The Founder of Alibaba

The Founder Of Alibaba
Jack Ma or Ma Yun (Chinese: , born on September 10, 1964) is a

Chinese business magnate and philanthropist. He is the founder and executive
chairman of Alibaba Group, a family of successful Internet-based businesses. He is
the first mainland Chinese entrepreneur to appear on the cover of Forbes.
Growing up in the Chinese province of Hangzhou, Jack used to cycle to the
Shangri-La hotel as a teenager just to speak to foreigners and improve his English.
Once he became fluent in the language, Jack got his first job as an English teacher
at the Hangzhou Institute of Electronic Engineering at the age of 24. Jack Ma intends
to use the internet and Alibabas influence to facilitate more globalized trade across
borders beyond China and to help SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) across the
world. Jack vows that helping SMEs to succeed is much like a religious calling for
him.
How was Alibaba created ?

In 1994, Jack heard about the Internet. In early 1995, he went to the US and
with his friends' help he got introduced to the Internet. During his first encounter he
searched the word "beer". Although he found information related to beer from many
countries, he was surprised to find none from China. Further, he tried to search for
general information about China and again was surprised to find none. So ,he asked
his friend Stuart Trusty, who worked in Seattle as an Internet consultant .In April
1995, Jack his wife and a friend collected $20,000 and started an Internet company.
Their company was dedicated to creating websites for companies. He named their
company "China Yellow Pages." Within three years, his company had made
5,000,000 Chinese Yuan which was equivalent to US$800,000.
The website did well, but the lack of a revenue model meant the company
was short of cash and vulnerable to takeovers. In 1996, a state-owned enterprise,
Zhejiang Telecom, took over the company. Jack lost control of his pioneering
enterprise, and had to move back to Beijing to take up a job in the ministry of foreign
trade and economic cooperation, where he built trade websites for the government.
Buried under layers of bureaucracy was frustrating, and in 1999, Jack left the
ministry to start his new Internet venture, Alibaba, which would cater to small
businesses, and go on to become one of the worlds largest e-commerce companies.
The reality was that Jack, late to the portal game now dominated by Sina,
Soho, and NetEase, had to find his own niche in the China Internet market. The
portals were trying to capture the growing number of individual users coming online,
but Jack was going to stick with what he knew best: small business. 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
favourite movie, Forrest Gump, in which Gump makes a fortune from fishing shrimp
after a storm.
Alibaba earns from advertising, and unlike e-commerce firms like Amazon, it
works on a marketplace model where it doesnt invest in warehousing. In the days
following its initial public offering in New York, its value soared to $300 billion (around
Rs.20 trillion now), making it the second most valuable Internet company in the world
after Google. Today its valuations are lower, but it now calls itself the worlds largest
retail economy, far surpassing Amazon, and overtaking even Walmart with a higher
gross merchandise value.
Personal Life
Jack Ma is married to Zhang Ying. The couple first met when they are still
studying at Hangzhou Normal University. The couple married shortly after graduating
in the late 1980s and both began working as teachers. The couple has one son and
one daughter.
When Jack founded Alibaba, his wife also quit her job to support her husband
and join Alibaba as the company's "political commissar." However, she said that she
spent most of the company's early days cooking meals for the attendees of her
husband's impromptu meetings at all hours of the day and running odd errands.
One day, a couple of years later, she asked Ma how much money the company had
made, and Ma raised a single finger. "Ten million yuan ($1.6 million)?" she asked,
and Ma said no. "A hundred million ($16 million)?" she asked, and Ma again said no.
"One million ($160,000)," Ma said to her disappointment, until he added, "a day."
During the company's growth, Jack admitted that they had effectively "sacrificed"
their son, born in 1992, for the sake of the company, sending him to child care five
days a week and only seeing him on weekends. It was in 2002, when Zhang was the
general manager of Alibaba's China headquarters, their 10-year-old son became
addicted to online gaming and spent most of his time in internet cafes. He told his
parents that it was pointless coming home because they were never there anyway.
Concerned about their son, Jack asked Zhang to step down and re-dedicate herself
to becoming a full-time housewife. Jack has been appreciative of Zhang's sacrifice
and her contribution to his success both at Alibaba and at home. "She helps me a lot
with my career and family," he said.
Jack had spent some of this time in Bay Area, San Francisco. He rents a home
there, and he has audited history courses at Berkeley. In 2015, he purchased a
28,100-acre land as his first property outside China made. Named Brandon Park in
Paul Smiths, New York, Jack bought it for $23 million.
Jack that has lived in Zhejiang, is known for his English idiom and business jargon
mixed with traditional Chinese proverbs. In discussing Taobao, he said that "eBay
may be a shark in the ocean, but I am a crocodile in the Yangtze River. If we fight in
the ocean, we lose - but if we fight in the river, we win."
Jack has been studying and practicing Chen-style Tai Chi Chuan. Since 2009, Jack
began studying it with Master Wang Xian. In 2011, he hired several Tai Chi
tournament-winning players to teach Alibaba's employees. Master Wang and Jet Li
are teaching regular classes at the company. According to Jack's assistant, Jack
wants that one day he will be remembered as a Tai Chi master, rather than just the
founder of China's largest e-commerce titan.

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The Founder Of Alibaba

Jack Ma or Ma Yun (Chinese: , born on September 10, 1964) is a

How was Alibaba created ?

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