Chapter 38. Razer Founder and CEO: Min-Liang Tan, Ahead of the Field

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 三十八 Razer创始人兼CEO Min

First published in the author's Zhihu column on November 20, 2015: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/20355163

This translation was reviewed against the Chinese original on July 31, 2026. If you spot a mistranslation, a wrong name, or a factual error, please open an issue or send a pull request.

Since Razer launched its first mouse, the Boomslang, in 1998, its products have reached almost every corner of gaming. Its designs have consistently stayed ahead of the field, inspiring countless peripheral makers to imitate them, and the brand remains a favourite among esports professionals.

Among Razer's many innovations, its pioneering pulsing light has become standard across the mouse industry, and there is a good story behind it.

As a boy, Min often played games late at night behind his parents' backs, but in the dark he could never see where the mouse was. That sparked an idea: put a light on the mouse and the problem disappears. When Min started designing mice, that idea became the pulsing light. A designer used a stopwatch to time Min's breathing and set the light's rhythm accordingly.

Seventeen years later, Razer has become a leading global brand in hardware and software for gamers. Min's focus on serving players at the top of the game has also produced a great many stories involving the world's gaming and esports scenes, and more than a few of them deserve a place in the record.

Min, whose full name is Min-Liang Tan, was born in Singapore on November 5, 1977. People have long assumed he came from money, but that is not what happened. His father grew up poor and completed his education overseas on a government scholarship, then raised four children through his own efforts.

Min loved games as a child, but the family could not afford a new computer, so for a long stretch he and his older brother shared a second-generation Apple machine, roughly equivalent to a 286, to play on.

Min's family was traditional, and his parents mapped out his future from an early age. He graduated in law from the National University of Singapore, passed the Singapore Bar qualifying examinations with distinction, and joined Keystone, one of Asia's leading technology law firms, as a professional technology and intellectual property lawyer.

But the dream of changing gaming peripherals kept growing in him, and in 1995, against his family's wishes, Min resigned from law and started Razer from nothing together with a friend.

Min jokes that it was a good thing he was the youngest: his older brothers and sisters had already discharged the family's obligations, which left him free to do what he wanted.

In 1998, Min, then still a competitive gamer, met Razer's other founder, Robert Krakoff. At the time, Krakoff's company, Karna, specialised in laser scanning research and had developed a new technology that could increase scanning frequency and precision several times over.

When Min heard about it, he suggested they use the technology to build a gaming mouse.

So Min and Robert used the new technology to produce the Boomslang. It was five times more precise than comparable products, used a USB connection, and topped out at 1,800 dpi.

At first Min only wanted an edge in his own matches. But once his esports friends heard about it, word spread and orders poured in, one person telling ten and ten telling a hundred. That was the start of a new era for the mouse, and Razer was formally founded soon after.

A brand new product is a challenge not only technically but commercially. As Razer's chief designer and chief gamer, Min's first plan was to take Razer into professional competition. His reasoning was simple: Razer existed to serve professional players, and at that moment the hottest place in the world for professional esports was South Korea.

The story that follows fills a gap in the historical record.

Plenty of people know that WCG grew out of WCGC in 2000. Far fewer know that WCGC itself grew out of a tournament called Battle Top, run by a Korean named Battle Lee. In 1998, for Razer's sake, Min flew to South Korea alone. To save money, and at the same time to get a feel for the Korean peripherals market, he skipped hotels altogether and ate and slept in internet cafés.

Min's arrival astonished Battle Lee. He was the only foreigner who had come to talk about working together.

Beyond tournament partnerships, in 2000 Min approached Fatal1ty, the superstar of the Quake era, and became his first sponsor. That same year, Fatal1ty won a string of major titles with the help of a modified Boomslang built specifically for Quake players.

Razer became widely favoured among professional players as a result. Word of mouth spreading outward from esports' leading figures paid off handsomely. Mouse sales climbed steadily, and the company committed firmly to esports as its route to market.

In 2001, when esports as a concept was still embryonic, Razer put up 100,000 US dollars for the naming rights to the CPL.

By today's standards that hardly sounds like much, but at the time it was an unprecedented sum. And in that year Razer was not a wealthy company. Its product line was narrow, and an earthquake in Taiwan in 2000 had destroyed a large quantity of equipment and stock, leaving the company hanging by a thread.

Fortunately, after two years of building momentum, Counter-Strike took over from Quake as the FPS discipline with the wider audience, the one that shaped a generation. Min saw the potential in Counter-Strike early and sponsored its tournaments in the discipline's opening phase.

Around the same time, Razer moved its manufacturing base to mainland China and released a 2,100 dpi version of the Boomslang, continuing to refine the design around what FPS players needed.

2004 was a turning point for Min.

Razer had been a famous company for some time, but its finances had never been healthy. It was run by professional managers, and Min felt the design and marketing of its products were not in the hands of gamers.

Faced with the results, the professional managers left one after another, and Min and Robert took the company back. Robert became president and Min was appointed creative director. Working closely together, in 2004 they launched the Razer Diamondback, designed by Min.

The triumph of the Razer Diamondback

Here at last was a flagship product capable of replacing the Boomslang line. It was an optical mouse capable of processing 5.8 megapixels per second, with an image capture rate of more than 6,400 frames per second and tracking speed above 40 inches per second. It also looked outstanding, with oversized, rubber-coated, non-slip buttons designed to suit hands of every size.

In October 2004 in San Francisco, Razer sponsored WCG for the first time. Poor finances had made that impossible before. Now, with the right product and a clear direction, Min arrived with the Diamondback and just three or four staff. They set up more than 200 computers, but by the end of the event more than 100 mice had disappeared because so few staff were available to watch over them.

What nobody expected was that those hundred-odd mice, quietly pocketed by players from around the world, became Razer's entry points into their home countries. The players could not wait to recommend the remarkable mouse to their teammates. That was how Razer went global.

In 2005, building on the Diamondback's success and everything learned from it, the world's first laser mouse, the Razer Copperhead, reached the market and caused a stir throughout gaming.

The Copperhead becomes a classic

Even now, many years later, plenty of players still miss the Copperhead. Its performance and feel were far beyond the mice of its generation, and it gave players a great many good memories. Through the peak years of Counter-Strike and Warcraft III, countless people had this mouse in hand as they fought their way to one win after another.

The success of those two products also won the board over to Min's player-centred design philosophy, "For Gamers. By Gamers." That same year, after Robert, the playful founder already in his sixties, retired, Min succeeded him as Razer's CEO while remaining creative director.

In 2006, a fully fledged Razer began expanding its product line, from the Razer Tarantula keyboard with macro support and anti-ghosting to the Razer Barracuda, the world's first gaming headset supporting 5.1 channel positional audio. Min was moving forward boldly.

At the end of 2006, a new generation of mice shook the market again with the launch of the Razer DeathAdder.

Many more products followed, and there is no need to list them all. More important was another step Min took: Razer established three design centres, in San Francisco, Taipei, and Singapore, as well as a technology centre exploring technologies three to ten years ahead of the market.

These research units are secretive. Min says only three people in the world know the full list of projects. The researchers do not work solely on peripherals, of course. They also study technologies that are neither popular nor mainstream, an environment thick with geek culture and no shortage of eccentrics.

One British designer, for instance, liked to live under his desk, did not bathe, ate no meat, and would not let anyone around him eat meat either. He is said to have gone off to India afterwards to pursue a spiritual practice. Min also recruits from every field. On one occasion he hired someone from YouTube to work on video streaming technology. It looks like idle experimentation, and yet it fills the company with open possibilities.

The Blade, the ultra-thin gaming laptop, came out of exactly that.

Gaming laptops on the market until then were all thick and heavy. Min believed players wanted a gaming laptop that combined performance with portability, so he took his researchers and set out to build one.

Most of the suppliers they approached said it could not be done with the technology available at the time.

So he acquired specialist laptop manufacturers including Powerbook and OQO, gathered relevant researchers from around the world, and spent three years leading the project himself. Breaking with convention, they finally produced the thinnest high-performance gaming laptop in the world.

Min says that if you give someone the chance to focus on the thing they are proudest of, it will pay off eventually.

That belief still guides the company. Even with Razer's brand firmly established, it continues to put real effort every year into campus tours and into sponsoring gaming tournaments and professional players.

Because Min believes For Gamers. By Gamers. is Razer's foundation and its wellspring. These are things that cannot stop, and cannot be forgotten.

Min-Liang Tan, CEO of Razer, ahead of the field.