He is 52 years old. He is the most powerful man in China and the first millionaire from this country which made it onto the cover of Forbes.
In almost all his known conferences and interviews, Jack Ma insists on telling how he learned English on his own. He was 12 years old and was working every day in a hotel in his city to offer guided tours to tourists in exchange for conversing in English with them. Isn’t that cool?
Rock-Star-retailer-Jack-Ma's-Alibaba-generated-more-online-revenue-during-Singles-Day-than-Black-Friday-and-Cyber-Monday Combined.
Maybe you’re thinking that Jack Ma always gets what he wants. This isn’t true. He tried to enter three prestigious Universities in his birth city, Hangzhou, but failed. What’s even worse, he applied to Harvard 10 time and failed all 10 times. By force of frustration, he completed his studies of being a professor in an Institute from his city which is considered to be third or fourth in ranking.
After stumbling with jobs that didn’t mean much and in which he earned very little money, Jack Ma found his opportunity during a trip to the United States. It was the Internet.
It was 1994. The Internet was just taking its first steps. Jack Ma knew nothing about computers. Nor did he know how to use a keyboard, but he knew from that moment on that he had to do something with the Internet.
His idea formed immediately: a lot of people in China would like to sell their products abroad, but they don’t have anywhere to do it. The large traders were going to the best exhibitions of the world, but the small companies didn’t have this option.
And what should they do? They complained! There, in these complaints, Jack Ma discovered his grand opportunity and was encouraged to create a work team to make an online sales platform for the small traders. A lot of people were against this.
“They all were saying: this guy thinks different, crazy thoughts and things that could never work”. Jack Ma quote
In this atmosphere was born what then later turned into Alibaba Group. For three years, Jack Ma’s company didn’t earn a single dollar. The only goal was to survive.
1999: Jack Ma founded the website Alibaba.com, “a business to business portal for connecting Chinese manufactures with buyers abroad” (Wikipedia). Once again, there was a large lack of confidence. The most skeptical were saying that Jack Ma’s business model was appalling. 2001: Jack Ma searched for his first financing for a value between 3 and 5 million dollars. Nobody wanted to invest. 2005: Jerry Yang, the cofounder of Yahoo, invested 1,000 million dollars in Alibaba. From this point on the company didn’t stop growing. September 19 2014: Alibaba launched on the Wall Street stock market. The actions of the Chinese conglomerate sky rocketed incredibly and placed Jack Ma among the ten richest men in Asia. At the closing of this historical day, Alibaba had a value of 231,440 million dollars, an amount superior to Facebook ($200 million USD) and Amazon ($153 million USD).
From a startup founded in Jack Ma’s apartment with 18 employees and 60,000 dollars, Alibaba has been converted into the ecommerce giant with more than 3000 workers. In 2015, Forbes calculated Jack Ma’s fortune to be 20,700 million dollars.
All outstanding up until now. If Jack Ma’s wealth didn’t slow down in accumulating, neither did his problems. In 2015, the Chinese government published an absurd number. “More than 60% of what is sold through the platform is pirating”.
This sentence is from a published note on Forbes Mx about this hard battle against pirating (millions of false products and even false stores) which the company still faces despite trying to combat it.
But for Jack Ma stumbles aren’t falling. After everything “how many times did he stumble in life and finished triumphing equal? No one more displayed then him to advise you.
What Would Jack Ma Say to You if he Knew That You Were Dissatisfied With Your Life?
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