My goal with Alibaba’s World is both to educate and inspire. I hope that entrepreneurs and others chasing a dream can read the book to learn from Alibaba’s successes and mistakes. And I hope that others can learn from Alibaba’s story to better understand what it was like on the ground during a transformative time when the Internet brought China face-to-face with the West. In pursuit of this goal I’ve made every effort to present an accurate and authentic reflection of my experiences.
Fortunately much of Alibaba’s history was captured in the 200 hours of video archives that I gathered in preparing my documentary, Crocodile in the Yangtze. This, and detailed notes I took during my time at Alibaba, provided a valuable reference for this book.
All the dialogue is based on actual conversations, but at times I combine two separate conversations with one person into one conversation. The same is true of some of Jack Ma’s early speeches where I have sometimes combined public comments he made separately at the time into one speech. I also paraphrase Jack Ma’s English occasionally to account for the fact that it is not his native language and sometimes includes small grammatical errors. In all cases I have made every effort to preserve the accuracy and authenticity of what was said by all parties.
In a few instances, when discussing confrontations or conflicts with former colleagues, I have left some minor characters unnamed. In a fast-growing start-up, there are always bumps and bruises, internal disagreements. However, my goal here is to use issues or conflicts as illustrations from which others may learn, not settle scores with individual colleagues. In the spirit of fairness, I also do my best to point out the times when I myself made mistakes or held the wrong assumptions.
This book was written independent of Alibaba, with no involvement by the company. Whether readers agree or disagree with my take on events, the opinions are entirely my own. It’s my hope that sharing the story, in the most candid way possible, of how a schoolteacher rose from obscurity to build the world’s largest e-commerce company can serve as a great case study for students, entrepreneurs, and anyone else setting out on a journey of their own.