Notion

Sea Group

Notion

Notion uses freemium pricing. The free plan is generous — unlimited pages and blocks for individuals.

The Plus plan is $10/user/month for small teams. Business is $18/user/month.

Enterprise is custom-priced. The free tier is intentionally powerful enough that individuals and small teams can use it forever without paying.

The revenue comes when those individuals bring Notion to their companies and entire organizations adopt it.

Notion also has an AI add-on at $10/member/month that adds AI writing assistance, summarization, and Q&A across your workspace.

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.

Notion

Ivan Zhao studied cognitive science at the University of British Columbia, obsessed with the idea that computers should be creative tools, not just consumption devices. He was inspired by pioneers like Alan Kay and Douglas Engelbart who envisioned computers as tools for thought.

In 2013, he started Notion with the idea of building a tool that combined documents, databases, and project management into one flexible workspace.

The first version of Notion launched in 2015 and basically nobody cared. The product was too abstract.

People didn't understand what it was or why they needed it. The company burned through its initial funding.

By 2015, Notion was nearly dead — Zhao had to lay off almost the entire team.

With the last of his money, Zhao kept just one engineer — Simon Last — and moved to Kyoto, Japan, where the cost of living was a fraction of San Francisco. For over a year, Zhao and Last rebuilt Notion from scratch in a tiny apartment.

They rewrote the entire product, making it simpler and more intuitive. The 2.0 version launched in March 2018.

This time, it clicked. Product Hunt loved it.

Twitter loved it. Within months, Notion was growing 50% month over month.

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.

Notion

Notion grew almost entirely through organic love. The product was so flexible that users built incredible things with it and shared them on Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit.

Template creators built entire businesses around selling Notion templates. YouTubers made "my Notion setup" videos that got millions of views.

Notion didn't need a marketing team because its users were the marketing team.

The template ecosystem was a massive growth driver. Notion made it easy to duplicate and share templates.

Productivity influencers and creators built elaborate systems — life dashboards, second brains, CRM systems, content calendars — and shared them with their audiences. Every shared template was a free advertisement for Notion.

The community strategy was deliberate. Notion hired community managers early and empowered super-users to become Notion ambassadors.

There are Notion meetups in cities worldwide. Notion Campus Leaders run groups at universities.

The company understood that for a tool this flexible, community was the best way to teach people what's possible.

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.

Notion

The "too flexible" problem. Notion can do almost anything, which means new users often stare at a blank page and have no idea where to start.

The learning curve isn't steep, but it's wide. People give up before discovering the product's power.

Every Notion user remembers the moment it finally "clicked" — but many potential users never reach that moment.

Enterprise adoption has been slower than expected. Notion is beloved by startups and small teams, but large enterprises need things like advanced permissions, audit logs, compliance certifications, and admin controls.

Building enterprise features while keeping the product simple for individuals is a constant tension. Companies like Confluence (Atlassian) have decades-long enterprise relationships that are hard to displace.

Performance at scale has been a persistent complaint. Notion pages with hundreds of blocks or large databases can become sluggish.

The app has improved significantly but power users with massive workspaces still hit performance walls. For a tool that promises to replace multiple apps, it needs to be as fast as each individual app it replaces.

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.

Notion

Notion is a workspace that combines notes, docs, wikis, project management, and databases into one tool. Pages can contain any mix of text, tables, kanban boards, calendars, galleries, and embedded content.

Notion Databases are the power feature — structured data that can be viewed as tables, boards, timelines, or calendars. Templates let users start with pre-built setups for everything from CRM to habit tracking.

Notion AI adds writing assistance, summarization, and the ability to ask questions about your workspace content. Notion Sites turns any Notion page into a published website.

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.

Notion

Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Coatue Management, Dragoneer Investment Group

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).