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Backers: Goldman and SoftBank
The Internet [is like] beer . . . the good stuff is at the bottom. Without the
bubbles, the beer is flat and nobody would want to drink it.
—Jack Ma
On its first day of trading on the Nasdaq, China.com—a company with only $4
million in annual revenues, on which it had lost $9 million—closed the day
worth $1.6 billion. Peter Yip had listed only a small number of shares, so
investors cast around looking for other China Internet stocks to buy. The
problem was, there weren’t any.
Seizing the opportunity, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs leapt into
action. In Hong Kong there was a sudden explosion of tech gatherings, speed-
dating exercises between young entrepreneurs and the investors that wanted to
back them. One of the largest meet-ups was called “I&I,” short for “Internet &
Information Asia.” The event had been around for a while, typically with a few
people gathering around a table in one of the tiny bars of Lan Kwai Fong, just up
the hill from the city’s main central business district. But the China.com IPO
changed all that. Suddenly hundreds of people showed up at I&I, the venues
switching to five-star hotels like the Ritz-Carlton as banks and law firms tripped
over one another for the right to sponsor the champagne and hors d’oeuvres.
Hong Kong was ready to package the deals, but the market and the entrepreneurs
to build the companies were across the border in mainland China. Suddenly
Beijing and Shanghai were awash in deal makers. The China Internet bubble had
officially begun and new dot-com ventures started to sprout up like weeds.
Alibaba would have to fight for its share of sunlight.
Media Coverage
Before even the VCs had showed up, foreign media arrived to cover the China
Internet story. Jack became a regular fixture at tech and investor conferences
around the country, his comments so quotable that the
Los Angeles Times
called
him a “sound-bite machine.”
Soon after the China.com IPO, a
BusinessWeek
magazine cover story
named Jack one of “China’s Web Masters.” Alibaba had yet to generate
meaningful revenues but
BusinessWeek
predicted that investing in B2B e-
commerce could mean an even bigger payoff than investing in China’s three
portals.
On August 31, 1999, an article written by my colleague Ted Dean appeared
in Hong Kong’s leading English-language daily, the
South China Morning Post
.
1
Ted had first met Jack a year or so earlier when Jack was still working for the
government. In the article, Ted predicted that Alibaba “may turn out to be a
global powerhouse” in B2B e-commerce. Jack laid out his ambition: “We don’t
want to be number one in China. We want to be number one in the world.”
In our small investment consultancy, we were hearing a lot of those kinds
of statements and were already becoming a bit cynical about the dot-com boom.
But after interviewing Jack for the article in Hangzhou a few days earlier, Ted
told me there was something about Jack that was different. I knew I had to meet
him.
When Jack invited me to visit, I hopped on a train from Shanghai to
Hangzhou. I booked myself back into the Shangri-La Hotel, the same hotel
where Jack as a boy had first approached David Morley to practice his English.
After checking in I took a taxi over to the Lakeside Gardens apartment.
I was immediately struck by Jack’s infectious enthusiasm and capacity to
charm, influenced no doubt by growing up in a household where both his parents
practiced
pingtan,
the traditional art form that includes comedic routines.
In his article, Ted had quoted Jack saying, “If you plan, you lose. If you
don’t plan, you win.” After working in Beijing, the land of the five-year plan, I
found Jack’s spontaneity refreshing. Foreign professionals
2
began to enter Jack’s
orbit, giving Alibaba an international flavor within months of its founding.
Alibaba also had a strong component of female executives,
3
adding to the
achievement of women making up one third of its founding team—in contrast to
many Silicon Valley–based companies.
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