Brian Wong and I paced around the arrival area of the Shanghai airport, killing time as we waited for Justin Doebele’s plane to arrive.
“Yo, Dawg, you’re lucky you joined the company when you did,” Brian said. “At least the Hangzhou team finally moved into a new office last month. I spent the whole winter working in the Alibaba apartment. It was so cold we had to wear gloves while we worked.”
In the short time we’d worked together Brian and I had already developed a brotherly rivalry. Hence his ribbing about having been at the company back in the “tough times,” before life at Alibaba had become more comfortable.
“Yeah, it must have been a lot tougher than living with your parents in Palo Alto,” I jabbed back. “You must have been jonesin’ all winter for a Starbucks frappuccino.” Brian chuckled.
We picked up Justin and began the two-hour drive to Nanbei Lake, a lakeside resort area between Shanghai and Hangzhou. Justin, who is tall, skinny, and slightly bookish, had just been named the Asia bureau chief for Forbes magazine. He was based in Singapore and had traveled to Shanghai to write about Jack Ma and Alibaba.
For me, as the company’s new PR person, it was a bit of a gamble to bring the Asia bureau chief of a major business magazine along on my first trip to the Alibaba headquarters, as I had no idea what the company was actually like. It was like bringing a restaurant customer into the kitchen. And it didn’t help that, because of a shortage of rooms, Justin had been assigned to share one of the resort’s cabins with me, a notorious snorer. But I figured that, for a start-up company, any publicity was good publicity, and it was better to err on the side of openness.
We arrived at Nanbei Lake and found Alibaba staff members, about 100 young men and women, excitedly buzzing between the resort’s small cabins. This was the company’s first off-site retreat and an opportunity for the company to catch its breath after growing so quickly without a break. None of the expats had made the trip up from Hong Kong to attend the retreat, which I thought was strange for an all-hands outing, as I felt they were missing an important opportunity to bond with their local counterparts.
First we headed to dinner in a large dining hall with round tables. Filled with excitement and anticipation, people settled in for a long meal, laughing and chatting while course after course of local dishes was set on the table. Lazy Susans spun, and staffers picked off delicious local food with chopsticks while clinking their beer glasses at toast after toast.
I was struck by the warmth of the gathering. It didn’t feel like a typical company. It felt much more like a family. Justin and I were invited to join a table full of my new colleagues. They were almost all in their mid-twenties and came from a range of backgrounds. The sons and daughters of farmers, factory workers, and businesspeople, most had joined the company in the four weeks since I’d signed my contract.
As I chatted with the staff, I was struck by how much all this meant for them. Several years earlier, even Chinese with college degrees would have been assigned to jobs by the government, with little choice about their future. The options for young people were terribly limited. The best they could hope for was to get a job in a state-owned enterprise, with the government, or—if they really dreamed big—with a multinational company. Compared to the opportunities available to the expat staff in Hong Kong, few places in China allowed young people to forge their own paths. Alibaba represented hope for them.
Thinking about all this made me feel a little guilty. Here I was, an expat making nearly 50 times more than many of the local colleagues who had hired me. Yet they were welcoming me with open arms. My earlier concern about money began to melt away as the full significance of Alibaba’s mission dawned on me. If we could make Alibaba a true success story, it could reshape the future for this bright young team.
After dinner we were sent into a dance hall, its drabness dressed in velvet drapes and sparkling with multicolored disco lights. The room was at full capacity, and the walls were lined with chairs. We sat along the perimeter facing each other. Jack took the stage and addressed us over the strong reverb of the karaoke machine.
“Wow, when we started Alibaba, I never imagined we would someday have this many people. It’s hard to believe how quickly we’ve grown. I’m so happy with our progress so far. Alibaba has got about 200,000 registered members and businesses joining us from almost every country now. That’s a good start, but it is really only the beginning of our dream. I know people think it is crazy, but we need to do everything we can to reach our goal of having one million Alibaba users from around the world by the end of the year.”
The crowd applauded.
“We’ve all been working very hard these days, and so I’m really happy that we finally have our first staff outing,” Jack went on. “We’ve now got an office in London, Hong Kong, Silicon Valley, and so many great new managers and staff from all around the world joining Alibaba every day. They couldn’t all come today, but we do have a couple laowai [foreigners] here in attendance. So why don’t we invite Porter, who is heading our company’s international PR, to the stage to say a few words. Porter?”
The crowd grew silent and stared as I walked toward the stage. For Jack Ma the English teacher, interacting with Westerners was natural. But most of the staff had never worked with a foreigner, and I was pretty sure that many had never even spoken to one. So I felt a bit of pressure to set the right tone and bridge the gap.
In my less-than-perfect Chinese I reached into my limited quiver of jokes to break the ice. “I apologize, as my Chinese is not great and there may be some people here who don’t understand what I’m saying. But let me reassure you, this is normal. Even I don’t understand what I’m saying.”
The crowd broke into laugher and applauded. Whew, I thought, ice broken. I went on.
“On behalf of all the foreigners who just joined the company, I want to say that we are really looking forward to being a part of the team. We are chasing the biggest dream of all—building a global company from China. I and the other foreigners on the team really look forward to working together with everyone.”
The crowd gave a warm round of applause. Even though my Chinese wasn’t perfect, I’d always found that just making the effort went a long way in building rapport. My words were well received. But in the back of my mind I couldn’t help but worry a bit about the sizable gap between the expats in Hong Kong and the staff in mainland China.
Jack said a few more words and wrapped up the evening’s events. “Just remember, everyone. We will win. We will make it. Because we are young. And we never ever give up.”
It seemed so simple, even a bit naive. I looked around the room and wondered, Is this really the right team to stand up to the US Internet titans? Yet their optimism was somehow infectious. It made you want to believe.
The next day we drove two hours to Alibaba’s new Hangzhou offices, stopping along the roadside to uproot bamboo shoots, which the staff wanted to bring back to their families for dinner that night. The office was housed in a drab building on the outskirts of Hangzhou, but inside it was popping with activity. With Justin in tow we strolled around the busy halls. It wasn’t quite clear whether people knew exactly what they were doing, but they certainly seemed to be having fun.
At one end of the office we came to a solid door. Curious, we opened it, revealing a dark room of bunk beds filled with napping engineers. The stench of bad breath and dirty socks filled the air, punctuated by periodic snoring. Brian had told me that it was common for Alibaba’s team to sleep on the floor at the Alibaba apartment, and it looked like this quirk of company culture had carried over. It seemed a good indicator of just how hard the team had been working.
I parked Justin outside Jack’s office and went in to brief Jack before the interview. This was my first time prepping him, and I wanted to make sure he recognized the significance. “Jack, this is Forbes magazine. It’s the oldest and one of the most influential business magazines in the US. So it’s pretty important. They are doing a big story about B2B companies. And they are even considering making Alibaba the cover story.”
“Oh, really?” he seemed surprised. “Sounds pretty important. What do you think I should say?”
I thought for a second about the team in Hong Kong and their request to keep Jack out of the spotlight—or at least keep him “on message.” And then I looked at Jack and thought about the team that I had just seen at the retreat.
“Just be yourself, Jack—it’s gotten you this far.”
Justin came in. Jack jumped around from topic to topic, sharing his life story and vision for Alibaba. Rather than rambling on about boring MBA frameworks and business models, Jack spoke in metaphors: In the Internet era, he explained, “one must run as fast as a rabbit but be as patient as a turtle.”
Justin ate it up. Jack sounded nothing like a CEO. But that’s what made him so fascinating.