Jack Ma or fondly known as Ma Yun was born on September 10, 1964 in Hangzhou, China. Ma is a successful entrepreneur, founder of E-commerce giant Alibaba Holdings and a revolutionary. Ma is named as the richest man in China as of year 2014. In 1999, Jack Ma an IT illiterate partnered with 18 people to establish a business to business (B2B) site named Alibaba that links Chinese exporters with overseas buyers.
Alibaba's office in China.
The road to success in business is ability in getting through rejections and failures by taking calculated risk. Jack Ma learned from his failures from his education aspects and ventures in business. Failure is an option for Jack Ma as he learned to fail better and fail forward. Ma failed key primary school test twice, middle school thrice and failed the college entrance exam twice.
In 1998, Ma graduated with a bachelor degree in English from Hangzhou’s Teacher Institute. Upon graduation, Ma was rejected for the jobs he applied. Ma was one out of the 24 applicants for KFC (YUM) manager interview but he was the only one that failed to secure the job. Ma tried to get a job at police force but it was an unsuccessful attempt. Ma applied for Harvard ten times but got rejected ten times. Ma is a proactive entrepreneur, during his early age, he always sought opportunities to learn English by riding his bike each morning to go to a nearby hotel and converse with foreigners to practice and improve his English. 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.
In 1995, Ma was introduced to the Internet in United States and he was shocked there was no general information about China. Ma saw potential business opportunities of the Internet that could facilitate small medium enterprises in venturing into business with the world. Ma and his team of friends launch China Page that lists Chinese businesses and their products. Ma began to receive emails from people around the world requesting for partnership. Later on, Ma partnered with a government entity to get more funding but unfortunately the rigid bureaucracy led to Ma’s eventual departure. Thereafter, Ma took up a government position at the ministry of foreign trade and economic cooperation in 1990s.
In 1999, Ma gathered his friends and convinced them to support him for the vision for the online marketplace called “Alibaba”. Jack Ma has a vision for Alibaba that is to build an e-commerce web portal that allows customers and businesses to do all aspects of business online. Sellers are allowed to post products listings so that customers can define the products' details to make purchases. This service attracted citizens from all over the world. The main aim of this site is to enable customers buy things directly from the site. Jack Ma started his first successful E-commerce company at the age of 31 even though he was an IT illiterate. The company had earned $5 million from Goldman Sachs and $20 million from SoftBank in October 1999.
Jack showed his risk taker’s trait when he refused offer from eBay to buy his company. Instead of selling out his company to E-bay, Ma received 1 billion USD investment from Yahoo co-founding member- Jerry Yang in 2005. He is willing to take the risk to compete with eBay, and to make his company to become more successful and serve more small business owner. Ma’s business venture success was evident after Alibaba’s Taobao bested eBay in China, forcing the United State auction site to largely withdraw from China in 2006. All of his success proves that he has is visionary and able to overcome the pain of rejections and treat it as an opportunity to learn and grow.
In October 1999 and January 2000, Alibaba won twice in the international venture capital investment to improve the domestic e-commerce market and perfect an e-commerce platform for Chinese enterprises. Besides, Ma always is proactive and always source for untapped market as he wants to improve global e-commerce system. Ma founded Taobao Marketplace, Alipay, Ali Mama and Lynx in year 2003.
Alibaba's ecosystem. Consent of Alibaba Group.
When Jack Ma set up Alibaba, he risked and challenge the status quo that was supported by many years of conventional wisdom about business and competition in the digital age. Maintaining the status quo means maintaining present situation and Jack Ma challenged it as it lacks of transparency and full of corruption. His unconventional way of thinking is to place customers as his first and foremost priority, partners as his second and lastly the shareholders which is against the norms of businesses as the top priority should be the shareholders.
Founded groups by Alibaba.
The outcome of his business philosophy successfully created millions of job and Alibaba's consumer-to-consumer (C2C) site Taobao features nearly a billion products and one of the 20 most-visited websites globally. Alibaba also successfully dominates the Chinese e-commerce market as Ma’s strategy of locking in shoppers at the beginning and end of their excursions has captured huge market share. Alibaba is able to control people going in and out of the retail platform- Tmall, and Taobao. Currently Alibaba serves more than 79 million members from more than 240 countries and territories. The September 19 initial public offering (IPO) of Alibaba, and its early run as a publicly listed company, was met with cheers as the $68 IPO price gave the company an initial value of $167 billion, which sets as the world's largest initial public offering ever. In less than two weeks, the market value of Alibaba rose to over $220 billion, exceeding that of even Facebook.
Jack Ma decided to go against the financial legal laws to develop the payment system. Initially when he decided to start his website ‘Alibaba’ there is about 1 to 3 years where the website only serve as an e-market for information exchange and there is no any payment involved. He decided to talk to the bank to develop an online payment system. However, he was rejected by all the banks and the banks think that he is crazy because if he launch this system he will be against the Financial Legal Laws as they have no license to run the system.
By chance, he went to listen to a leadership discussion talk. He learnt that leadership is all about responsibility thus he decide to take risk and give it all out. He called his friends and asked them start to launch the payment system- Alipay. He risked his personal freedom to build Alipay without approval from the Chinese banking authorities. This is because he saw the importance of developing a reliable and trustworthy online payment system and currently Alipay facilitates more business globally than PayPal.
Jack Ma’s success story in setting up Alibaba Holdings is an inspiring story for people around the world especially entrepreneurs. Jack Ma possessed the traits of proactive as he is constantly sourcing for untapped markets and opportunities even though there was failures and failed business ventures he never gave up as there is a glimpse of hope. Ma’s unconventional way of doing business by risking himself and Alibaba proved to be fruitful as Ma is one of the richest person in the world.
