Jack Ma: The Brilliant Reject

Image: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg

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He’s China’s second richest person, and the nation’s first entrepreneur to appear on the cover of Forbes. He’s shared the stage with Charlie Rose, President Obama and Mark Zuckerberg, led an international conservation movement and, in 2014, raised $25 billion as part of the largest initial public offering in US financial history for his e-commerce company, Alibaba.

Not bad for a man who, years earlier, couldn’t even get a job at KFC.

Jack Ma was born Mǎ Yún in Hangzhou, China, in 1964. Two years later, Mao’s Cultural Revolution struck the country, and his family was severely impacted. His grandfather, a Nationalist party officer at the time the Communists came to power, was branded an enemy of the state, while his parents – performers of a musical-storytelling form called Ping Tan – struggled to make money to support Ma and his two siblings.

Ma struggled at school, but developed a fondness for English at the age of 12. Keen to improve his ability, he rode his bike on a 40 minute journey to a local hotel, where a yearly influx of Western tourists had been holidaying in the wake of President Nixon’s heavily publicised 1972 visit to the region. Visitors often had trouble pronouncing his name, so Ma was given the nickname Jack. He made this trip every day over eight years.

It was during this time that Ma met the Morley family from Australia. “I think Dad saw something in him,” David Morely recently recounted to the Australian Financial Review. Ma and David were pen pals in those days;  Ma would write letters in which every second line was blank so that David’s father, Ken, could correct his mistakes and send back the original letter with one from his son.

Ironically, Ken Morely was a communist sympathiser, and was not interested in investing in Alibaba when Ma prepared to launch it in the late-90s.

Though Ma would become one of the country’s most successful individuals, his post-schooling years were gruellingly difficult. He failed the university entrance exam three times, was rejected by Harvard a total of 10 times, and applied for 30 jobs, none of which he received.

“I went for a job with the police; they said, ‘You’re no good’. I even went to KFC when it came to my city. Twenty-four people went for the job. Twenty-three were accepted.”

Eventually, Ma was accepted into Hangzhou Teacher’s Institute, from which he graduated with a Bachelor’s in English in 1988. He started lecturing in English and International Trade at the Hangzhou Dianzi University soon after.

It was in 1994 that Ma first heard about the internet. He would get to experience it first-hand the following year, while on a trip to the United States. Initially, aware of how expensive computers were, he was too scared to even touch it. His friend pushed him, so he nervously typed in ‘beer’. His search came back with responses from Germany, the US, Japan etc…but nothing from China.

(The) second word I type is ‘China’. Nothing. No data”, he told Charlie Rose in a 2015 interview.

Ma therefore decided to build an “ugly” website with information on China with there help of his friend. Within hours, he was receiving emails asking for more information. It was then that he realised just what the medium had to offer.

That same year, he, his wife, and a friend collected $2,000 USD to start a company he called the China Yellow Pages. Within three years, it had made $800,000 USD. Pretty soon, the company was building websites for a range of Chinese companies, even though the infrastructure was hardly in place. He recalls that when he first got a dial-up connection at his home, he invited his friends around to see it. Over three and a half hours, the connection managed to only load half a page. It wasn’t long before his friends started referring to him as ‘Crazy’ Jack Ma.

In 1998, while working for the Ministry of Foreign Investment and Trade as part of a for-profit e-commerce venture, Ma met Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang. He took Yang on a tour of the Great Wall, and the two became fast friends.

The following year, Ma returned to his hometown of Hangzhou to found Alibaba, a business-to-business marketplace site designed to improve China’s international trade industry.

Alibaba struggled in the early years. “There were three reasons why we survived. We had no money, we had no technology, and we had no plan. Every dollar, we used very carefully,” he told Inc. He recalls times when local business operators who recognised him at local restaurants paid for his bill, knowing that their newfound income was a result of a platform that Ma himself was making very little money from.

“I call Alibaba ‘1001 mistakes’,” he went on to explain. We expanded too fast, and then in the dot-com bubble, we had to have layoffs. By 2002, we had only enough cash to survive for 18 months. We had a lot of free members using our site, and we didn’t know how we’d make money. So we developed a product for China exporters to meet U.S. buyers online. This model saved us. By the end of 2002, we made $1 in profits.”

Things started picking up exponentially soon after, as the internet became a crucial fixture in every modern household and business. By 2004, Ma was being championed as a business and global leader by the likes of FortuneBusinessweek, and China Central Television.

His consumer-auction website, Taobao, launched in 2006, and was so successful that eBay was forced out of the local market. They offered to buy Ma out, but he rejected, instead finding support in his friends at Yahoo, who invested $1 billion USD into the company.

Ma would go on to be listed as one of Time‘s most influential people in the world in 2009, and again in 2014, when Alibaba made history by raising $25 billion as part of its IPO. Ma became executive chairman of the newly founded Alibaba Group, which has nine subsidiaries: Alibaba.com, Taobao, Tmall (a B2C version of Taobao), eTao (a shopping search engine), Alibaba Cloud Computing, Juhuasuan (a daily deals site), 1688.com (a wholesale website), AliExpress.com, and Alipay (a payment platform of which Ma owns 50%).

Outside of business, Ma has become an eager philanthropist. He publicly swore off shark fin soup in 2007, and banned the sale of related products from its stores. Two years later, he called for shareholders to found businesses to cope with economic downturn instead of waiting for government bailouts or competitor buyouts. “The great fortunes of the world were made by people who saw opportunities that others didn’t.”

In 2010, the Alibaba Group earmarked 0.3% of annual revenue for environmental protection strategies. These expanded beyond China in 2015, when Ma purchased 28,000 acres of parklands in New York.

Recently, Ma has been lecturing at international universities including MIT, Peking University, the University of Pennsylvania. And Harvard.

Alibaba now serves 100 million users daily, but Ma is far from done. He’s still the ultimate guiding voice for the company, which continues to go from strength to strength.

His story is one of determination, innovation, and vision, and one to keep in mind the next time someone tries to tell you that you’re “no good”.

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