July 24, 2016
“Alibaba might as well be known as “1,001 mistakes.” But there were three main reasons why we survived. We didn’t have any money, we didn’t have any technology, and we didn’t have a plan.”
July 24, 2016
“Just as Jack had lost control of China Pages to his SOE-linked partner, in Beijing Jasmine Zhang had been forced out of Yinghaiwei by her largest shareholder, rumored to be connected with China’s Ministry of State Security.”
July 24, 2016
“Other entrepreneurs, especially those who had set up Internet service providers (ISPs) to roll out dial-up services to consumers, found themselves squeezed out by large SOEs like China Telecom. ”
July 24, 2016
“In China, the Taiwan-born Jerry Yang became a hero. The public was fascinated to learn how an immigrant to the United States had become a billionaire before the age of thirty.”
July 24, 2016
“Charles Zhang (Zhang Chaoyang), the founder of Sohu, was born in Xi’an. One month younger than Jack, he won entry to Tsinghua University to study physics before heading on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). After attaining a Ph.D. in physics, Charles stayed on as a postdoc, working to foster U.S.-China relations through MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program. ”
July 24, 2016
“While Wang Zhidong, Charles, and William were surfing the waves of China’s exciting new dot-com sea, Jack was languishing on the dusty dot-gov shore. ”
July 24, 2016
“ The new site attracted the praise of government officials, including MOFTEC minister Shi Guangsheng, who called it a “solid step by China to move into the age of e-commerce.”
July 24, 2016
“The reality, though, was that all the offline bureaucracy involved in registering on the website made it unappealing to businesses, especially because the website could not facilitate any orders or payments.”
July 24, 2016
“But his government perch ended up giving Jack another lucky break: his first encounter with Jerry Yang, the cofounder of Yahoo. In the coming years, the fates of Jack Ma and Jerry Yang would become ever more closely intertwined.”
July 24, 2016
“As the general manager of Infoshare, and a fluent English speaker, Jack was asked to receive Jerry Yang and his colleagues, who in late 1997 came to Beijing to look for opportunities for Yahoo in China. ”
July 24, 2016
“Jack introduced him to his wife, Cathy, and they took Jerry, Jerry’s brother, and Yahoo vice president Heather Killen to visit Beihai Park, opposite the Forbidden City, and the Great Wall. Here they took a photo that would play an important role in helping separate Jack from the pack, illustrating Jack’s early meeting with the global king of the Internet at the time.”
July 24, 2016
“But Jack was worried about the consequences for him and his planned new venture of walking out of his government job. A friend advised Jack to feign illness, a common ruse in China to escape from such predicaments. Jack did in fact come down with appendicitis a few months later, but by then he was already back in Hangzhou and his new venture was well under way.”
July 24, 2016
“Jack has been asked many times why he chose an Arabic name for his company rather than something derived from his passion for Chinese martial arts or folklore. Jack was attracted, he said, by the “open sesame” imagery, since he hoped to achieve an opening for the small- and medium-size enterprises he was targeting. He was also looking for a name that traveled well, and Alibaba is a name that is easy to pronounce in many languages. He liked the name since it came at the beginning of the alphabet: “Whatever you talk about, Alibaba is always on top.”
July 24, 2016
“In contrast to the business-to-business sites in the United States that were focused on large companies, Jack decided to focus on the “shrimp.” He found inspiration from his favorite movie, Forrest Gump, in which Gump makes a fortune from fishing shrimp after a storm: “American B2B [business-to-business] sites are whales. But 85 percent of the fish in the sea are shrimp-sized. I don’t know anyone who makes money from whales, but I’ve seen many making money from shrimp.”
July 24, 2016
“The government’s policy of “informatization” was making the Internet more affordable. Getting a connection from the local phone company still took months and could cost as much as $600. But in March 1999 the government scrapped the installation fee for second phone lines and made it cheaper to surf8 online, too, cutting the average price from $70 per month in 1997 to only $9 by the end of 1999.”
July 24, 2016
“Jack likes to put Silicon Valley companies on a pedestal, but he also likes to rally his team by saying Alibaba could knock them off it: “Americans are strong at hardware and systems but in software and information management, Chinese brains are just as good as American. . . . I believe that one of us can be worth ten of them.”
July 24, 2016
“Although Jack and Cathy together were the lead shareholders, Alibaba was cofounded by a total of eighteen people, six of whom were women. None came from privileged backgrounds, prestigious universities,13 or famous companies. This was a team of “regular people,” bound together by Jack’s energy and his unconventional management methods. ”
July 24, 2016
“In May 1999, Jack met Joe Tsai,16 a Taiwanese-born investor then living in Hong Kong. Joe would become Jack’s right-hand man, a role he still performs more than seventeen years later. The association between the two would become one of the most profitable and enduring partnerships in Chinese business.”
July 24, 2016
“At the age of thirteen, speaking hardly any English, Joe was sent off from Taiwan to the Lawrenceville School, an elite18 boarding school in New Jersey. There Joe excelled at his studies as well as at lacrosse, which he credits with helping him assimilate into American culture and learn the importance of working in a team: “The sport taught me life lessons about teamwork and perseverance. While I never got past playing on the third midfield line, being part of the team was the best experience of my life.”
July 24, 2016
“I asked Joe how he came to connect with Jack: “I wanted to be more intimately involved in technology start-ups. Because I was making investments for Investor, sitting on boards, I always felt a layer of distance between the board and the management. I said to myself, I should be involved in the operation.”
July 24, 2016
“Joe remembers how Jack outlined his ambitious goal for Alibaba: to help millions of Chinese factories find an outlet overseas for their goods. The factory owners lacked the skills to market their products themselves and, Jack explained, had little choice but to sell their goods through state-owned trading companies. Jack was proposing to cut out the middleman, always a compelling idea.”
July 24, 2016
“Later on Jack told me that there are three kinds of people he doesn’t trust: Shanghainese, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong people.” But somehow Jack and Joe, a Shanghainese-speaking Taiwanese who lived in Hong Kong, hit it off. “It was fate that the two of us ended up working together.”
July 24, 2016
“Joe too was thinking carefully before taking the plunge. “I went back a second time because I saw something in Jack. Not just the vision, the sparks in his eyes. But a team of people, his loyal followers. They believed in the vision. I said to myself, If I am going to join a group of people, this is the one. There is a clear leader, the glue to the whole thing. I just felt a real affinity to Jack. I mean who wouldn’t?”
July 24, 2016
“ Looking at how Sina, Sohu, and NetEase had done it, Joe registered an offshore company,23 writing out a personal check for $20,000 to a law firm, Fenwick & West, to ready Alibaba’s corporate structure to receive venture capital investment. All they needed now was to find the investors. He set out with Jack for San Francisco.24”
July 24, 2016
“Chris explained to me that in his Economist article he had compared Jack to Jeff Bezos because “[b]oth are clever entrepreneurs who have grown rich by being among the first to exploit the Internet’s potential. But there the similarities end.”
Notes From: Duncan Clark. “Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built.” iBooks.
