Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built pdfdrive com

China Pages
The company they registered, Hangzhou Haibo Network Consulting (HHNC),
was one of the first in China devoted to the Internet. To fund his start-up Jack
borrowed money from his relatives, including his sister, brother-in-law, and
parents. Jack’s wife, Cathy, was the first employee.
In April 1995, Jack and He Yibing opened the first office for China Pages
in a twelve-square-meter office building at 38 Wen’er Road. To portray their
business as a solid concern, Jack and He Yibing printed up several versions of
their business cards, each listing different positions
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that they would use
depending on whom they were meeting. During the day, the two partners went
out to find clients, returning in the evening to teach an introductory training
course about the “information superhighway.” This class helped generate some
of China Pages’ early customers.
On May 10, 1995, they registered the domain name chinapages.com in the
United States. In July they officially launched their website, which featured a
red-framed map of Asia, with China highlighted under the title “China Business
Pages: The Online China Business Directory.”
The website’s home page indicated chinapages.com was “Broadcast via
Seattle, USA from Hangzhou, the Garden City.” The site featured tabs including
“What’s New!,” “What’s Cool!,” “Net Search,” and “Net Directory,” and a link
to Hope, his translation venture.
China Pages started off as a family affair. Jack’s wife, Cathy, her sister
Zhang Jing, and He Yibing’s girlfriend all lent a hand.
Jack’s former students also provided a ready pool of talent for China Pages.
Jane Jiang (Jiang Fang), whom Jack had taught at the institute a few years
earlier, took charge of customer service. One visitor to China Pages in those
early days was Cui Luhai, who ran a computer animation business. Now a
lecturer at the China Academy of Art, Cui commented, “I can still remember the
first scene I saw when I walked into his office. . . . It was a pretty empty space
with only one desk set up in the middle of the room. There was only one very
old PC desktop surrounded by a lot of people.” Cui learned that Jack had spent
most of his money on registering the business, leaving little leftover for
hardware or other equipment.
China Pages badly needed customers. Cathy signed up one of the first
clients, who paid them eight thousand yuan ($960). The company received a
boost when Hangzhou was selected in May to hold the Formula One Powerboat

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World Championship later that year, the first time the event would be held in
China. Jack’s venture won the contract to make the official website for the race.
To win more clients, as with Hope Translation beforehand, Jack called on
his former students to spread the word and bring in business. Two of them duly
obliged.
He Xiangyang, a former student of Jack’s, was working at the Qianjiang
Law Firm. Reluctant to list the firm’s name on the Internet, he gave Jack his
personal phone number instead. To his surprise, he started to receive phone calls
around the clock from prospective clients, many overseas, who told him they’d
got his number from China Pages. The once-skeptical lawyer started to think
there might be something to Jack’s story about the Internet after all.
Another former student was Zhou Lan, who would become Jack’s
secretary. Zhou was working at the Lakeview Hotel in Hangzhou when Jack
made a website for them, featuring the hotel’s brand-new fourteen-inch color
TVs. Later that year, the United Nations held its Fourth World Conference on
Women in Beijing, attended by more than seventeen thousand participants,
including First Lady Hillary Clinton. A number of delegates traveled on to
Hangzhou after the conference. Booking rooms at the Lakeview, they told the
hotel management it was the only hotel in Hangzhou they could find online. By
the following spring, the hotel had sold more rooms in the first three months
than the previous year, another demonstration of the power of the Internet.
Even with the help of Jack’s former students, China Pages needed more
clients if it was going to survive. But demonstrating what China Pages was all
about was not easy, for one very basic reason: In Hangzhou at the time it was
impossible to get online.
Instead Jack came up with an alternative approach. First, he spread the
word through friends and contacts about what the Internet could do for their
business. He then asked those interested to send him marketing materials to
introduce their companies and products. Next Jack and his colleagues translated
the materials, and sent the material by mail to VBN in Seattle. VBN then
designed the websites and put them online. They then printed out screenshots of
the websites and mailed them to Hangzhou. Finally, Jack took the printed
materials to his friends and announced that, although they couldn’t check this
themselves, their websites were now online. But without Internet access in
Hangzhou it was a challenge even explaining to his customers what “online”
actually meant. As sales pitches go, asking people who had never heard of the
Internet to fork over 20,000 renminbi ($2,400) up front to create, design, and
host a website they could never see was a challenging one. Jack worried that
people thought he was defrauding them. “I was treated like a con man for three

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years,” he said.

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