Block (Square)

Sea Group

Block (Square)

Block makes money across several business lines. Square (the seller ecosystem) charges merchants a flat percentage per transaction — 2.6% + $0.10 for in-person payments, higher for online.

Cash App takes a fee on instant deposits, Bitcoin trading, and Cash App Pay transactions. Afterpay (announced at $29 billion in 2021, though Block's share price fell so far before closing in January 2022 that the final price was closer to $14 billion) earns merchant fees on buy-now-pay-later transactions.

TIDAL is the music streaming service (acquired from Jay-Z). Block also earns Bitcoin revenue — Cash App is one of the largest Bitcoin brokers in the US, though margins on BTC trading are razor-thin.

Sea Group

Sea runs three distinct businesses under one roof, and the genius of the structure is how they feed each other.

Garena is the gaming division. It develops and publishes games — most famously Free Fire, which Sea built itself after years of just licensing other people's games.

Free Fire launched in 2017 and became a phenomenon in emerging markets. It's a battle royale game optimized for low-end Android devices and slow internet connections.

Exactly the phone most people in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and India actually own. Garena makes money through in-game purchases — skins, characters, seasonal passes.

At its peak, Free Fire had over 100 million daily active users.

Shopee is the e-commerce marketplace. It operates like a hybrid of Amazon and eBay — sellers list products, buyers purchase, Sea handles payments, logistics coordination, and marketing.

Shopee makes money through advertising, transaction fees, and value-added services for sellers. It's now the dominant e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia and has a significant presence in Brazil.

SeaMoney is the fintech arm. It offers mobile wallets, digital payments, buy-now-pay-later, and banking services through MariBank in Singapore.

The pitch is simple: hundreds of millions of people in Southeast Asia are unbanked or underbanked. Give them a mobile wallet tied to their Shopee account and they'll use it for everything.

It's the super-app play, executed patiently.

Block (Square)

The origin story starts with Jim McKelvey, a glass blower in St. Louis and old friend of Jack Dorsey.

In 2009, McKelvey lost a $2,000 sale on a glass faucet because he couldn't accept credit cards. The customer wanted to pay with Amex.

McKelvey couldn't process it. The sale fell through.

McKelvey called Dorsey, who had been pushed out of the Twitter CEO job the year before and was serving as its chairman, and they started brainstorming. The problem was obvious: millions of small businesses, street vendors, farmers market sellers, and independent contractors couldn't accept credit cards because merchant accounts required monthly fees, credit checks, and clunky hardware that cost hundreds of dollars.

Dorsey and McKelvey wanted to make it so anyone could accept a credit card using just their phone.

They built a tiny white card reader that plugged into a smartphone's headphone jack. The reader cost almost nothing to manufacture and Square gave it away for free.

The software was simple — swipe the card, enter the amount, the customer signs on the screen, done. Square charged a flat 2.75% per transaction with no monthly fees, no contracts, and no minimums.

The product launched in 2010 and spread through small businesses like wildfire.

Sea Group

Forrest Li moved from China to Singapore in 2005 to do his MBA at Stanford. He didn't go back.

In 2009, he founded Garena — which literally means 'Global Arena' — as an online gaming platform for Southeast Asia. The region was massively underserved.

Hundreds of millions of young, mobile-first users with low PC penetration but exploding smartphone adoption. Nobody was building for them.

Li saw that gap and went straight at it.

Garena started by licensing popular PC games — League of Legends, FIFA Online — and localizing them for markets like Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines. It was a straightforward licensing model, unglamorous, not the kind of thing that gets TechCrunch headlines.

But it worked. Garena quietly became the dominant gaming platform across Southeast Asia.

The company rebranded to Sea Limited in 2017 when it IPO'd on the New York Stock Exchange, raising $884 million. By then, Li had already launched Shopee in 2015 — an e-commerce marketplace — and SeaMoney, a digital payments and financial services arm, was taking shape.

Three businesses. One holding company.

The bet was that gaming would fund the others until they could stand on their own. That's exactly what happened.

Block (Square)

Square grew by giving away the hardware. The card reader was free.

That eliminated the biggest barrier for small businesses. A food truck operator, a yoga instructor, a farmers market vendor — anyone could start accepting cards in five minutes without spending a dollar upfront.

Square made its money on the transaction fees that followed.

The simplicity was the pitch. Traditional merchant services involved contracts, monthly minimums, tiered pricing, and hidden fees that required a finance degree to understand.

Square charged one flat rate for everything. No surprises.

That transparency built enormous trust with small business owners who had been burned by traditional processors.

Cash App grew through peer-to-peer payments and a brilliant viral strategy. The app launched in 2013 as a simple way to send money to friends.

Rappers, influencers, and content creators started using their $cashtag for tips and payments. Cash App sponsored hip-hop events and partnered with musicians.

By 2024, Cash App had over 55 million monthly active users — more than most banks.

Sea Group

The counterintuitive move was using gaming to subsidize e-commerce. Most tech companies pick a lane.

Sea used Garena's cash flows — which were enormous when Free Fire was at its peak — to fund Shopee's aggressive, money-losing expansion. They didn't need to raise debt or dilute shareholders to burn cash in new markets.

The gaming division was basically an ATM.

Free Fire itself was a masterclass in product-market fit. Instead of porting a premium game to low-end markets and watching it fail, Sea built a battle royale game from scratch that ran on 1GB RAM Android phones with patchy 3G connections.

The game was optimized for exactly the hardware that 800 million people in emerging markets actually owned. Nobody else was doing that.

Shopee's growth hack was localization taken to an almost absurd degree. They didn't just translate the app.

They hired local teams in every market, ran country-specific campaigns, integrated local payment methods, and partnered with local logistics providers. In Brazil, they ran Shopee-branded motorbike delivery.

In Indonesia, they integrated with hundreds of local courier companies. The playbook was: be more local than the locals.

The final piece was the flywheel. A Garena user downloads Free Fire, spends money on in-game items using SeaMoney's wallet, then starts buying physical goods on Shopee with the same wallet.

Three products, one ecosystem, one user. That's the compounding effect Li was building toward from day one.

Block (Square)

The Afterpay acquisition was controversial. Announced at $29 billion in 2021, it closed in January 2022 at roughly half that after Block's own stock fell.

Buy-now-pay-later was already facing regulatory scrutiny and growing delinquency rates. Critics argued Dorsey overpaid at the peak of the market.

Afterpay's revenue growth slowed significantly after the acquisition, and write-offs on bad consumer debt increased. It remains the biggest bet Block has ever made.

The Bitcoin obsession worries investors. After renaming Square to Block in December 2021, Dorsey went all-in on Bitcoin — investing company cash in BTC, building Bitcoin mining hardware, and creating TBD (a Bitcoin-focused developer platform).

While Cash App's Bitcoin revenue is huge on paper ($10+ billion annually), the margins are tiny. Investors question whether the Bitcoin focus distracts from the core payments business.

Competition is intense on every front. Square competes with Stripe, Toast, and Clover for merchants.

Cash App competes with Venmo, Zelle, and Apple Pay for consumers. Afterpay competes with Klarna, Affirm, and bank-native BNPL products.

Block has to fight multiple wars simultaneously with finite resources.

Sea Group

The post-pandemic collapse was brutal and nearly existential for the stock, if not the business. During COVID, Sea was the perfect story — gaming was up, e-commerce was up, digital payments were up.

The stock hit $372 in October 2021. Market cap touched $200 billion.

Sea was the most valuable company ever to come out of Southeast Asia.

Then the world opened back up. Free Fire's daily active users fell off a cliff as people left their homes again.

Garena had funded the empire, and now the empire's funding engine was broken. Sea lost its license to publish Free Fire in India after the Indian government banned Chinese-linked apps.

India had been a massive market. Gone overnight.

Sea responded by cutting costs aggressively — laying off staff, retreating from markets like France, Spain, Poland, and India where Shopee had expanded without yet reaching profitability. The stock fell from $372 to under $40 by early 2023.

A 90% drawdown. That's not a correction.

That's a reset.

The deeper challenge is structural. Shopee competes with Lazada (backed by Alibaba), TikTok Shop (which has exploded in Southeast Asia), and increasingly with Temu and Shein.

These are not small competitors. TikTok Shop in particular has disrupted the e-commerce landscape in Indonesia and Thailand faster than most analysts expected.

Sea has scale and local knowledge, but the fight for Southeast Asia's e-commerce market is far from over.

Block (Square)

Square is the merchant ecosystem — point-of-sale hardware, payment processing, invoicing, payroll, loans, and online stores for businesses of all sizes. Cash App is the consumer side — peer-to-peer payments, direct deposit, investing, Bitcoin buying, and the Cash App Card (a debit card).

Afterpay is the buy-now-pay-later product — split any purchase into four interest-free payments. Square Banking offers business checking accounts and loans.

Square Online lets merchants build e-commerce websites. TIDAL is the music streaming platform that pays artists higher royalties.

Sea Group

Free Fire is the crown jewel — a mobile battle royale game with over 100 million daily active users at its peak, built specifically for low-end Android devices in emerging markets. It's been the most downloaded mobile game globally multiple times and remains dominant across Southeast Asia and Latin America despite declining from its COVID peak.

Shopee is Sea's e-commerce marketplace and the business with the highest long-term ceiling. It operates across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Taiwan, and Brazil.

It's consistently ranked the most-visited e-commerce site in Southeast Asia. The app includes livestream shopping, local seller tools, Shopee Pay, and Shopee Food in select markets.

SeaMoney — now operating as the financial services umbrella — includes ShopeePay (mobile wallet integrated with the Shopee checkout), SeaBank (a licensed digital bank in the Philippines and Indonesia), and MariBank (a digital bank in Singapore). The pitch is financial inclusion for the underbanked, backed by transaction data from Shopee.

Block (Square)

Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Visa, Goldman Sachs, GIC (Singapore)

Sea Group

Sea went public in 2017 without needing a late-stage mega-round from the usual suspects. But it had institutional backing from early on.

Tencent is the most significant external shareholder — the Chinese gaming giant held a roughly 22% stake at various points, which gave Sea both credibility in gaming and a complicated geopolitical headache as anti-China sentiment grew in Southeast Asia and the U.S.

Naveen Tewari's General Atlantic and other growth equity funds participated in rounds before the IPO. Post-IPO, Sea attracted attention from large institutional investors including T.

Rowe Price, BlackRock, and various sovereign wealth funds drawn to the Southeast Asia growth story.

Masayoshi Son's SoftBank also took a stake — consistent with SoftBank's bet on emerging market consumer internet platforms. The Tencent relationship is the most interesting one because it's both a competitive asset (access to gaming IP and distribution) and a liability (political risk in markets sensitive to Chinese corporate influence).