Forrest Li

Forrest Li Xiaodong was born in Tianjin, China. He earned a bachelor's degree in engineering from Shanghai Jiaotong University, and after graduation worked at Motorola Solutions and Corning. He then earned an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he watched Steve Jobs give his "stay hungry, stay foolish" commencement speech. Li later credited the speech as inspiring him to become a startup founder.

After graduation, Li moved to Singapore with limited financial resources and $100,000 in student loan debt. He and his wife, whom he met at Stanford, rented a single bedroom in a three-room public housing unit in Braddell. He became a Singapore citizen and founded his company Sea in Singapore.

Li founded Sea in 2009, initially as a digital entertainment company under the name Garena. At the time, the company operated out of a single shophouse off Maxwell Road at Tanjong Pagar. The company first focused on game publishing. Over the years, Li's company diversified its business to include e-commerce and digital financial services. In 2015, Garena launched Shopee, an e-commerce platform that grew to become one of the leading online shopping service providers in Southeast Asia. Later, the company introduced Monee (formerly SeaMoney), which offers digital financial services including payments and lending.

In May 2017, after raising US$550 million in a funding round, Garena underwent a corporate rebranding and adopted the name Sea Ltd, while retaining use of the name Garena for Sea's digital entertainment segment.

In March 2019, after the share price of his consumer internet company Sea Ltd increased by 45%, Li's net worth increased to more than $1 billion.