@ the Right Place
@ the Right Time
I slid into the backseat of the taxi as the driver dropped the meter’s flag and turned to me. “So where you headed?”
“Wensan road. Alibaba headquarters.”
We bumped along the Hangzhou streets for a bit, past construction sites, shops, and Hangzhou’s West Lake. Then the driver struck up a conversation.
“Do you work at Alibaba?”
“Yes, I joined the company in 2000. I’ve worked there for about six years now,” I said.
“Oh, really? I didn’t know Alibaba had foreigners. So why did you decide to work in a Chinese company?”
“I thought it would be more fun to help a Chinese company go global than to help a foreign company enter China. It’s an exciting challenge.”
The driver hesitated a bit and then went on.
“I actually know Jack Ma. We were in grade school together. The same class. Do you work with him much?”
“Yeah, we work closely together. I’ve traveled with him to a lot of different countries.”
“Do you want to know why Jack Ma is so successful today?” he asked.
Hmm. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know where the guy was heading, but I let him go on.
“It’s because he’s lucky. He was at the right place at the right time.”
Having seen all of the hard work that Jack and his team had put into building Alibaba, I tried to resist getting defensive. If building China’s largest e-commerce company was just a matter of being at the right place at the right time, I thought, why didn’t 1.3 billion other people in China see and grab the same opportunity when the Internet came to China? And if the driver and Jack were classmates in the same city, wouldn’t the driver have been at the right place at the right time as well?
But I kept mum, because I didn’t see any point in debating him. Yes, Jack had been in the right place at the right time. But on paper millions of other people were more qualified to start an e-commerce business than a schoolteacher from Hangzhou who twice failed his college entrance exams. Yet Jack was the only one who seized the moment. He was the right person at the right place at the right time.
So why Jack? What made him different? What motivated him? In many ways the answer lies in his life before Alibaba, a story I heard in bits and pieces over the years.
Jack was born on September 10, 1964, just two years before Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Jack’s early years were no doubt shaped by the political turmoil that marked the period from 1966 to 1976, a time when intellectuals, artists, and capitalists were tormented by round after round of class warfare. As the grandson of a landlord and son of a performer of Pingtan—a traditional folk art combining music with storytelling—Jack was on the wrong side of history in the eyes of the Communists. This led to Jack’s being bullied by classmates, and his frequent fights got him into trouble at his school and with his parents.
Perhaps as an escape Jack spent his free time absorbed in martial arts novels. He started with the Chinese classics and then moved on to the contemporary writer Louis Cha, whose popular wuxia (martial arts and chivalry) novels told tales of noble warriors defending the common people and underdogs using their wits—rather than brute strength—to defeat more powerful opponents.
The martial arts stories may have helped Jack overcome the first thing anyone ever notices about him—his appearance. Alternately described as elfish and impish by the media, Jack’s diminutive figure brought him unwanted attention and ridicule. Even within his own family he was sometimes teased as being the runt. When introducing his three kids, his dad was known to joke, “And this one we found in the garbage.”
You’d think being teased about his appearance and bullied by peers would destroy a young person’s confidence. But in Jack’s case it somehow gave him strength. As China opened after Mao’s death, foreigners began to trickle into Jack’s home town of Hangzhou to visit West Lake. When Jack’s middle school geography teacher told him that she’d seen foreigners near the lake, Jack became curious and went down to see for himself. He soon made a daily habit of pedaling his bicycle to the lake to befriend foreign tourists and practice English with them.
Jack developed a relationship with one Australian family in particular with whom he bonded over a game of Frisbee. They remained pen pals for many years. Through his relationship with the Australian family, Jack first traveled out of China, which he said “showed me that everything I had learned about the outside world in my Chinese textbooks was wrong.” The family became such a strong influence on Jack that he described the family’s father as “like a father to me.”
Jack’s many friendships with foreigners improved his English well beyond his contemporaries’ in Hangzhou while also opening his mind to international thinking. So he was a natural candidate to become an English teacher. Despite failing his college entrance exams twice because of his struggles with math, Jack finally entered the Hangzhou Normal University, a teachers’ college, where he was elected president of his class.
After graduation he began work as an English teacher at a local university, where he made $12 per month. Most Chinese teachers required rote learning from textbooks, but Jack taught extemporaneously, straying from the texts and relying on storytelling and humor to engage his students. He incorporated in his lessons a bit of showmanship learned from his performer father, and Jack became a favorite teacher on campus.
After fulfilling a commitment he had made to a mentor to serve as an English teacher for five years, Jack decided it was time to “jump into the sea” and start a business. “Everything I taught my students was from books,” he said. “I wanted to get some real-life experience. Whether I succeeded or failed was not important. Because I knew I could always take that experience back to share with my students.”
Jack’s first venture was the Hangzhou Hope Translation Agency, which he started in 1994 to serve the growing number of local businesses engaged in tourism and foreign trade. As Jack became known around Hangzhou for his English skills and ability to communicate with foreigners, local government officials asked him to travel to the United States to try to sort out a dispute they were having with a US partner who had promised to fund the construction of a toll highway.
Jack flew to the United States with high hopes, but when he arrived in Los Angeles, he began to suspect that the man he’d been sent to meet was a con man. His fears were heightened when his host flashed a gun and then left Jack stranded without a car in a Malibu mansion for a couple days to stew about whether or not he would report back to the Chinese partner that everything on the US side of the deal was on the up and up. Terrified and suspecting his US host was hiding important information from the Chinese partner, Jack eventually made his way to Seattle, where he had American friends.
In Seattle Jack’s friends introduced him to the Internet by sitting him down in front of a computer for the first time. “I was afraid to touch the computer, such an expensive thing. But they told me, ‘Jack—go ahead. It’s not a bomb!’ So I typed in the word beer, B-E-E-R, and I could see German beer, Japanese beer, but no Chinese beer. So I searched the word China and the response was ‘no results.’ So I said to myself, This is something interesting. If we can take companies in China and make a home page for them, this could be something big.”
When Jack returned to China, he set up China’s first Internet company, China Pages, a sort of online English-language directory for Chinese companies and information. Unfortunately Hangzhou did not yet have Internet access. So the businesses he initially targeted as prospective clients reacted as if he were trying to sell them magic beans. Once he finally did make sales, he had to gather the client company’s information and have it couriered to his friends in Seattle, who would build a web page. To prove that Jack’s website existed, the Seattle friends would print out the pages and courier a copy to China for Jack to present to the customers.
China Pages had some early success and soon caught the eye of the state-run Hangzhou Telecom, which had started its own rival service. Fearing he might have to compete against a government-backed player, Jack decided the only way to survive would be to team up with Hangzhou Telecom. They formed a joint venture, but Jack soon found himself at odds with Hangzhou Telecom’s management and left in frustration.
Next he headed to Beijing, where he worked at a company started under the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation (MOFTEC). Thinking he could help pioneer e-commerce from within the government, he took charge of an organization designed to help small- and medium-sized enterprises take advantage of the Internet. But once again Jack felt stifled by the government bureaucrats ultimately responsible for the organization. “My boss wanted to use the Internet to control small businesses, but I wanted to use the Internet to empower small businesses. We had a totally different philosophy.”
Finally, as China’s own Internet boom began to take off in 1999, Jack gathered the friends he had dragged to Beijing to work on his team at MOFTEC and told them he had a new idea for a venture—Alibaba. He had learned from the ups and downs of his experiences with China Pages and the government. Jack now had a clearer vision for how e-commerce could finally take root in China. He’d chosen the name Alibaba because it was a globally recognized story and conjured up images of small businesses saying “open sesame” to new treasures and opportunities through the Internet. Thus Alibaba was born.
Which brings us to early 2000. . . .