Making the Cut – Min-Liang Tan, CEO and creative director, Razer

Not many people can claim to love what they do. Or for that matter, create a passionate following amongst gamers. Razer’s CEO and creative director Min-Liang Tan managed to check all those boxes, creating amazing products for gamers. At the very heart of it, he manages the business like a game, strategising and overcoming challenges with a gamer’s mind and heart. | By: Eve Goh

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Transcription: I don’t think I really have a favorite game at any point of time, well, I have a favorite game at any point of time, right? Like all the gamers out there, well, you know today it could be Mass Effect or tomorrow it could be, you know, Dragon Age or it could be Ultima or something like that, right? So that’s something I love about gaming right, there’s always something cool around the corner. Back then in 2005, gamers weren’t necessarily the, umm, considered huge industry. On top of that, depending on where you are you’ve got societal pressure for example, right, game is not good for you, parents, teachers, what have you. But, but, attitudes are changing. I would actually dare say that there are huge amount of opportunities and a huge amount of areas of expansion for eSports right now. Xian, for example, part of Team Razer, you know, he’s been one of the eSports athlete we’ve been supporting all the way through and he’s been delivering some phenomenal global kind of achievements and we’re really really proud of him. We’re just really focused on one person and that’s the gamer. I like to chat directly with our users, our fans and it’s a great conduit for me to always be listening, like, whether it’s positive feedback or “I love your product” and things like that and, even negative criticism which we think is really constructive where we are able to say, “Oh is there something we can improve on our product?”, “Is there something that we can push the limits in terms of engineering?” Fundamentally, because I look at it as a gamer, there are all like challenges. You just try to get through a jumping challenge. You can’t get through a jumping challenge, you’ll find all different ways and means to do it you search on the internet for a walk-through and you know the list could go on there are many huge challenges out there. We don’t look at it as a setback, we don’t look at it as a negative thing. We look at all of this as challenges and because we were, we are, passionate gamers ourselves, what we wanted to do was to design great product – whether it’s hardware or weather software for gamers – and what we’ve done is today we are world leaders in the gaming peripheral space. We didn’t just invent the first gaming mouse we invented an entire new category, a whole industry. Technically it’s designing for myself. It’s, umm, it’s more like good fun.