Jack Ma failed his college entrance exam twice. He applied to 30 jobs and was rejected by all of them—including KFC, where 24 people applied and 23 were hired. When he finally started working as an English teacher making $12 a month, he discovered the internet on a trip to the US. He searched for ‘beer’ and found results from every country except China. That’s when he realized China needed e-commerce—but nobody believed him.
The Turning Point
In 1999, Ma gathered 17 friends in his apartment and convinced them to invest in his vision for Alibaba. They pooled $60,000. The company struggled for years, surviving the dot-com crash and fierce competition. The breakthrough came when Ma focused on serving small Chinese businesses who had no way to reach global markets. By creating a platform for manufacturers and connecting them with buyers worldwide, Alibaba became indispensable to China’s export economy.
The Strategy
Ma’s genius was understanding that China’s small businesses were underserved. While competitors chased big corporations, he built tools for mom-and-pop shops. He made the platform free for buyers, monetizing through seller services. He focused on trust—creating Alipay to solve payment fears between strangers. He also built a culture of resilience, famously saying, ‘Today is hard, tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be sunshine.’ He kept his team motivated through years of losses.
The Results
Alibaba’s 2014 IPO raised $25 billion—the largest IPO in history at the time. The company now facilitates over $1 trillion in annual transactions. Jack Ma’s net worth peaked at over $50 billion, making him China’s richest person. Alibaba became a global powerhouse, with Taobao and Tmall dominating Chinese e-commerce and AliCloud leading cloud computing in Asia.
