How did Jack Ma find the 18 people who started the business?

1992 was a very important year in China’s business history. Deng Xiaoping's southern tour at the beginning of this year rekindled the Chinese people's hope for reform and opening up. Many people started starting businesses inspired by Deng Xiaoping's speech during his southern tour. Later, Chen Dongsheng, the founder of Taikang Life Insurance, coined a term: "92 School" to describe entrepreneurs who started their businesses after 1992.

In addition to Chen Dongsheng, Guo Guangchang, who was a teacher at Fudan University at the time, and several of his classmates registered companies that year; Hu Baosen, a civil servant at the Henan Provincial Department of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation, resigned and founded a company called "Jianye" company; Feng Lun, Pan Shiyi, Wang Gongquan and other six gentlemen founded Wantong the next year; Yu Minhong was already a successful English training teacher, but he only founded New Oriental in 1993. Many of them later became Jack Ma's friends.

However, the most famous businessman in China that year was Mou Zhongzhong. In August 1992, he exchanged several railway cans for four planes from Russia, landed at Chengdu Shuangliu Airport, and suddenly became a national sensation. The media's attention was all attracted to him.

No one in the world knows a college English teacher named Jack Ma.

In 1988, 24-year-old Jack Ma graduated from Hangzhou Normal College and was assigned to teach at Hangzhou Electronic Industry College. Ma Yun is famous for his activeness in the school. In order to prevent Ma Yun from having other ideas, Huang Shumeng, the vice president of Hangzhou Normal University at the time, made a "five-year agreement" with Ma Yun, and he could not resign within five years after arriving at that school.

While teaching at Hangzhou Electronic Industry College, Ma Yun was a lecturer in English and international trade. At the same time, he launched an "English Corner" by the West Lake and slowly gained some fame in the translation community. At that time, the national economy was developing rapidly, and the number of private enterprises doing foreign trade business in Hangzhou gradually increased, and the demand for translation services was also increasing. Therefore, many bosses ask him to be an English translator. But at that time, he could only work part-time because his "five-year agreement" with the old principal had not yet expired.

In 1992, Jack Ma, who was still teaching at the university, established Haibo Translation Agency with his colleagues. This is the first professional translation agency in Hangzhou. Haibo is a homophony of the English word "hope", which means "hope". At that time, the translation agency was just a small shop with only five employees. Jack Ma and his colleagues raised 3,000 yuan and rented a house with a monthly rent of 1,500 yuan. The registered capital of the translation agency is 3,000 yuan. The beginning of starting the business was not smooth, with the first month’s turnover being less than 600 yuan. The situation of not being able to make ends meet made the employees of the translation agency shaken, but Ma Yun firmly believed that the translation agency could continue to operate.

At the same time he must find new sources of income. Later, he discovered that he could make money by selling flowers and gifts, so he took a train to Yiwu to wholesale purchase goods with a sack on his back. After that, he divided the office into two, using one half to sell flowers and gifts, and the other half to serve as a translation agency. Moreover, Jack Ma often carries a large sack full of small handicrafts and sells them on the streets of Hangzhou. Jack Ma even worked as a pharmaceutical and medical device salesman for more than a year. Jack Ma uses the income from these small businesses to maintain the operation of the translation agency.

A new question arises. Since you can earn three to four thousand yuan a month from selling gifts, but a translation agency can only earn five to six hundred yuan, why should you continue to be a translation agency? Jack Ma's colleagues suggested opening only a gift shop and setting up a gift company in the future, but Jack Ma refused. He stated his opinion: What was the purpose of establishing a translation agency in the first place? Was it to meet market demand and solve teachers' problems, or to make money? Since it is for the former, you must persevere and get through it, and the light will come.

In 1995, after three years of losses, Haibo Translation Agency began to make a profit. At this time, the five-year contract had expired, and Ma Yun submitted his resignation to the school. After resigning, Jack Ma ran a translation agency full-time for a period of time. After the translation agency achieved profitability, it gradually got on the right track. Jack Ma let his colleagues take care of it and no longer interfered with the specific matters of the translation agency. He began to look for new entrepreneurial opportunities. Today, Haibo Translation Agency has become the largest translation agency in Hangzhou as Jack Ma wished. Many years later, Jack Ma said lightly about this entrepreneurial experience: "I thought there would be demand and it should be successful."

From Hangzhou to New York, Jack Ma's 15-year entrepreneurial journey

On September 19, 2014, Jack Ma and his team were waiting in front of the New York Stock Exchange early on Wall Street in New York, USA.

This time, he was wearing a suit and a smile on his face. It was obvious that he had carefully prepared for this day. Along the way from the hotel to the exchange, he was greeted like a famous local Broadway star. Among these people were a "mixed formation" composed of hundreds of media brought from the United States and Alibaba Group from China, and those who Wall Street investors are optimistic about this "IPO feast".

The news of Alibaba’s listing has been previewed like a soap opera for a whole year, from Hong Kong to the United States, until this moment it finally settled.

Entrepreneur Jack Ma

Jack Ma, who is 50 years old this year, and his company Alibaba are undoubtedly one of the most inspiring stories in China. This company, founded by Jack Ma and his 17 partners in Hangzhou in 1999, has now become one of the largest Internet and e-commerce companies in the world. Its business scope covers e-commerce, financial management, film and television entertainment, cloud computing, etc. business.

The reason why people pay so much attention to this company is largely because they are inspired by Jack Ma’s spirit. In a country where state-owned enterprises occupy the commanding heights of the economy, private enterprise Alibaba has achieved world-wide success in the Internet and e-commerce fields by avoiding the edge of state-owned enterprises.

After the IPO, Jack Ma told the CNBC reporter who came to interview him that he had watched the movie "Forrest Gump" more than ten times and that his hero was Forrest Gump. I read it again before coming to New York this time, and told myself while watching it: "No matter what changes, I am still myself."

After 15 years of entrepreneurship, Jack Ma transformed from a teacher to a real entrepreneur Home.

In 1988, Jack Ma’s first job was as a foreign language teacher at Hangzhou Institute of Electronic Technology. His monthly salary at that time was almost 100 yuan. Unwilling to be lonely, he found many part-time jobs and used his spare time to serve as a tour guide for foreign tourists visiting Hangzhou. The first English corner by the West Lake was initiated by Jack Ma.

In 1992, Jack Ma and his friends founded the "Haibo Translation Agency", where they worked around after school to receive translation business. But the operation is still difficult. The monthly turnover is more than 200 yuan, but the rent is 700 yuan. It can be said that it is difficult to make ends meet. Ma Yun couldn't bear it anymore, so he had to carry his pockets to Yiwu and Guangzhou to buy goods, sell gifts, and wrap flowers. He used the money to support the translation agency for three years before he started to break even.

In 1995, Jack Ma was hired by a Chinese company that was cooperating with American companies to contract construction projects and went to the United States to collect debts. This experience was later described by Sun Yanjun in the book "The Myth of Alibaba", It can be said that he had a narrow escape from death.

At that time, Jack Ma was locked in a villa for two days by Philip Cavenna, an American businessman who wanted to default on his debt. He finally escaped from detention and even lost his luggage. In Seattle, he encountered a new online world. This was also his first contact with the Internet.

Later, Jack Ma recalled that he was even afraid to touch the computer keyboard. Who knows how much this thing costs? If it gets damaged, you won't be able to pay for it. What touched him the most was that he curiously told his friend that when he entered the word "beer" into the search engine, he only found American and German brands. At that time, he wanted to use the Internet to make the world familiar with Chinese companies. After returning to China, this "Top Ten Outstanding Young Teachers in Hangzhou" resigned from his job, borrowed money, and started "China Yellow Pages", one of the first Internet companies in China.

At the end of 1997, Jack Ma and his team developed a series of government websites in Beijing such as the official website of the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation and the online Chinese commodity trading market.

In 1999, after repeated setbacks, Jack Ma gave up his business in Beijing and decided to return to Hangzhou to establish an e-commerce site that could serve small and medium-sized enterprises around the world.

In Hangzhou's Lakeside Garden Community, he and the later famous "Alibaba Arhats" raised 500,000 yuan to start a business without borrowing money from relatives and friends. These include Jack Ma’s wife, colleagues and students when he was a teacher, friends in need, and of course industry elites attracted by his charisma.

In July 2003, Alibaba launched Taobao. The following year, the online transaction payment tool "Alipay" was launched.

Alibaba Ecology and China

Since this year, Alibaba founder and chairman Jack Ma has been interviewed by the Chinese Prime Minister many times. He and his company have been called China's Representatives of the private economy.

Benefiting from China's economic growth and demographic dividend, Alibaba is now a huge "ecosystem."

Alibaba’s listing prospectus shows that in fiscal year 2014, the total merchandise transactions completed on its platform reached 1.68 trillion yuan, exceeding the world’s second and third largest e-commerce platforms Amazon and eBay combined. The number of active buyers is 255 million, achieving revenue of 52.504 billion yuan and profit of 23.4 billion yuan, with a net profit margin as high as 44.57%.

Investors’ confidence in Alibaba and Jack Ma comes from their optimism about China’s rapid economic growth. Among all Internet companies, Alibaba is the most closely tied to China's real economy. In a country with foreign trade transformation, retail industry reform, lack of credit and backward basic logistics, every change is a new high-growth point. In the eyes of investors, Alibaba's business model relies on China's unique "ecosystem", and the company and the country have become inseparable.

At the dinner that day, Jack Ma told hundreds of Chinese reporters who came to New York to witness Alibaba’s listing that he would not take all the funds raised overseas back to China Flower, but would actively expand Overseas markets extend Alibaba’s ecosystem to foreign countries.

Yao Yang, dean of the National School of Development at Peking University, believes that Alibaba’s greatest value does not lie in the amount of online transactions it has achieved or the size of its users, but in its huge social value. Including creating millions of social jobs, promoting the upgrading of traditional industries, and creating a variety of e-commerce service industries, Alibaba has well explained the meaning of "social usiness".

In the eyes of Walter Frick, deputy editor-in-chief of Harvard Business Review magazine, Alibaba is not only like Facebook, Google or Amazon, but its operating model is also similar to the century-old giant General Electric. Spread across e-commerce, payments, communications, enterprise software, entertainment and more, Alibaba is more like a conglomerate ecosystem.

Julie Woolf, a Harvard Business School professor who has studied global Internet business models for many years, said that within Alibaba Group, there is a dynamic balance between competition and cooperation among various businesses. Distributed decision-making by departments coexists with overall decision-making by the entire group. This kind of conglomerate ecology is rare in the West, but it is not surprising that it has achieved great success in China. What Alibaba wants to create is an Internet ecosystem similar to Apple or Google, and e-commerce is just the beginning.

Alibaba’s listing will obviously have a significant impact on the domestic Internet landscape, the Chinese economy and even the global economy. At present, Alibaba's AliExpress has become the largest e-commerce website in Russia; in June this year, Alibaba also launched the shopping website "11Main" in the United States; in Europe, Alibaba's layout has also penetrated into various countries in the European Union.

The "Wall Street Journal" recently commented that although Silicon Valley companies dominate the global Internet, after Alibaba's listing, 4 of the 10 Internet companies with the highest market value in the world will come from Asia, which will tip the balance of the Internet landscape. Begin to tilt towards Asia.

Jack Ma and Hangzhou

Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and New York, these cities have all left the footprints of Jack Ma’s entrepreneurship, but only Hangzhou is the home base of Alibaba and Jack Ma. Immediately after the listing, Jack Ma announced that he had no plans to immigrate when answering questions from the media.

In the sky, the lights are shining brightly; in the water, the reflections are swaying, and from time to time there is beautiful music coming from the side of the water bank. The Lei Feng Tower not far away is full of light and light makeup. This is Hangzhou. . Since the establishment of Alibaba, almost every online business conference has been held in Hangzhou. When talking about "the reasons why I love Hangzhou", Jack Ma said: "Hangzhou supported me and supported Alibaba through the most difficult period. Alibaba will always be Alibaba in Hangzhou."

Jack Ma, who was born and raised in Zhejiang, has always been proud of being a Zhejiang businessman. He followed the example of Hu Xueyan, a representative of Zhejiang businessmen, and injected "prevention of bullying" and "integrity" into Ali's blood.

Jack Ma said that the most touching moment in his heart was when he started his business in his early years.

"I started my own business after graduating from college in 1995. I have a dream, and it is also an ideal that I have been striving for for so many years. Most of the people who succeeded in business in the 1970s and 1980s were well-connected or brave. Very big. I think many people who were doing business in the late 1980s and 1990s relied on capital and relationships. If after the 21st century and 1990s, Chinese companies will still rely on relationships and capital rather than wisdom. If we win with hard work and diligence, Chinese enterprises will have no chance and no hope. I hope there will be a media that uses wisdom to create wealth through the Internet.”

The scene when I started my business in Beijing in 1997 was once mentioned. CCTV's "Oriental Time and Space" recorded it. In the film, Ma Yun sat tiredly on a bus in Beijing, looking at the street lights outside the window, with a serious look on his face, and murmured: "In a few years, Beijing won't treat me like this. In a few years, Beijing won't treat me like this." "You all have to know what I do, and I won't be so depressed in Beijing." But he eventually left Beijing and returned to his hometown of Hangzhou.

A few years later, in another TV show on Hangzhou TV, Jack Ma was in high spirits and no longer hesitated. Since then, Jack Ma has become the "godfather of China's e-commerce". He has been interviewed by the media and worshiped by countless entrepreneurs. His words and deeds have become "secrets" for success. Now, everyone in Beijing and Hangzhou knows what Jack Ma does.

In Hangzhou, after 15 years of rapid development, Alibaba has nearly 20,000 employees. With this listing in the United States, these employees in Hangzhou's "Taobao City" will also gain huge wealth. According to the "21st Century Business Herald", Alibaba's IPO can bring approximately US$41.385 billion in wealth to employees, with per capita wealth growth reaching US$2.069 million, and will create tens of thousands of millionaires.

At this point, Jack Ma’s net worth has reached US$21.8 billion, making him the richest man in China. After returning to Hangzhou, he finally realized his entrepreneurial dream. Outside Taobao City, the wandering and excitement continued.