Jack Ma, Founder and Chairman, Alibaba Group

Jack Ma knows a thing or two about creating new opportunities. A self-made

billionaire, Ma was ranked #33 on the Forbes billionaire list for 2015. He got there by
orchestrating the development of Alibaba, a mega-e-commerce company that went
public on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) with the largest initial public
offering (IPO) in history, beating out erstwhile mega-IPOs including Facebook, Visa,
and General Motors (GM).

Jack Ma was born as Ma Yun in Hangzhou, in China’s Zhejiang Province, about 100
miles from one of the world’s largest cities, Shanghai Jack’s entrepreneurship efforts
began at an early age. When he was only 12 years old, Ma recognized the tremendous
opportunities he could create for himself if he learned English. To accomplish his
goal, he would ride his bike for 40 minutes every day—regardless of the weather—to
an international hotel in Hangzhou’s West Lake district where he could fraternize with
foreigners, offering his services as a tour guide free of charge. In return, he learned
English. Just as important, he learned about the rest of the world firsthand. He quickly
realized that the foreigners he spoke with had a different story to tell than did his
native Chinese teachers and textbooks, which presented reality through the distorted
lens of communism.

In 1979, Ma met an Australian couple and became pen pals with their two children. In
1985, the family invited Ma to visit them “Down Under,” further opening up Jack’s
eyes to the way the rest of the world—especially the Western world—lived and
worked. His efforts to seek out education and opportunities beyond the borders of his
own country changed his thinking and his life.

Like virtually all entrepreneurs, Ma faced a lot of failure and disappointment in his
early working years. From flunking his university admission exam to being rejected in
his application to become a secretary to a Kentucky Fried Chicken general manager,
Ma learned the hard way that success rarely happens overnight.

In 1995, Ma was able to move to the United States as an interpreter for a trade
delegation. It was in Seattle that he first learned about the Internet. Jack and a friend
quickly discovered that China was not yet utilizing the Internet, so they launched their
own website, called China Pages.

With virtually zero knowledge of the Internet, or even how to properly use a
keyboard, Ma invested $2,000 to start a company. He had enough early success to
attract the interest of the state-owned China Telecom, but later parted ways when the
communications giant showed little interest in Ma’s vision or goals.

In 1999, Ma courageously ventured out on his own again with a single-minded vision
of starting his own e-commerce corporation. With some close associates who believed
in him, and $60,000, Ma and his team went to work.
 “I wanted to have a global company, so I chose a global name. Alibaba is easy to
spell, and people everywhere associate that with “Open, Sesame,” the command that
Ali Baba used to open doors to hidden treasures in One Thousand and One Nights
(Fannin, 2008, online)”.

Alibaba began business in Ma’s apartment. The company’s core values included
frugality, flexibility, and innovativeness. With serious irony, Ma cites three reasons
for his company’s initial survival: “We had no money, we had no technology, and we
had no plan.”

As is often the case, Alibaba expanded too fast initially, leading to layoffs and
minuscule profits. Ma refers to these challenging times as “The dark days at Alibaba”
(Fannin, 2008, online). But with determination and persistence, Ma and his associates
eventually prevailed in epic fashion. Their global financial success was consummated
on September 19, 2014, when Alibaba went public on the NYSE with the ticker
symbol BABA and was valued at $231 billion (Baker, Toonkel, & Vlastelica, 2014),
making Ma one of the richest people in the world.

From his childhood in Hangzhou to his mid-forties as a megacelebrity on Wall Street

and around the world, Ma has been a big thinker. He has also been willing to take
calculated risks to create opportunities and accomplish his vision—which has yet to be
fully realized. Ma’s entrepreneurial vision expands well beyond making money, as he
has expressed the desire to change the world, and especially his native country of
China, in positive ways.

“My vision is to build an e-commerce ecosystem that allows consumers and

businesses to do all aspects of business online. We are going into search with Yahoo!
and have launched online auction and payment businesses. I want to create one
million jobs, change China’s social and economic environment, and make it the
largest Internet market in the world. . . . What is important in my life is that I can do
something that can influence many people and influence China’s development. When
I am myself, I am relaxed and happy and have a good result”. (Fannin, 2008, online)

Critical Thinking Questions

1. Describe how Ma’s desire to influence and contribute to Chinese social and
economic culture aided his rise as a global entrepreneur. Now identify some
entrepreneurial opportunities for making a meaningful contribution to your own nation
or culture.

2. Entrepreneurs tend to see the opportunity even in the most challenging

circumstances. Riding his bike—rain or shine—for 40 minutes a day for years took
unusual dedication and personal drive. What difficulties do you currently face—or
would you be willing to face—to take advantage of entrepreneurial opportunities?

3. What is something you could learn (e.g. ,a foreign language),or a skill you could
acquire (e.g., trade, process, function), that would empower you to create additional
entrepreneurial opportunities for yourself in the future?

Sources

Note: This case study is drawn primarily from a 2007 interview of Jack Ma by
Rebecca Fannin of Inc.com.