July 17, 2016
“Soon after returning from Seattle to Hangzhou, Jack resigned his position as a teacher at the Hangzhou Institute of Electronic Engineering.”
July 17, 2016
“In March 1995, Jack convened a gathering of two dozen of his night school students to present his concept and seek their advice, as well as their business. “I asked the most active and capable people from my evening classes to my home. I talked about two hours, they listened to me, obviously confused. . . . Eventually lots of people cast their votes. Twenty-three of them said it would not work out. Only one person—now he is working at Agricultural Bank of China—said to me: If you want to try, then go ahead, but if it doesn’t work out, come back as soon as you can.”
July 17, 2016
“China Pages
The company they registered, Hangzhou Haibo Network Consulting (HHNC), was one of the first in China devoted to the Internet. To fund his start-up Jack borrowed money from his relatives, including his sister, brother-in-law, and parents. Jack’s wife, Cathy, was the first employee.”
July 17, 2016
“During the day, the two partners went out to find clients, returning in the evening to teach an introductory training course about the “information superhighway.” This class helped generate some of China Pages’ early customers.”
July 17, 2016
“To win more clients, as with Hope Translation beforehand, Jack called on his former students to spread the word and bring in business. Two of them duly obliged.”
July 17, 2016
“Even with the help of Jack’s former students, China Pages needed more clients if it was going to survive. But demonstrating what China Pages was all about was not easy, for one very basic reason: In Hangzhou at the time it was impossible to get online.”
July 17, 2016
“Finally, in the fall of 1995, Zhejiang Telecom started to provide Internet access services in Hangzhou. By the end of the year there were only 204 Internet users in the whole province. But Jack was among them and was finally able to load a website in front of his first client, the Lakeview Hotel, on the 486 computer he’d brought back from Seattle in his suitcase.”
July 17, 2016
“It took three and a half hours to download the front page. . . . I was so excited.”
July 17, 2016
“While the Chinese government was thinking about what to do about the Internet—wrestling with issues of ideology, control, and infrastructure—the U.S. government was pondering the wisdom of bringing a communist country online. In the end, it was not politicians but scientists,2 on both sides of the Pacific, who took the lead. After years of efforts, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Menlo Park, California, connected3 with the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP), 5,800 miles away in Beijing.”
July 18, 2016
“Just as King Henry IV of France cemented his legitimacy by putting a chicken on every dinner table on a Sunday, with xinxihua the Chinese Communist Party began to roll out phone lines, then cell phones, then broadband connections to hundreds of millions of people.
In 1993, Vice Premier Zhu Rongji launched the Golden Bridge Project to create an information and communications network spanning the whole country.”
July 18, 2016
“In 1995, only 1.5 million personal computers were sold in China, mostly to business or government users. Priced at roughly $1,800, the PCs cost a fortune for average Chinese at the time. The costs of getting a fixed line installed and getting online, combined with a lack of awareness about what the Internet actually was, meant that China Pages was having a hard time finding enough customers.”
July 18, 2016
“After encountering resistance at the local level, Jack started to spend most of his time in Beijing. There he met up with Jasmine Zhang of Yinghaiwei. The two did not hit it off, Jack later sharing his first impressions: “I though if the Internet’s demise comes one day, hers will be earlier than mine. I was already very idealistic, but here was someone who was even more idealistic than me.”
July 18, 2016
“The problem for China Pages was that it really was just a directory. The site was pretty rudimentary, merely listings of a company’s products for sale. There was no way for prospective customers to make purchases online, so there was a limit on what China Pages could charge for its services.8”
July 18, 2016
“China Pages was running out of cash to meet its payroll. Switching sales staff to commission-based pay relieved the pressure for a while, as did a 10,000-yuan contract from a client in the textile industry. But China Pages was in a vulnerable state.”
July 18, 2016
“Jack had discovered that when working with China Pages on the Zhejiang government website, Dife had registered the domain name www.chinesepages.com, very similar to his own venture’s www.chinapages.com, and a new company called “China Yellow Pages.” Yet because Dife was a subsidiary of a powerful SOE, Jack couldn’t fight back. Gritting his teeth he had to give interviews with local media lauding the new venture: “The establishment of Dife-Haibo will further strengthen China Pages.” He concluded by saying, “We have every reason to believe, with the right policies of the Party and the State, and with the tremendous support from every walk of life in the society, China Pages will surely achieve great success. China’s information high-speed train will be faster and faster!”
July 18, 2016
“Years later, after Alibaba had become successful, Jack was free to comment on the experience. China Pages was dwarfed by its new partner, and while Jack was the general manager, the position turned out to be of little value. “When the joint venture was formed, disaster followed. They had five votes on the board, and we had two. Whenever there was a board meeting, whatever ideas I put forward, if one of them voted against it, the rest of them followed suit. During five or six board meetings, none of our ideas were passed.”
July 18, 2016
“Jack had lost control of his pioneering venture: “At that time I called myself a blind man riding on the back of blind tigers. Without knowing anything about technology or computers, I started the first company. And after years of terrible experience, we failed.”
July 18, 2016
“The China Pages episode provided him with some important lessons, as well as good material for his speeches, such as, “It is difficult for an elephant to trample an ant to death, as long as you can dodge well,” and “With good strategies, you will definitely survive. To this day, I’ve realized one thing: Don’t be nervous if you face huge competition in the future.” He would later draw on his experiences when taking Alibaba into battle against eBay, in the David versus Goliath struggle that would raise his profile on the global stage.”
Notes From: Duncan Clark. “Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built.” iBooks.
