Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built pdfdrive com

Bubble Ball and Burst
From its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq began a two-year losing streak, wiping
out trillions of dollars of market capitalization and taking down many
technology firms with it. NetEase’s shares dropped 20 percent on the first day of
trading after its IPO in June. Sohu limped to an IPO in July but after that there
would be no more issuances for Chinese Internet companies for more than three
years. The IPO door was now firmly shut to the other Chinese Internet
companies, including Alibaba, as investors once again cared about revenues and
profits.
Just as the markets started to tank, and on the fringes of the Internet World
conference in Beijing, I hosted a party at a business club called the Capital Club.
I titled the party, as a joke, “The Bubble Ball.” They say you never know you’re
in a bubble until it pops. But in the spring of 2000 there was a growing sense that
everything was about to come to a crashing halt.
For me the trigger was an event a few weeks after 
Time
magazine ran a
cover story, on February 28, 2000, on the Chinese Internet market, entitled
“struggle.com.” The opening paragraph was a story I had told to 
Time
journalist
Terry McCarthy about my first meeting with one of the portal pioneers:
William Ding, founder of Netease, one of China’s top Internet portals,
was uneasy. As he talked to a friend in a Beijing restaurant last summer,
something was irritating him. The air-conditioning. It was too cold. Without
interrupting the conversation, the self-taught techie took out his Palm Pilot
electronic organizer, pointed the infrared port at the aircon unit and adjusted
the temperature from across the room. His friend’s jaw dropped.
At an extravagant dinner party hosted in Shanghai on the grounds of a
colonial-era mansion a few weeks after the 
Time
article ran, an investor came up
to introduce herself and told me excitedly about how our host, a senior
investment banker, had confided that she, not I, was the “friend” featured in the
article. Wounded ego aside, I started to realize that, as the bankers began to
invent stories of their closeness to the entrepreneur, the days of the Internet
boom were numbered.
The Bubble Ball name proved more apt than I could have imagined. Jack
came along and danced until the small hours, along with Charles Zhang from
Sohu—in a unique style that reminded me of Elaine Benes in 
Seinfeld
—William
Ding from NetEase, and four hundred others, in what turned out to be the last

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