Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built pdfdrive com

China Is Coming On
If traditional industry and e-commerce “successfully merge together, there will
be no limit to China’s next round of economic development.”
—Jack Ma
Soon after returning from Seattle to Hangzhou, Jack resigned his position as a
teacher at the Hangzhou Institute of Electronic Engineering. He had realized that
his teaching days must end when he ran into the dean, who was riding his
bicycle carrying vegetables he had just bought from the market. The dean
encouraged him to keep working hard at teaching, but looking at the bicycle and
the vegetables Jack realized that even if he were to become dean himself one
day, this was a future he couldn’t get excited about.
His new dream wasn’t teaching or translating. Fresh from his first contact
with the Internet, he would build an online index, in English, of businesses in
China seeking customers overseas.
As Stuart Trusty had noticed back in Seattle, Jack had a tremendous work
ethic. To populate China Pages with entries, he toiled away collecting
information on companies, which he would translate into English, then send
along with photos to VBN in Seattle for uploading to the website.
In March 1995, Jack convened a gathering of two dozen of his night school
students to present his concept and seek their advice, as well as their business. “I
asked the most active and capable people from my evening classes to my home.
I talked about two hours, they listened to me, obviously confused. . . . Eventually
lots of people cast their votes. Twenty-three of them said it would not work out.
Only one person—now he is working at Agricultural Bank of China—said to
me: If you want to try, then go ahead, but if it doesn’t work out, come back as
soon as you can.”
Undeterred, he pressed ahead. Together with his friend He Yibing, a
computer science teacher at the institute Jack had just left, Jack launched China

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Pages. The two had met the year before when He Yibing was looking for
someone to help him practice his English ahead of a training trip to Singapore.
There, He Yibing gained exposure to the Internet. When Jack returned from
Seattle with a dream of building an Internet company, the two decided to work
together.

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