This episode of Beyond the Valley is sponsored by the Singapore Week of Innovation and Technology by Enterprise Singapore. Investors are always on the hunt for the next big opportunity, especially when it comes to tech. Over the past decade, an increasing amount of that attention has shifted towards Asia. At the heart of this story is Singapore, a small city-state that's become a major gateway for companies and investors looking to tap into Asia's booming tech market. But how did Singapore build this reputation? And what makes it such a critical player in the global tech landscape. Beyond the Valley.
Hello and welcome to Beyond the Valley. I'm Arjun Kharpal and this is the second episode in a three-part series exploring Singapore's rise as an Asian tech hub. From serving as a home to major investors to becoming a key outpost to the world's biggest tech firms, I'll unpack how Singapore has carved out its role in an ever changing industry. My guest for this episode has built one of Singapore's most successful tech firms, Min-Liang Tan, the co-founder and CEO of Razer. Min, thanks so much for joining me on this episode of Beyond the Valley.
So, look, let's talk about the starting of Razer. 2005, all those years ago. What motivated you because you were a lawyer before, right?
So, what motivated you to change from being a lawyer to going into this, you know, called gaming venture?
Well, wow, that's 20 years. So, it's our 20th year anniversary this year. And essentially, I was a lawyer. I did the whole thing with the Asian parents thing where you can be a doctor, you can be a lawyer, but at heart, I suspect I speak on behalf of many of the young people out there. I've always been a gamer right back then. And while I was passionate about the law, I was more passionate about gaming. So, when you're a gamer, it's all about the competitive advantage. How you're going to be able to beat your friends at a game and stuff like that? So it came from that and we built the first the world's first gaming mouse which was the Razer Boomslang. Yeah. The Boomslang. What is that? A snake? Yes. Yeah. It's a name of South African incredibly venomous snake. And back then, I think when we built the first gaming mouse it was all about being faster, more precise, more accurate. And essentially when we built that together with a couple of friends of ours, we thought, well, this is going to be the one single product that we're going to have. We're never going to have anything else. It's just for ourselves and we said, 'Okay, instead of all these like crappy tech names out there like MX 5000 and stuff like that, we wanted to have a name that for a mouse there ate other mice.' So there you have it. We decided to pick a snake name and it's the Razer Boomslang.
Why did you go for a mouse? What was it that motivated you to think that was our first product?
Oh, wow. Well, for a gamer, the mouse is everything. It's the extension of your arm. The more precise your mouse is, the more likely you are going to be able to get frags. That's what we called it back then against your friends and things like that. So, that was the mouse. We started with the mouse. We extended to the keyboard, the headset, and boom, today we are one of the largest gaming peripherals companies in the world.
Do you think that was motivated out of being in Asia? Because, you know, when I think about 2005. I'm based in the UK. I grew up in the UK and it was all about console gaming, right? And that was so big in so many markets. But with Asia, PC gaming was huge, online gaming, internet cafes that were popping up. So, do you think like that fed into it somewhat?
Well, I think the crazy part about it was that it was actually a global kind of a collaboration built over game servers. So, myself and my co-founder, my co-founder was actually based out of the U.S. We got together and then we talked to another friend of ours in Europe in terms of gaming and all of us were communicating through game servers at that point of time. So, in short, I actually think it was really the global nature of gaming that gave birth to Razer as a company.
Just before this interview I was reading a Reddit thread and I think your fans would be upset if I didn't ask you this, but they were talking about the Boomslang and saying, are you going to do a 20th anniversary edition?
Absolutely. So we have just teased it. We've been talking about it. So the Boomslang is probably one of the most iconic kind of designs for gamers everywhere in the world. Right? It was the first gaming mouse. We are making a 20th year anniversary and we should have some news on it pretty soon.
So let's talk about kind of life as a Singaporean entrepreneur as well. What was it like trying to build a global company out of Singapore when you founded it in 2005 with your co-founder?
Sure. Well, we were fortunate in the sense where we are dual headquartered as a company. Today, we're still dual headquartered both in the US and in Singapore. For us, I think it was truly as I've mentioned a little earlier before, the global nature of gaming that allowed us to go global very very quickly. So we didn't really focus on Singapore as a market, but we really focused on North America, Europe because there were gamers everywhere and today our business spans even from the emerging markets. Latin America, Southeast Asia etc. primarily because we went to where the gamers are, for gamers by gamers. That's our motto and till today it's remained the same for 20 years.
So, it was quite global mindset from the outset.
Absolutely. From the outset, we pretty much focus on where the gamers were and you know at some point when you're on a server, you don't care whether you know the other person's in the US, well except when it comes to ping and lag and things like that. Essentially, gamers are everywhere and we've got our own language. It's a little bit of a subculture by itself and that's how we started.
And if you were talking to other entrepreneurs building companies from Singapore, is that something they should keep in mind in terms of being able to think global from the outset? Given I guess the size of the market here of course is quite small anyway, but there's a huge potential market on the doorstep, right?
Yep. So twofold. The way I would see it is Singapore is a great place to start a company. It's efficient. It's productive and it's a great test bed for many of the products. So often times startups talk about PMF, product market fit, right? So this is a great place to kind of test it out, to get the product out there, but that comes with the second bit where the world is a lot larger, the TAM, the opportunities so much larger. So start in Singapore, get your product market fit, get the product tested out and then focus on the world very very quickly, whether it's US, Europe, Asia, China for example. Massive market. And we're in this interesting time in the world where Singapore is a great place to kind of access both the American and the Chinese markets.
Yeah, we don't hear a lot about kind of big global brands, particularly in tech, coming out of Singapore. We've had some good successes, yourselves. Grab you think about. But do you think that's changing now and, and what do you think is changing about the tech ecosystem here?
So I think the tech ecosystem here is really maturing, right? Versus 20 years ago when it first started. Now there is a lot more venture capital. There is a lot more acceptance in terms of entrepreneurship. There's a lot of support. Look at us here right in SWITCH. It's exciting. You know there's a whole lot of buzz happening at the same time. But I think there are really two kind of paths that companies or startups take from here. To focus on Southeast Asia which is a great opportunity I think for a lot of startups over here because there's ready access to Southeast Asian markets and of course going global at the same time, going to the US and China throughout. So I do think both paths are available to companies looking to scale outside of Singapore and really the sky's the limit.
Do you think there's anything missing from the ecosystem that you'd like to see?
I would love to see even more support for the mid-stage companies. So I think there are quite a number of investors right now in the Seed Stage, Series A. I think past that, Series B I think and Series C would love to see more private equity and we're seeing that growth happening over here in Singapore right now and over, and above would love to see a lot more vibrant capital markets. Here in Singapore the SGX for example and I think the Singapore government is doing quite a bit of work of focus in respect of that. You know, being able to see that stage of companies being able to be founded in Singapore, funded in Singapore, being able to go public in Singapore, I think that would be even better.
Let's talk about gaming then, cuz it's a personal enjoyment of mine. I still play games when I have the time, but you started life as a company doing peripherals, you know, for the gaming market. We talked about the mouse, but in your time in the industry, what have been the biggest shifts you've seen? What are the two, three biggest things you've seen, whether it's in PC or console or mobile, whatever it might be. What are those?
So I think the biggest shift over the past 20 years right really is how the definition of gamer has really evolved right? Back in the early days it was predominantly male 12 to 21. But that has really evolved. It's also been accelerated by Covid, where it brought a whole lot of new gamers across now. So gaming as an industry used to be a small niche-y kind of industry, but gaming today is bigger than movies. It's bigger than music combined. Essentially it is a single form of entertainment for pretty much everyone out there. So I think that has been the biggest shift in the sense that gamers right now. The 2-3 billion. It's pretty much everybody in the world at this point of time. So you know for us at Razer, our motto has always been, 'for gamers, by gamers.' And the products and services that we've come up with have really also evolved along the way. Now we started as you've mentioned with gaming peripherals. Today, we're still one of the world's biggest gaming peripherals companies in the world, but on a software level, we've got 300 million users on our software platform. We're one of the biggest software platforms out there. We've got gaming payments, which we help game companies do payments. We process over $10 billion worth annually of game payments and growing. So essentially we have as Razer really grown with how the gamer demographic has grown, despite the fact that we've always remained single-minded and focused on just one user: the gamer.
And how have you adapted to the shifts in technology and gaming preferences? Because you know we had internet getting better over that time right? Which allowed better online gaming experience. We had the boom of mobile and people switching to casual mobile gaming, unserious mobile gaming, esports becoming a serious kind of sector of the gaming market as well. So there's been so many different things. What have you done to adapt?
Well, I think in short for us we've not really changed from 20 years ago in the sense that this has always been more a passion than a business for us. So the focus as I've said, 'for gamers by gamers' has been this single-minded focus on ourselves as an excuse, right? When you talk about having no time to game, for us, it's our job. So in this sense, being able to say, 'look, what do we want to build for ourselves?' And it was really looking at all the pain points, whether it's a better mouse, a better keyboard, a better headset, better audio technology, better game launcher, a faster, more efficient way to pay for games, because it was just so difficult for us to be able to do that. So in short, we just focused on the gamer and we evolved with the gamer, built products and services around the gamer, and today we're still pretty much the same as we were 20 years ago.
What about this region of Asia? Because it's become so central to the global gaming story. A lot of young people. A lot of young people, right? And also if you just think about, you know, consoles. Nintendo and PlayStation these are from Japanese companies and you think about the gaming base for esports so many out of Korea, out of China, out of various countries here in Asia as well. How is it that Asia has become so central to the global story?
Well, I think really as I've mentioned, it's really the fact that we have a lot of youth over here. Like Southeast Asia, one of the youngest populations I think comparatively in the world, and essentially with a lot of young people, the demand for game content. Better gameplay, better gaming hardware, has really come out from here, and of course, with gaming evolving also at the same time to be more competitive, more immersive. So, a good example is that we spend a lot of time with some of the top game companies in the world making the games more immersive. The latest game titles, Borderlands 4, Battlefield 6, you know, we put our tech stack in there to help the games become more immersive. Now, over and above, we've also seen gamers become a lot more competitive, you know, in the sense wherein it's no longer just about being the best amongst your friends. It's now about being a best worldwide. You've got Esports World Cup funded out of Saudi Arabia with Riyadh being now a capital of esports at the spot of time, competitive gaming. So pretty much, I would say it is digital entertainment providing for a lot more immersive and competitive environment and a lot of young people being committed and dedicated across the game.
What do you like to play, Min? Do you have time? It's your job. You said it's your job.
It's an excuse. So, I love it. You know, whenever I play new games and after the first half an hour or an hour, technically speaking, I've actually done my homework, but I go like, 'Oh, no. I've got to work a little harder. I've got to play this a little longer.' I love simulation games because I can play that on long flights, you know, civilization and things like that. I like RPGs, you know, to a great extent because I get immersed in it. I play some of the more competitive ones like Wukong or Elden Ring and stuff like that, but I get incredibly frustrated by it. And that's one reason why we came up with Project AVA, like the gamer companion, because I was just so incredibly frustrated getting caught with that. But first person shooters, that has always been my passion.
