Hyderabad: Within a few hours, on September 19, a diminutive Chinese businessman became one of the world’s richest people. His e-commerce enterprise, Alibaba, had just made a historic Wall Street trading debut breaking the record for the largest-ever initial public offering, raising an incredible $25 billion. And even as traders on the floor looked on stunned at the numbers in green, the ‘excited’ boss passed on profits based on stock options to his beloved employees — both former and current. That gesture (Alibaba priced its stocks at the top end of the $66-$68 range) instantly made stocks owned by some 6,000 employees worth nearly $8 billion in total. The cheers were positively loud.
Overall though, Alibaba is now valued at over $223 billion — more than Facebook, Amazon and eBay.
Meet Mr Jack Ma
For Alibaba, Ma has been the light — perhaps the very embodiment of Chinese business acumen. He stands five-feet tall, is extremely thin, is tenacious in his dealings and full of ancient wisdom. He has also never shied away from making those characteristic let’s-take-on-the-world claims. “eBay may be a shark in the ocean, but I’m a crocodile in the Yangtze River. If we fight in the ocean, we lose, but if we fight in the river, we win,” Ma was once quoted as saying. Sanjay Varma, a former vice-president at Alibaba, remembers Ma’s ambitions as early as in 1999. “He really wanted to empower the little guys, the small companies, the SMEs. Jack, back, then was humble, and today he’s still very humble. What’s changed is his power — he’s obviously extremely rich, but in terms of his goals and his vision, those haven’t changed a bit.”
Fifty-year-old Ma actually draws inspiration from a Hollywood character — Forrest Gump. “I like that guy. I’ve watched that movie about 10 times,” Ma said in an interview soon after last week’s Wall Street debut. “Every time I get frustrated, I watch the movie.” The rudimentary lesson he learned from Tom Hanks was “that no matter whatever changed, you are you. I’m still the guy I was 15 years ago (when I earned) $20 a month.”
Searching for ‘beer’
His early days in Hangzhou city were rough. Terrible at mathematics, but armed with better English than most of his city’s other 8.7 million people, Ma spent most of childhood as a tour guide to foreigners. Later, after two failed attempts at the entrance tests, Ma managed to enrol in Hangzhou Normal University, where he studied his favourite subject — English. He would go on to teach the language following graduation in 1988, earning $12 per month.
That was until during a trip to Seattle… Ma bumped into the Internet, and he recalled searching for the word ‘beer’. “The first time I used the Internet, I touched the keyboard and I find well, this is something I believe, it is something that is going to change the world and change China,” Ma said, in an interview to CNN.
Then, seeing an opportunity for small businesses to buy and sell their goods online, he started Alibaba, initially running the company out of his Hangzhou apartment.
‘the little meeting’
There are lessons to be learnt from Ma’s life. Just months before starting Alibaba, he organised a little party for 24 of his friends at his home. And soon after everyone’s arrival, Ma dropped the bomb… telling them about Alibaba. “After discussing for a full two hours, they were still confused. Twenty three out of the 24 people in the room told me to drop the idea saying I didn’t know anything about the Internet,” he recalls. The one friend who backed Ma’s idea — a banker — had a bit of advice. “I remember him saying, ‘If you want to do it, just try it. If things don’t work out the way you expected it to, you can always revert to what you were doing before’. I pondered upon this for one night, and by the next morning, I decided I would do it anyway.”
The man from Hangzhou has described his startup’s early days with a mix of T.E. Lawrence and fortune-cookie quotes. In a blog entry, he quotes the famous British Army officer. “All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream in the dark recesses of the night awake in the day to find all was vanity. But the dreamers of day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, and make it possible.” He then famously says. “If you are poor by 35, you deserve it. You are poor, because you have no ambition. Ambition is living a life of great ideals; a magnificent goal in life that must be realised.”
For a hundred years
It has been 15 years since Alibaba made that first online transaction. Since then, the company has started several other businesses and it still remains one of the fastest growing companies in the world. In fact, Ma’s power was evident after Alibaba’s Taobao bested eBay in China, forcing the American auction site into a hasty retreat from the country in 2006. And eight years later, standing not high from the Wall Street trading floor, Ma threw an open challenge to the world.
“Fifteen years ago, Alibaba’s 18 founders were determined to set up a global Internet company originated by Chinese people, with hopes it would become one of the world’s top 10 Internet companies, a company which will exist for 102 years,” he said. And as the Americans looked at each other, wondering what the two additional years were for… Ma drove home his point. “We have a dream. We hope people say in 15 years this is a company like Microsoft, like IBM.”
The Crocodile of Yangtze had just targeted the big fish.
