Jack Ma

Jack Ma's first search on the internet, in Seattle in 1995, was for beer: American beer and German beer came back, and no Chinese beer at all. He then searched for China itself and found almost nothing, and took the empty result as the business plan.¹

Ma is the co-founder and former executive chairman of Alibaba Group, a Chinese company that built the country's largest online marketplaces for business-to-business trade, consumer shopping, and digital payments. He never wrote a line of code and had no background in technology or commerce; before Alibaba he worked as an English teacher.

Background

Ma was born Ma Yun on September 10, 1964, in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, China. His father worked in traditional music and photography; his mother worked in a factory. He was an unremarkable student by conventional measures: on his first attempt at the gaokao, China's national college entrance exam, he scored 1 out of 120 on the math section, and he failed the exam twice before passing on a third attempt in 1984 with a math score still below the normal cutoff.¹

What set Ma apart as a child was English. At age 12 he bought a radio to learn the language from broadcasts, and for nine years he rode his bicycle roughly 40 minutes each way to a hotel by Hangzhou's West Lake to practice English with foreign tourists, free of charge, simply for the exposure. His nickname, Jack, came from one of those tourists, who could not pronounce Ma Yun. After Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China brought a wave of foreign visitors to Hangzhou, Ma began informally guiding them, and through that circle he met an Australian family, the Morleys, who became pen pals and later hosted him for a month in Newcastle, Australia, in 1985, a trip he later said revealed how much the China he had been taught about diverged from the country he actually knew.

Ma was admitted to Hangzhou Normal University only because its English department had not filled its enrollment quota that year. He graduated in 1988 as a top student and student union chairman, then applied to roughly 30 jobs, including one at KFC, and was rejected by all of them.¹ He taught English for a small monthly salary and later founded a Hangzhou translation agency, work that put him in contact with some of the first Western companies doing business in China.

Getting started

In 1995, Ma traveled to Seattle on translation-agency business and was introduced to the internet by an American acquaintance. His first search was for beer: it returned American and German beer but no Chinese beer. He then searched for information about China generally and found almost nothing. Ma took the empty search results as a business opportunity: no one had yet built a way to connect Chinese businesses to the rest of the world online. He returned to China and founded an early venture, China Pages, to put Chinese company information on the web, which was later acquired by China Telecom, then spent roughly two years building websites for China's Ministry of Foreign Trade in Beijing before striking out on his own.

In early 1999, Ma returned to Hangzhou and gathered 18 people, including himself, in his apartment to found Alibaba.com, a business-to-business marketplace intended to let small Chinese manufacturers list themselves and reach buyers anywhere in the world. The company's name was chosen in a San Francisco coffee shop, where Ma asked a series of strangers if they recognized "Open Sesame" from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves; all of them did. Alibaba.com was formally established as a company on June 28, 1999.¹

What he built

Alibaba grew from that 18-person apartment startup into China's dominant online business-to-business trade platform and, over time, into a group covering nearly every layer of Chinese commerce. Taobao, a consumer-to-consumer marketplace, launched in 2003; Alipay, an escrow-based payment system built to let strangers trust each other in online transactions, followed in 2004; Tmall, a business-to-consumer marketplace for branded goods, launched in 2008. Alibaba later added cloud computing (Alibaba Cloud) and logistics (Cainiao), and Alipay's parent business became Ant Group.

Early funding included a 3.3 million dollar investment from Goldman Sachs for 33 percent of the company. Joseph Tsai, who left a job paying roughly 700,000 dollars a year at a Swedish investment firm to join Alibaba for about 600 dollars a year, became Ma's principal operating partner and is widely credited with building the financial and corporate structure that let the company scale.¹ Alibaba went public on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2014 at a valuation of about 168 billion dollars, the largest initial public offering in US history at the time.¹

How he operates

Ma has repeatedly described his role as recognizing a commercial pattern rather than building technology himself. He has said his company's real competitors were not other Chinese firms but the technology companies of Silicon Valley, and that Alibaba's advantage came from spotting an opening ordinary businesspeople and engineers had not yet noticed. Because he could not write the software Alibaba needed, he built the company around people who could, most notably Tsai, pairing a founder who saw the opportunity with an operator who could execute against it. Ma also invested directly in the next generation of entrepreneurs: he founded Hupan University, a private business school for Chinese founders, and in 2015 admitted the young entrepreneur Justin Sun as its youngest-ever student.²

Where things stand

Ma stepped down from Alibaba's board and operational leadership in 2019, and the company came under sustained Chinese regulatory pressure starting in 2020, including the cancellation of Ant Group's planned IPO.¹ Ma largely withdrew from public life for several years afterward. He has since resurfaced periodically in China, including public appearances alongside other prominent business and government figures, and by the mid-2020s retained a substantial personal fortune tied to his remaining stakes in Alibaba and Ant Group, though well below his peak net worth from before the regulatory crackdown.

Key facts

• Ma failed the gaokao twice, scored 1 out of 120 on the math section on his first attempt, and was rejected by roughly 30 employers, including KFC, before founding Alibaba.
• Alibaba.com was founded in a Hangzhou apartment in early 1999 with 17 colleagues and formally established as a company on June 28, 1999.
• Goldman Sachs invested 3.3 million dollars for 33 percent of the company; Joseph Tsai left a job paying about 700,000 dollars a year to join Alibaba for roughly 600 dollars a year.
• Alibaba's September 2014 IPO valued the company at about 168 billion dollars, the largest IPO in US history at the time.
• Ma founded Hupan University and in 2015 admitted Justin Sun as its youngest-ever student; Sun has credited Ma with instilling his entrepreneurial spirit.
• Ma stepped back from Alibaba's operational leadership in 2019 and largely withdrew from public view during China's 2020 to 2021 regulatory crackdown on the company and Ant Group.