Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built

“The finance industry needs disrupters, it needs outsiders to come in and carry out a transformation.”

Alipay diffuses trust throughout Alibaba’s e-commerce empire. Consumers know that when they pay with Alipay their accounts will be debited only when they have received and are satisfied with the products they have ordered.

Jack summed it up: “In other countries, e-commerce is a way to shop; in China it is a lifestyle.”

He started out assembling refrigerators using spare parts, then in 1988 founded Geely. In 2010 Geely purchased Sweden’s Volvo Cars.

Home to Alibaba’s e-commerce empire, Hangzhou has a long tradition as a trading center. The city once served as the southernmost point of the 1,100-mile-long Grand Canal, whose full name in Chinese is Jing Hang Da Yun He, or the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal. For more than a thousand years, the Grand Canal was the main trading artery between south and north China, making Hangzhou one of the most prosperous cities in China.

Jack’s first business was focused on helping local companies find customers overseas. Jack later recalled, “I had to teach during the day, and had no time to help others do translation work. But lots of retired teachers had nothing to do at home, and their pension was low, so I wanted to found a translation company, to be an intermediary.”

China has a million companies that want to sell abroad, but they don’t know how.

—Jack Ma

Jack’s teaching days were coming to an end. Swept up in the enthusiasm that Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour had fanned, he resolved to launch his own business before he turned thirty.

never seen so many people congested in one place. It became clear then that Jack was a bit of a networker, organizing a vehicle and a dinner with the mayor required connections

Everything I’d learned in China was that China was the richest country in the world,” Jack later said. “When I arrived in Australia, I realized it was totally different. I started to think you have to use your own mind to judge, to think