Interesting read...
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/technology/the-unlikely-ascent-of-jack-ma-alibabas-founder.html?_r=0What is Alibaba Video:
http://nyti.ms/SxPHEmHONG KONG — The first time Jack Ma used the Internet, in 1995, he searched for “beer” and “China” but found no results. Intrigued, he created a basic web page for a Chinese translation service with a friend. Within hours, he received a handful of emails from around the world requesting information.
It was an introduction to the power of the web that would drive Mr. Ma to create the Alibaba Group four years later.
Today, Alibaba is China’s largest online retailer, with merchandise volumes that lag only Walmart, worldwide. The e-commerce giant is also moving forward with plans for a stock sale that is expected to rival Facebook’s $16 billion offering two years ago. If successful, the deal would help vault Alibaba and Mr. Ma, who owns 8.9 percent of the company, to the highest ranks of technology industry titans.
Some of the statistics in Alibaba's filing for its initial public offering revealed the potential the Chinese e-commerce giant still has to grow.Bits Blog: Alibaba, by the NumbersMAY 6, 2014
Mr. Ma’s ascent to dot-com billionaire is remarkable for not following the traditional script. Unlike Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Steven P. Jobs or Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Mr. Ma, 49, has no background in computing and professes not to understand technology. Raised during China’s Cultural Revolution, Mr. Ma began his career as an English teacher.
Instead, his role at Alibaba has always been as the company’s main strategist, a flamboyant motivator in chief to his staff and a relentless opponent to those who have competed against him. Alibaba’s two main websites, Taobao Marketplace and Tmall.com, now account for 60 percent of the packages shipped through the Chinese postal system.
“He effectively represents millions of people who now depend on Alibaba for their livelihood,” said Duncan Clark, who has known Mr. Ma since the late 1990s and is the chairman of BDA China, a consulting firm in Beijing that focuses on the digital and consumer sectors. “That’s a constituency. He’s a politician with a small ‘p.' ”
He has also proved to be a serial disrupter — an outsider with a knack for creating new markets by reimagining old industries like retailing or finance. Alibaba and Mr. Ma are shaking up some of China’s most staid, state-dominated industries, starting ventures in banking and finance and mobile phone communications. He is even moving into the department store business and film production.
“Innovation in many industries has been triggered by outsiders,” Mr. Ma wrote last June in an opinion article in The People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party — an unusual move for a private sector entrepreneur.
He was putting the country’s state banks on notice. Publication of the article coincided with the start of Yu’e Bao, a high-interest money market product that Alibaba initiated to attract investment from its customers’ online payment accounts. As of February, 81 million people had signed up for the product, which had $40 billion in assets under management.
“The finance industry needs a disrupter, it needs an outsider to come in and carry out a transformation,” Mr. Ma wrote in the article.
He brings his own flair to the role.
At a 2009 stadium rally to celebrate the anniversary of Alibaba, he emerged on stage wearing a waist-length blond wig, a black leather jacket with red flame and metal stud accents, sunglasses and lipstick. Raising a microphone, he ripped into a stilted rendition of “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?,” eliciting cheers from the crowd of 16,000 employees.
Since the beginning, Mr. Ma has shown a knack for thinking differently.
At a time when few Chinese households had their own computers, Mr. Ma in 1995 made the decision to leave teaching to set up an online business. In his hometown, Hangzhou, an eastern city about 100 miles from Shanghai, Mr. Ma established one of the country’s first officially registered Internet companies, a business index site called China Pages. Cui Luhai, who was then running a computer animation business, met with Mr. Ma at the China Pages office to learn more about his plans for the website.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/technology/the-unlikely-ascent-of-jack-ma-alibabas-founder.html?_r=0
