Shaong. He was born in Tanzhin in 1977 or [clears throat] 78. The records are slightly inconsistent to parents who spent their careers working at state-owned companies. Stable work, predictable lives, the kind of existence that postreform China had made available to millions of families who had survived everything that came before. He was smart. He studied engineering at Shanghai Jaoong University, one of China's most prestigious technical universities. After graduation, he worked as an HR manager at Motorola in Shanghai, reading thousands of resumes, evaluating other people's career trajectories. He said later, "I kind of knew what my resume would look like 5 years later, and somehow I didn't feel excited. So he applied to Stanford. At Stanford's graduate school of business, a professor could not pronounce his Chinese name. Shiaoong. The sounds didn't come naturally in English. Around that time, he watched a film, Forest Gump. The story of a man who is not the most intelligent, not the most gifted physically, but who moves through the world with a kind of stubborn, openhearted persistence that carries him through things that should have stopped him. He took the name Forest. He said later that he identified with the character completely.

[00:01:58]not always the smartest person or the strongest one physically among his peers, but he has a very good heart.

[00:02:06]Because of his persistence and his courage, he lived a very successful and very meaningful life. In June 2005, he sat in the audience at Stanford's commencement ceremony and watched Steve Jobs deliver the speech that ends with, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." Jobs had just been diagnosed with cancer. He had no way of knowing he had 6 years left.

[00:02:31]He stood at the podium and told the graduates to find what they loved and not settle for anything less. Forest Lee did not go back to China. He graduated in 2006, $100,000 in student loan debt. his girlfriend Ma Chen who he had met at Stanford who would later become an investment director at TESC graduated around the same time. They moved to Singapore. Why Singapore and not China where the opportunities were enormous, where the economy was accelerating, where his classmates were heading back to build companies in an environment that already understood them. He never gave a single clean answer to this question.

[00:03:16]The answers he gave across various interviews point in the same direction without quite arriving. He wanted to build something for Southeast Asia, not for China. He believed Southeast Asia's digital economy was years behind where it needed to be. He believed someone would build the infrastructure for it, the gaming platforms, the e-commerce, the payments, and he wanted to be that person. Singapore was the natural base, stable rule of law, access to capital, a population that understood multiple Asian markets simultaneously.

[00:03:54]He and Mali Chien rented one-bedroom in a three- room HDB flat in Bradell. The man who would eventually be named Singapore's richest person started in a public housing unit, $100,000 in debt with no product and no funding.

[00:04:12]>> [clears throat] >> his first gaming company failed.

[00:04:15]He shut it down and started again in May 2009 in the middle of the global financial crisis, which was perhaps the worst possible moment to launch a startup and also as it turned out not fatal.

[00:04:32]The new company was called Gerena, an online gaming platform operating out of a shophouse in Tanjong Pagar. Two things happened in 2010 that changed everything.

[00:04:44]He signed a deal to distribute games for Riot Games, the American company behind League of Legends, which was about to become one of the most popular video games on Earth. And Tencent, the Chinese tech giant, took a 40% stake in Gerena, providing capital and credibility simultaneously.

[00:05:05]The timing was not luck exactly.

[00:05:09]He had spent years understanding how gaming worked in China, spending his nights in internet cafes in Shanghai long before he had any business reason to do so. And he understood that the same platforms adapted for Southeast Asian markets and tastes could be enormous. He was right. In 2015, Garena launched Free Fire, a mobile battle royale game developed internally designed specifically for the lower-end smartphones that were the predominant mobile devices across Southeast Asia and South Asia. While PUBG Mobile and Fortnite required processing power that most users in these markets didn't have, FreeFire ran on almost anything.

[00:05:55]Freefire became the most downloaded mobile game in the world in 2019 across Southeast Asia, Latin America, India, markets that the bigger games had built for but never quite reached. In 2017, C Limited listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

[00:06:14]By 2020, C was the best performing stock in the world. Pandemic lockdowns had driven explosive demand across all three of its businesses simultaneously.

[00:06:25]Gaming, e-commerce through shopppee, and digital payments through Coney. By August 2021, Forest Lee's net worth had reached 19.8 billion US. He was named Singapore's wealthiest person from $100,000 in student loan debt and one rented bedroom in a Brell HDB flat in 15 years. C was valued at over $120 billion.

[00:06:55]Southeast Asia's most valuable company ever. Listed in New York, headquartered in Singapore, built by a man from Tanzhin who had named himself after a Tom Hanks character because his professor couldn't say his name. Then came 2022.

[00:07:14]The fall was faster than almost anything in modern financial history. Interest rates began rising globally. Growth stocks which had been valued on the assumption of cheap capital indefinitely were crushed and C had specific problems beyond the macro environment.

[00:07:34]Freefire the game that had built Gerena into a global platform was banned in India. India with its hundreds of millions of mobile gamers had been one of Gerena's largest markets. The ban was part of a broader Indian government crackdown on Chinese linked technology companies following border tensions with China. C had 10 cent as a major shareholder. That was enough. At the same time, Shopi's aggressive global expansion into France, into India, into markets where it had no particular competitive advantage was burning through capital at a rate that investors in a rising rate environment were no longer willing to fund indefinitely.

[00:08:19]In October 2021, CE's share price had peaked at $366.

[00:08:26]By December 2022, it had fallen below 40. Forest Lee had lost approximately $17 billion in personal net worth in roughly 14 months. He wrote an email to his employees.

[00:08:42]He acknowledged the collapse without softening it. He said the company needed to shift from growth to self-sufficiency, from spending for expansion to earning what it needed to survive.

[00:08:55]7,000 people were laid off. Shopppee pulled out of France, out of India, out of markets where it had expanded aggressively and found that local competition was fiercer than the models had accounted for. He did not leave Singapore. He did not step down. He cut, restructured, refocused, and waited. The weight worked. By 2024 and 2025, SE's core businesses had stabilized. Shopppee remained the dominant e-commerce platform across Southeast Asia. Sea Money had grown into a meaningful fintech operation. Garena had found new games beyond FreeFire.

[00:09:38]His net worth by 2025 had recovered to 11 billion.

[00:09:44]He climbed back to the top tier of Singapore's richest list, sixth by Forbes's ranking.

[00:09:52]Forest Gump, he had once said, lived a meaningful life because of persistence and courage, not because of intelligence or physical strength. In 2022, when $17 billion evaporated and 7,000 people lost their jobs and the company he had built was falling by 80% from its peak, he had the opportunity to find out whether he actually believed that. He stayed, he cut, he rebuilt. There is a question this story keeps circling without quite answering. Why Singapore?

[00:10:28]Lie Xiaoong graduated from Shanghai.

[00:10:31]Jaoong University in one of the most consequential decades in Chinese economic history. He could have gone back. He could have done what his classmates did, built a Chinese company for Chinese markets, ridden the wave that produced Alibaba and Tencent and Mtoan and dozens of others. He chose instead to build a Southeast Asian company from Singapore to become a Singaporean citizen to root himself in a city state that was not his home and was not where the money obviously was. The irony is that his company's biggest early shareholder was 10 cent, the Chinese tech giant he was in some ways replicating for a different market. And his company's biggest crisis came partly from being perceived as Chinese-L linked. When India banned his game, he built a company for Southeast Asia backed by Chinese capital, named himself after an American movie character, listed in New York, headquartered in Singapore, and got caught in the crossfire of geopolitics between countries that had nothing to do with where he had decided to build his life.

[00:11:44]He stayed anyway.

[00:11:46]Singapore gave him something. Rule of law, stability, neutrality, a base that was genuinely between China and America rather than aligned with either. He gave Singapore something back. The most valuable tech company the country had ever produced. $120 billion at its peak.

[00:12:07]Built by a man renting onebedroom in a Bredell HDB flat with $100,000 in debt.

[00:12:14]The bet paid off more than once. First when the stock hit $366 and again more quietly when it fell to 40. And he stayed and waited and rebuilt. Forest Gump, after all, kept