With every seat full and students lining the walls, Berkeley Law’s Leadership Lunch Series got off to a rousing start as Netflix Vice President of Legal Chia-Chi Li ’08 described his company’s foray into gaming and his own career journey.
Hosted by the Berkeley Center for Law and Business and Berkeley Business Law Journal, the series welcomes chief legal officers, general counsels, and other leaders of high-profile companies. For this year’s kickoff event, Professor Stavros Gadinis interviewed Li, who discussed the value of taking risks — both in how he got to Netflix and in what he does there.
A Chinese American who spent the summers of 2001 and 2003 in China during college, Li saw telling changes emerge over just those two years. Trade began opening up and a prevailing global narrative of China as a poor nation was steadily changing.
Working at a firm in San Francisco after graduating but itching to return to China, he had two options: join the Hong Kong office of a British firm or join a then small Chinese tech company called Tencent that a mentor had recommended.
“He said, ‘If your goal is to work in the Chinese economy, why go to a British firm?’” Li recalled. “At that point, few American lawyers joined a Chinese company in China. Even my LL.M. friends went to international companies or firms in China.”
Breaking new ground
Li was one of the first foreigners to join Tencent, which had about 30 lawyers. Several months later, it created the wildly popular app WeChat and grew rapidly. Tencent now has more than 112,000 employees and is the world’s largest gaming company.
Eventually overseeing a global team of over 40 lawyers who managed Tencent’s international commercial deals and international products compliance, Li then spent a year and a half as head of legal for Tencent Games Global.
“It was fascinating to be in the belly of a company that grew so quickly and made such an impact on society,” he said. “A Chinese company faces both geopolitical and multinational issues. On the legal front, you need to understand how Chinese regulators and American regulators think, and on the business front you have to know what non-Chinese partners feared or understood, or misunderstood, about Chinese companies.
Li worked on numerous high-level deals, relishing how his work was largely non-siloed.
“I think of a legal career in four buckets,” he said. “One is transactions, licensing, partnerships, and M&A deals. The second is compliance/regulatory and litigation. The third is what I call governance, including acquiring, integrating, and keeping a company running smoothly, and the last is policy. I was blessed as an in-house lawyer because I had to thread a needle between all of them.”
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