Alibaba Founder Quotes

The short-termism among US policymakers has meant that the gains from globalization have been misallocated in a way that frustrated millions of Americans and spurred the populist reaction witnessed in 2016. As Alibaba founder Jack Ma pointed out at the Economic Forum in 2017, by choosing to spend $14.2 trillion fighting thirteen wars over three decades, rather than investing in America’s infrastructure, industry, and jobs, policymakers misallocated the wins from globalization. What was clear is that even thirty years ago, industrial jobs in the United States were already on the decline and exposing the economy to greater competition inherent in open international trade, further harming the American worker. The outcome was a missed opportunity to distribute the gains of globalization more widely (and in particular to America’s Rust Belt) and to fund a longer-term infrastructure investment strategy to galvanize the US economy.

Months before his Davos debut, Xi had struck a different tone in a speech to Chinese tech titans and Communist Party leaders in Beijing for a conference on “cyber security and informatization.” To an audience that included Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, Alibaba CEO Jack Ma, high-profile People’s Liberation Army (PLA) researchers, and most of China’s political elite, Xi exhorted China to focus on “gaining breakthroughs in core technology as quickly as possible.” Above all, “core technology” meant semiconductors. Xi didn’t call for a trade war, but his vision didn’t sound like trade peace, either. “We must promote strong alliances and attack strategic passes in a coordinated manner. We must assault the fortifications of core technology research and development…. We must not only call forth the assault, we must also sound the call for assembly, which means that we must concentrate the most powerful forces to act together, compose shock brigades and special forces to storm the passes.” Donald Trump, it turned out, wasn’t the only world leader who mixed martial metaphors with economic policy. The chip industry faced an organized assault by the world’s second-largest economy and the one-party state that ruled it.

Thomas Edison described himself as being “not at the head of my class, but the foot.” Einstein graduated fourth in his class of five physicists in 1900.54 Steve Jobs had a high school GPA of 2.65; Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba (the Chinese equivalent of Amazon), took the gaokao (the Chinese national educational exam) and scored 19 out of 120 on a math section on his second try;55 and Beethoven had trouble adding figures and never learned to multiply or divide. Walt Disney was a below-average student and often fell asleep in class.56 Finally, Picasso could not remember the sequence of the letters in the alphabet and saw symbolic numbers as literal representations: a 2 as the wing of a bird or a 0 as a body.57

Concurrent with all this, a massive new venture capital fund was being created by SoftBank, the Japanese tech conglomerate with stakes in Alibaba, Sprint, and others. CEO Masayoshi Son was on the verge of controlling a nearly $100 billion fund that was intended to rewrite the rules of investing in Silicon Valley and pick world-changing winners, infusing them with the kinds of cash that a generation ago would’ve seemed impossible in the private market. Goldman thought a meeting between Musk and Son might be fruitful. A matchmaker was found for the two: Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle. He lived near Son’s Silicon

When eBay entered the Chinese market in 2002, they did so by buying the leading Chinese online auction site—not Alibaba but an eBay impersonator called EachNet. The marriage created the ultimate power couple: the top global e-commerce site and China’s number one knockoff. eBay proceeded to strip away the Chinese company’s user interface, rebuilding the site in eBay’s global product image. Company leadership brought in international managers for the new China operations, who directed all traffic through eBay’s servers back in the United States. But the new user interface didn’t match Chinese web-surfing habits, the new leadership didn’t understand Chinese domestic markets, and the trans-Pacific routing of traffic slowed page-loading times. At one point an earthquake under the Pacific Ocean severed key cables and knocked the site offline for a few days. Meanwhile, Alibaba founder Jack Ma was busy copying eBay’s core functions and adapting the business model to Chinese realities. He began by creating an auction-style platform, Taobao, to directly compete with eBay’s core business. From there, Ma’s team continually tweaked Taobao’s functions and tacked on features to meet unique Chinese needs. His strongest localization plays were in payment and revenue models. To overcome a deficit of user trust in online purchases, Ma created Alipay, a payment tool that would hold money from purchases in escrow until the buyer confirmed the receipt of goods. Taobao also added instant messaging functions to allow buyers and sellers to communicate on the platform in real time. These business innovations helped Taobao claw away market share from eBay, whose global product mentality and deep centralization of decision-making power in Silicon Valley made it slow to react and add features. But Ma’s greatest weapon was his deployment of a “freemium” revenue model, the practice of keeping basic functions free while charging for premium services. At the time, eBay charged sellers a fee just to list their products, another fee when the products were sold, and a final fee if eBay-owned PayPal was used for payment. Conventional wisdom held that auction sites or e-commerce marketplace sites needed to do this in order to guarantee steady revenue streams.

The failure of these B2B marketplaces is a sharp contrast to the one major success story in B2B ecommerce from the dot-com era: Alibaba. Alibaba took a very different approach from these other marketplaces. Rather than going after large, consolidated industries, it went after small businesses. This strategy was the brainchild of Alibaba’s founder and CEO, Jack Ma. Ma’s vision was that “the revolutionary significance of the Internet is that it will enable small enterprises to operate independently.

Right now there is a prime opportunity for all of us to change the rules of the game through e-commerce and shift the balance in favor of entrepreneurs like you. The Internet levels the playing field and gives everyone - be they big or small - a chance.