Jack Ma Biography
By Mohamed Jalloh
The man known in the West as Jack Ma was born Ma Yun in 1964 in Hangzhou during China’s Cultural Revolution, during which his family was persecuted because of his grandparents, who were members of the Nationalist party that opposed the Communist party. If few things can characterize Jack Ma's background, education and path to success, they are failure, rejection, fighting, resolve, hard work, agility and vision. All throughout Jack Ma's life, from childhood till building a multibillion-dollar global ecommerce technology giant, he has failed many times, been rejected and called crazy, even by his father who warned him about his unique “dangerous” ideas that could have resulted in his imprisonment in an earlier generation.
Jack Ma has learned more from his and others' failures than through the traditional channels of education. Ma, a man of incredible resolve, has learned to fail better and fail forward. As he declared in an interview with Charlie Rose in Davos, "I failed a key primary school test 2 times, I failed the middle school test 3 times, I failed the college entrance exam 2 times and when I graduated, I was rejected for most jobs I applied for out of college. (Ma was the only one out of 5 applicants to the police force to be rejected and the only one of 24 applicants to be a KFC manager to be rejected. "I applied for Harvard ten times, got rejected ten times and I told myself that ‘Someday I should go teach there.’" In the late 1990s after starting Alibaba, Ma tried to get venture capital funding in Silicon Valley for Alibaba and got rejected for running an unprofitable business model. He eventually went back to China without funding. (See also: Top 10 Chinese Entrepreneurs.)
Unlike many idolized college drop-out successful entrepreneurs such as Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, Jack Ma earned his MBA from Cheung Kong University while already building Alibaba in the early 2000s. Though critical of traditional teaching practices, especially at business schools, Ma is fond of academics. He was a university English teacher himself, and he talks about teaching again someday in the future.
Like many brilliant innovative minds, both past and present, Ma struggled academically, especially throughout his early years in primary and secondary schools, where he failed repeatedly. However, he excelled in the things that he was passionate about, for example, teaching himself English. During these formative years, Ma thought that, as long as he kept his resolve and worked to achieve his objectives, he had a chance to succeed. Ma said, "If you never tried, how do you know there's no chance?" Ma successfully failed forward academically into Hangzhou Teacher's college and thereafter, in his career and business. (See also: What's Next For Alibaba?)
When one listens objectively to Ma's speeches about his early, formative years, one can observe that Ma learned most by experimenting, observing and questioning the status quo. As an adolescent, he taught himself English and polished it by becoming an unofficial tour guide to foreign tourists. Through those tourists, pen pal relationships he cultivated with some of his tourist clients and his interaction with some relatives in Australia, Ma learned much about the outside world (especially the Western world). More importantly, he learned to question (not necessarily disbelieve) everything he thought or was told before, a practice he applies to this day.
That ability to question and reexamine issues helps him to look at situations from various angles and see opportunities where most see only problems. For example, when most people feared conducting e-commerce in China due to an unreliable and untrustworthy payment system, Ma got Alibaba to build Alipay without the Chinese banking authorities approval at the risk of his personal freedom. Now Alipay facilitates more business globally than PayPal, as measured in U.S. dollars. (For more, see: How Counterfeiting Affects Alibaba's Business.)
Ma could be said to have graduated from both formal and informal education systems. If informal education is thought of as "the School of Hard-Knocks," Ma has earned a doctoral degree with honors in addition to his MBA from Cheung Kong University. Ma is also heavily influenced by martial art teachings, especially Thai-Chi, which he claims helps him to find balance that he applies to both his personal and business life.
- Jack Ma: Success Story
By Mohamed Jalloh
Jack Ma intends to use the internet and Alibaba’s influence to facilitate more globalized trade across borders beyond China and to help SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) across the world. Ma vows that helping SMEs to succeed is much like a religious calling for him.
Frustrated with his lack solid employment opportunities after graduation in the early 1990s, Ma relied on his English to teach at the local university he had attended a few years prior and to start a translation service business. Upon his first visit to the United States in the 1995 as a translator, Ma got introduced to the Internet, and to his shock after looking up beer from various countries, he learned that there was none from China (a country of about a Billion people) on the World Wide Web. Ma immediately saw the potential business opportunities of the internet and how it could facilitate the way small and medium Chinese enterprises could do business with the rest of the world. Then, he and his friends decided to lunch a site about China and Chinese products online, known as “Chinapage”, that listed Chinese businesses and their products. Within the same day, he began to receive emails from people around the world requesting that they partner up. That experience taught Ma about the incredible power of connectivity, especially how the internet can greatly impact global trade, especially for SMEs.
Later, believing that "Chinapage" will get better funding, Ma partnered with a government entity that had majority control. Unfortunately, that entity brought along the rigid bureaucracy that stifled away many of Ma's visionary projects and frustrated him; which led to Ma’s eventual departure. Thereafter, Ma took up a government job for a short period at the ministry of foreign trade and economic cooperation in the latter half of the 1990s. There, he also built important connections with influential people that would later impact Ma’s life and business venture; one of whom is the founding member of Yahoo, Jerry Yang. Jerry would eventually get yahoo to invest USD 1 Billion in Alibaba in 2005.
Thanks to his experience there and his failed partnership with the government entity, Ma learned much about government inefficiencies and why not to be in business with the government. As he addressed his relationship with the governments in interview Charlie Rose in Davos, found on YouTube, Ma said "Be in love with the governments, but do not marry them.” For example, when government officials approached Alibaba to help solve a habitual crash of its ticket vending system during the annual spring festival in China, Ma and his young team from Alibaba helped to fix the problem 'Free of charge' with the promise of being left alone by the government.
In 1999, after leaving the government job, Ma took a second bite at internet-based business ventures by grouping 18 people (including himself and his wife) at his home and sold them a dream to found Alibaba with the goal of facilitating international trade for small and medium ventures based in China. Alibaba was born out of Ma’s unfulfilled dream of using the internet to facilitate business activities for Chinese SMEs and frustration with the bureaucrats he worked with in the preceding joint venture (Chinapage), where his suggestions to use the internet to facilitate trade of Chinese made products in the international market were repeatedly rejected.
In the early stages of the Alibaba, Ma tried to raise funds in Silicon Valley, the tech hub in the United States and was met with denials, and his business model was criticized to be unprofitable and unsustainable by many at the time. Eventually, Ma succeeded in getting Goldman Sachs and Softbank to invest USD 5 Million and USD 20 Million in Alibaba, respectively.
In 2003, still unprofitable with Alibaba, Ma and his team lunched an online auction site named “Taobao.com”, charging zero commission, and took on a multinational e-commerce giant, eBay, which already had the lion share of the Chinese online auction market. Determined to win against eBay, Taobao remained a commission-free marketplace for millions of online traders, and that did put Alibaba under significant financial strain. To stay afloat while maintaining the platform's commission-free policy, Ma and his team began offering peripheral value-added support services (e.g. custom webpages to online merchants) for small fees. Ma and his team won the Chinese market in less than five years, and eBay subsequently withdrew from China. Jack Mack reflected on this challenging period on a YouTube video of his interview with Charlie Rose, stating “If eBay are the sharks in the Ocean, We (Alibaba and Taobao) are the crocodiles in the Yangtze River.” Since then, Alibaba has created many subsidiaries through organic growth (such as Tmall and AliExpress) and acquisitions.
As the "dot com" boom period came to an end after 2000, Alibaba faced serious challenges due to its aggressive expansion into international markets (which Ma admitted to be a mistake). Jack Ma successfully reorganized the company's operations, including closing many international branches and focusing on strengthening Alibaba's position in the Chinese market. Thereafter, Ma expanded the services of Alibaba and reengaged its international expansion strategy.
After Ma and Alibaba reorganized their operations and made their Mark by driving eBay out of China after just few years in business, with the help of Jerry Young of Yahoo, Ma succeed in getting Yahoo to invest a sizable USD 1 Billion for a 40% stake in Alibaba in 2005. Besides getting crucial funds to help Alibaba to execute its international growth strategy, that Investment earned Alibaba (a six years old company) a valuation of USD 2.5 Billion.
In 2014, in what turned out to be the largest initial public offering to date, Ma and his team successfully raised in excess of USD 20 Billion for Alibaba by listing it in the NYSE stock exchange in the United States. That made Alibaba, a 15 years old e-commerce company that has its origins outside of the United States, one of world's largest companies as measured by its market capitalization that was approximately USD 200 Billion. Ma and his team are turning Alibaba holding group into a massive conglomerate by acquiring many smaller companies from technology related to logistics and beyond.
- Jack Ma: Most Influential Quotes
By Mohamed Jalloh
Jack Ma is very insightful, forthright and flamboyant, and at times professorial. His speeches are rich with quotable comments and advice. Some of his notable quotes, most of which are found on YouTube, are listed below.
When Ma reflected on his team's credo when they challenged eBay Inc. in the early years of his business, it was: "We will make it because we are young and we never ever give up!"
On his relationship with Alibaba Group’s stakeholders, Ma stressed the following fundamental belief: “Put the customers first, the employees second, and the shareholders third.”
In regards to this generation’s responsibility to grow, Jack Ma said, “If Alibaba doesn’t get bigger and more successful than Walmart or Microsoft, I will regret it for the rest of my life. Our predecessors invested in us, it is therefore our (this generation’s) responsibilities to do better than them.”
Ma criticized companies that rely on government’s subsidies: “If the company always thinks of picking money out from the government’s pocket, that company is rubbish! It should think about how to make money from customers and the market, and to help customers succeed."
Ma questioned the current business school model with the following: “The business schools teach a lot of skills about how to make money and how to run a business. But I want to tell people that if you want to run a business, you have to run the value first, to serve the others, to help the others – that’s the key.”
Ma responded to being called “Crazy Jack” by Time magazine in the early 2000’s, saying, “I think crazy is good! We are crazy but not stupid! If everyone agrees with me and if everybody believes in our idea is good – we will have no chance.”
Ma said about taking action and risk: “If you don’t do it, nothing is possible. If you do it, at least, you have the hope that there's a chance.”
Ma talked about the value of meditation: “I use Thai Chi philosophy in business: Calm down, There’s always a way out and keep yourself balanced, and meanwhile, don’t try to kill your competitors.”
Ma asserted the idea and value of empowering people: “In this world, if you want to win in the 21st century, you have to be making sure that making other people become powerful, empower others; making sure the other people are better than you are, then you will be successful.”
Ma addressed what money means to him as a wealthy person: “I believe when you have $1 million, that’s your money – when you have $20 million, you start to have a problem. When you have $1 billion, that’s not your money, that’s the trust society gave you. They believe you can manage the money better than the government and others.”
Ma said the following about the value of taking personal responsibility: “I find that when a person makes a mistake or fails, if he or she always complains or blames others, that person will never come back from the failure. But if the person checks inside, this person has hope.”
On his views about working with governments, Ma said, "My relationship with the government is: Be in love with the governments, but do not marry them.”
Ma noted on competition, “If eBay are the Sharks in the Ocean – We (Alibaba) are the Crocodiles in the Yangtze River. Never fight in the Ocean, let’s fight in the Yangtze River.”
Ma commented on Alibaba’s celebrated journey to success: “Today, people write about the successful stories of Alibaba. And I really don’t think we were so smart, we made so many mistakes and we were so stupid at times. So, someday, the book I personally really will want to write about is Alibaba’s 1001 mistakes. These are the things people should remember and people should learn.”
Ma responded to criticism that China is a difficult place to launch a business: “Going anywhere, doing business, takes time. No market welcomes gamblers – You go there, create value for local people, have time – it will have chance.”
In response to Alipay being called “stupid” by banks and others, Ma said: “A stupid thing – if you improve it every day, it is going to be very smart.”
In regard to perseverance, Ma said, "Never give up! Today is hard, tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be sunshine. If you give up tomorrow, you will never see the sunshine."
