Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built pdfdrive com

yìqùwang
, whose meanings include “interesting
exchanges network.”
6
. Since 1949.
7
. Four hundred thousand dollars in angel backing from investment
bankers George Boutros, Bill Brady, and Ethan Topper, who had all worked
at Morgan Stanley with legendary deal maker Frank Quattrone.
8
. All her possessions were in New York, but she didn’t go back to pick
them up—they would stay in storage for more than a year until EachNet
could afford to ship them to China.
9
. From Whitney, AsiaTech, and Orchid.
10
. There were more than a dozen, including ClubCiti and Yabuy, founded by
veterans from Federal Software who had backed 8848.
11
. Whitman later attributed the delay to eBay’s costly site outage in the United
States the summer before.
12
. With the purchase of a controlling stake in Internet Auction Company.
13
. eBay paid $9.5 million for Taiwan auction site operator NeoCom
Technology.
14
. Behind the United States, Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
15
. eBay took two seats on EachNet’s board. Bo held one of the other three.
16
. The contrast between eBay’s travails in China, where it had made an
outright acquisition, and its triumph in Latin America, where it had made a
minority investment in 2001 in local player Mercado Libre, would speak for
itself. Today Mercado Libre is the most successful commerce player in
Latin America, worth more than $6 billion, and eBay owns over 18 percent.
17
. Initially through a joint venture with Alibaba in which SoftBank invested

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$50 million, with the additional investment in the form of $30 million in
convertible notes that they could later convert into ordinary shares.
18
. Shou Yuan.
19
. “Taobao” was not the first choice of name for the new business. The
original name was “Alimama,” subsequently used for the company’s online
marketing technology platform.
20
. Toto Sun was known as “the God of Wealth” (or “Cai Shen” in Chinese).
His staff liked to call him “Uncle of Wealth.” Sun hoped that the nickname
would bring good luck to this new addition to the Alibaba family. Zhang
Yu, a vice president in charge of operations, was known as Yu Yan, one of
the leading female roles in Jin Yong’s novel 
Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils
.
21
. For the impact of her regular publication 
The Internet Report
, first released
in 1995 in the run-up to the groundbreaking Morgan Stanley IPO of
Netscape Communications.
22
. In trying to imagine what an itinerant merchant of the Yiwu variety would
look like in the United States, I thought of a movie from my childhood, the
1987 film 
Planes, Trains and Automobiles,
starring John Candy and Steve
Martin. Candy plays Del Griffith who is trying, and failing, to make a living
traveling the country selling plastic shower-curtain rings.
23
. Individual buyers—and sellers—who dominated the platform were less
likely to pay taxes such as VAT, putting business-to-consumer websites at a
disadvantage.
24
. In 2004.
25
. MIT, 
Sloan Management Review
, 2012, Puneet Manchanda (University of
Michigan) and Junhong Chu (National University of Singapore Business
School).
26
. “In the introduction phase, the platform’s growth is primarily seller-driven:
seller growth induces buyers to register, which in turn leads to more sellers
to register, which further encourages more buyers to register, etc.”
27
. Meaning “Ali prosper.”
28
. Senior Vice President Bill Cobb, Chief Financial Officer Rajiv Dutta, and
deal specialist Bill Barmier.
29
. At the firm’s annual analyst day on January 20, 2005.
30
. Like eBay’s acquisition of EachNet, this too ended in failure, resulting in its
sale at a $600 million loss in 2009 to investors that included Silver Lake