PART-2
In the last blog, An Entrepreneurial Journey of Jack ma I have discussed how he got an idea to start Alibaba , what are the struggles he had gone through, and how he got financially locked and faced the situation.
In this blog, we will see the rest story of the life of a man who has impacted the entire economy and internet industry of China almost single-handedly. that’s is the story of Jack Ma.
Jack ma tried to raise money from venture capitalists in Palo Alto, Silicon Valley. The investors he met expected him to present a fully developed business plan.
But, much like Bloomberg, the Google founders and so many other successful company founders, Jack Ma did not have a business plan.
His motto was: “If you plan, you lose. If you don’t plan, you win.”
Unfortunately, the investors had a hard time to understand Ma’s approach. “We don’t really have a clearly defined business model yet,” he conceded. “If you consider Yahoo! a search engine, Amazon a bookstore, eBay an auction center, Alibaba is an electronic market.
Yahoo! and Amazon are not perfect models and we’re still trying to figure out what’s best.” Thanks to his charisma, he nevertheless managed to persuade the employee responsible for China at Goldman Sachs to invest $5 million in his company.
Entrepreneurial success is not the result of explicit, academic learning and book knowledge– It is the product of implicit learning processes that manifest themselves in intuition and gut feeling.
However, this is not something irrational or mystical; it is accumulated experience, which in turn is the result of a combination of perseverance and the willingness to experiment.
As far as Jack ma was concerned, even technological knowledge was not necessary as he strived to achieve exceptional success as an internet entrepreneur “I’m not good at technology,” he declared in 2014.
“I was trained to be a high school teacher”. It’s a funny thing.
I’m running one of the biggest e-commerce companies in China. maybe in the world.
But I don’t know anything about computers. All I know about computers is how to send and receive email and browse.
Jack Ma, who first started as a website designer and then went into business-to-business e-commerce, continued to develop his business in new directions.
In 2003, he founded Taobao, the largest Chinese business-to-consumer shopping website. He was met with skepticism when he unveiled his plans for Taobao, both within his company and from investors.
After all, Alibaba’s business-to-business operations were not yet turning a profit. Plus, At this time, it was proving increasingly difficult to raise new funds from venture capital companies. Should the company really open a new front before it has won the business-to-business battle?
Many of the people he spoke to were wary. But Jack Ma was right.
In 2007, he even managed to beat his fiercest competitor, eBay, which had far greater financial muscle than Ma’s company.
eBay was forced to wind up its business in China because it never managed to understand the Chinese market, including the mentality of the large numbers of small retailers who use Taobao. Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang invested $1 billion in Taobao.
In 2004, Ma went on to found Alipay, the world’s largest internet payment service.
In September 2014, Alibaba was rising on the New York Stock Exchange over $25 billion in IPO and became one of the most valuable technology companies in the world. This was the largest initial public offering in US history.
Jack Ma served as executive chairman of Alibaba Group, which holds– Alibaba.com, Taobao Marketplace, Tmall, eTao, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Juhuasuan, 1688.com, AliExpress.com, and Alipay.
In November 2012, Alibaba’s online transaction exceeded one trillion yuan. In 2015, Jack Ma founded a business school ‘Hupan School’.
On January 9, 2017, Jack Ma met US President Donald Trump and discussed 1 million job openings in the coming five years in favor of Alibaba.
In September 2018, Jack Ma announced that he will step down as Alibaba Group’s executive chairman. After his announcements, several reports emerged that he was forced by the Chinese officials to step down, which the latter denied citing that he wants to focus on philanthropy. Currently, Daniel Zhang is the executive chairman of Alibaba.
In 2018, Jack Ma started the Jack Ma Foundation and announced his retirement from Alibaba citing several reasons– educational work, philanthropy, and environmental causes.
Ma officially stepped down from the board of Alibaba on September 30, 2019.
Having started his first successful company at the age of 31 and even after never having written a single line of code or selling something to anyone, Jack Ma runs one of the biggest E-commerce networks in the world.
The company went on to grow rapidly, expanding all across the world, quickly growing out of its China shell.
Only second to Walmart now in terms of sales per year, Alibaba has become the E-commerce giant that Jack Ma has envisioned for it.
Finally, Believing in yourself, Being Persistent in the face of adversities, and treating rejections and failures as opportunities to propel yourselves ahead is what Jack Ma’s extraordinary life speaks out to the world.
This is the story of the exceptionally optimistic and determined Entrepreneur who has changed the face of business and the Internet in China and across the world.
Catch you all in next blog 🙂
Also read,
An Entrepreneurial Journey of Jack ma
Digital Agency Role In Lead Generation