How Jack Ma Went From Being A Poor
School Teacher To Turning Alibaba Into A $160 Billion Behemoth
In 1995, a former school teacher from China named Jack
Ma visited the United States for the first time.
Ma had recently started a translation company to capitalize on China's
export boom.
When he was in the U.S., as part of his translation business, a friend
showed him the internet. His friend told him that just about everything was on
the internet.
Ma decided to search for beer. The results didn't turn up a single Chinese
option. In fact, he could hardly find anything about China on the Internet at
all.
When he returned home, he decided to found China Pages, a directory of
various Chinese companies looking for customers abroad, and some say, the
country's first internet business.
China Pages was a flop. But four years later, Ma took another stab at an
internet business. He called his second company Alibaba.
Ma still owns a 8.9% stake in the company, which means he'll be worth
~$14.5 billion if the $160 billion valuation holds. Ma is no longer the CEO of
Alibaba. He's the chairman, but he's still the face of the company.
Ma has never been a typical tech CEO. He failed the college entrance exam
twice before he finally got in. He founded an enormous tech company, yet he had
studied to become a teacher and still doesn't know how to code. Back in the
mid-2000s, when
Alibaba was battling eBay
in China, reporters used to call him "Crazy Jack" because
of his animated manner of speaking and bold goals.
Ma's story starts in Hangzhou, China, a city of 2.4 million people near
Shanghai, where he was born in 1964 to parents who made a living as
professional ping tan performers (a traditional style of
storytelling and ballad singing).
Although he got into
fights with classmates - he was teased for his size - he turned on the charm
when it came to foreign tourists. He used to go to a local hotel every day so
that he could meet people and learn English. He also bought a radio so that he
could listen to the English broadcast every day.
Despite how well he took to learning another language, he
never excelled at math. Low marks on the mathematics portion of China's college
entrance exam caused him to fail twice.
Finally, after rigorous prep for his third try at the test,
he passed, and eventually graduated from Hangzhou Teacher's Institute in 1988.
He says that he was rejected for a number of jobs - including a manager
position at Kentucky Fried Chicken - right after he graduated.
However, he eventually became an English teacher, making
about $12 a month at a local university. Here's a shot from the documentary Crocodile in the Yangtze,
an amazing film that shows the rise of Alibaba:
During China's export boom, Ma ended up starting a
translation company, which would ultimately lead him to visiting the United
States for the first time in 1995 where he discovered the Internet.
China Pages, his first attempt at an internet business, was
ultimately frustrating. Ma was pressured into a joint venture with China
Telecom and ultimately lost control of the company, according to
The New York Times.
But Ma was determined
to try again. In 1999 - as Internet fever was hitting Wall Street in the U.S. -
Ma corralled 17 friends into his apartment. The team set to work building their
own online marketplace.
The site, Alibaba.com, let exporters post product
listings that buyers could browse, and it started to attract members from all
around the world. By October 1999, the company had raised $5 million from
Goldman Sachs and $20 million from SoftBank, a Japanese telecom company that
also invests in technology companies.
Footage from those early days (which you can see in "
Crocodile in the Yangtze")
reveal Ma as a captivating speaker who could make his big dreams infectious.
Even as the team began to grow, Porter Erisman - the creator of the documentary
and an early Alibaba employee - says it felt more like a close-knit family. Ma
motivated the team by creating an ethos of being a scrappy little company ready
to take on giants.
" We will make it because we are young and we never, never give
up," he says on tape to gathering of employees.
He made bold claims to the press about how fast the company would grow, at
one point telling Erisman that if the company wanted to get some free
advertising, they had to say some crazy things.
With a love of performance (probably inherited from his
parents), Ma also helped create a quirky, fun atmosphere at the company. When
Alibaba first became profitable, Ma provided every employee with a can of Silly
String to go wild with. When the company decided to start Taobao, its eBay
competitor, in the early 2000's, he got the team working on it to do handstands
during breaks to keep their energy levels up.
Even today, Alibaba hosts an annual talent show every year in an enormous
stadium that gets employees rehearsing for weeks. Ma has blessed hundreds of
newlywed Alibaba employees in wedding attire during an annual ritual, according
to
The Wall Street Journal.
Of
course, he wasn't without mistakes in those early days. The company grew very
fast but was burning through cash, and in 2001 Ma had to lay off his entire
international staff. Erisman can remember a phone call after Ma had decided to
close Alibaba's U.S. office, where Ma was questioning himself, wonder whether
or not he was a bad person.
Ultimately though, it was Ma's willingness to take
risks and his dedication to creating a website that catered to the needs of
China's citizens - many of whom were just discovering the Internet - that
helped the company beat
eBay in China in the mid-2000's. Taobao is now one of the top twenty
most-visited websites globally, and, combined with another Alibaba site, Tmall,
it had a total transaction volume of
$240 billion in 2013.
Ma stepped down as the CEO of the company in 2013. The new CEO is
Johnathan Lu, who had previously been the company's senior vice president.
"I thought it would be easier when I stepped down from CEO," he
told
The Wall Street Journal,
"But now I'm finding out being a chairman, if you want to be a good
chairman, is much busier than being a CEO."
After the company filed for its IPO, Ma wrote a letter to Alibaba
employees, which was printed by
The Wall Street Journal.
In it, Ma tells the team that there is "unparalleled ruthlessness and
pressure" ahead, but that the company can overcome it by sticking to its
original mission and culture.
Here's a nugget from the letter: " We know well we haven't survived
because our strategies are farsighted and brilliant, or because our execution
is perfect, but because for 15 years we have persevered in our mission of
'making it easier to do business across the world,' because we have insisted on
a 'customer first' value system, because we have persisted in believing in the
future, and because we have insisted that normal people can do extraordinary
things."
1. What tenses are used in the article? (show the proof)
·
In 1995, Jack visited the US = Simple past
·
Jack Ma had recently started a
translation company to capitalize on Chinese export boom = Past perfect tense
·
Next week, Alibaba will start trading on
New York stock exchange = Present future
·
Jack Ma is no longer the CEO of Alibaba
= Simple present
2. Restate one sentence
in the article into gerund/to + infinitive
Next week, Alibaba will start trading on the New York
stock exchange
Next week, Alibaba will start to trade on the New York
stock exchange
3. Show a use of
personal pronouns or possessive pronouns or reflexive pronouns in the article
Reported
used to call him “Crazy Jack” because of his animated manner of speaking and
bold goals
Sumber : https://amp.businessinsider.com/the-story-of-jack-ma-founder-of-alibaba-2014-9
