August 13, 2016
“Faced with increasing competition, and flush with cash, Alibaba accelerated its expansion. In the months following SoftBank’s investment, the company went on a hiring spree in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Fremont, California, where incoming CTO John Wu set up their U.S. outpost.”
August 13, 2016
“China’s own venture capital market was in its infancy, and its stock markets were dominated by SOEs. In any case, the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges required ”
August 13, 2016
“companies to have been in business for at least three years, and to be profitable. All of China’s Internet companies were new, and operating unashamedly at a loss”
August 13, 2016
“China wanted a Silicon Valley, but one that it could control, built on its terms. Yet the distributed, bottom-up nature of the Internet was inimical to China’s traditions, both imperial and Leninist, of top-down control of information. For those coming online, this was the Internet’s central appeal.”
August 13, 2016
“On his first trips to Europe, though, he experienced some culture shock. I advised Alibaba on its expansion strategy there, recommending a Swiss friend of mine, Abir Oreibi, who would oversee the company’s European operations for the next eight years. On his first visit to London, Jack was booked into the city’s prestigious Connaught Hotel but couldn’t understand why he had to stay in such an old building. In Zurich, Jack and Cathy were perplexed by the fact that all the shops were closed. Abir explained that it was a Sunday, prompting Cathy to exclaim, “Oh, I see, they’re all working second jobs today.” Coming from the nonstop business culture of China, the concept of shopkeepers taking a whole day off to rest was unimaginable.”
August 13, 2016
“an R&D center under John Wu’s leadership were running into problems. In an effort to overhaul the company’s disparate software platforms, Alibaba had hired more than thirty engineers in its new Fremont office, but coordinating with their colleagues in China across a fifteen-hour time difference was proving a headache. Forced to use English for the benefit of non-Chinese-speaking colleagues in California, Chinese engineers in both offices struggled to communicate among themselves. The team started to fracture and tempers frayed as Hangzhou pushed to develop one product and Fremont another. After an infrastructure upgrade, the whole Alibaba.com site went down. Jack was visiting Fremont at the time and had to step in personally to force better cooperation between the two teams so that the problem could be fixed. It was clear that splitting the technology team across the Pacific had failed. Alibaba started to move core functions back to Hangzhou. Alibaba was about to embark on a new, defensive strategy: “B2C,” or “Back to China.”
August 13, 2016
“ Merle Hinrichs’s office declined to comment on the spat, but the rivalry is something that Jack, the philosopher CEO, invested with a deeper meaning: “If you can’t tolerate your opponents, you will be definitely beaten by your opponent. . . . If you treat your opponents as enemies, you have already lost at the beginning of the game. If you hang your opponent as a target, and practice throwing darts at him every day, you are only able to fight this one enemy, not others. . . . Competition is the greatest joy. When you compete with others, and find that it brings you more and more agony, there must be something wrong with your competition strategy.”
August 13, 2016
“As the tech downturn continued into 2001, Jack and Joe recognized that things needed to change. In January 2001 they brought on board as chief operating officer Savio Kwan, a fifty-two-year-old veteran of GE,7 who gave a frank assessment of the company: “We need to ground [Alibaba] in reality and make it into a business.”
August 13, 2016
“Kwan slashed monthly expenses by as much as half, stepping up the “Back to China” retrenchment. A joint venture in South Korea was scrapped and Alibaba’s Silicon Valley presence drastically scaled back. Many of the higher-paid foreign employees were let go. Expensive advertising campaigns were abandoned and replaced with word-of-mouth marketing. Reducing expenses overseas allowed Alibaba to increase its hiring at home, leveraging Hangzhou’s deep pool of lower-cost talent.”
August 13, 2016
“In the years that followed the dot-com crash, Alibaba slashed costs and found a way to steadily increase its revenues. Even though the venture capital market had dried up completely, Alibaba was able to stand on its own two feet. And thanks to a new business launched in the spring of 2003, it was about to succeed on a scale that even Jack could never have imagined.”
Notes From: Duncan Clark. “Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built.” iBooks.
