Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built pdfdrive com

Los Angeles Times
commented that the “ability of a Chinese start-up to
poach one of Silicon Valley’s key players could bolster China’s claim as the
ultimate Internet frontier for the best minds in the industry.”
John jumped from Yahoo to Alibaba, he explained, because Alibaba’s idea
was an original one. “If you compare the other leading Internet companies in
China,” he said, “almost all of them are copying business models already
existing in the U.S.” Shirley Lin at Goldman Sachs had been attracted to Alibaba
for its “localness.” John Wu saw the same merits: “There are a lot of Internet
companies started by people who studied in the U.S. and came back to China. . .
. Jack Ma is different. He has been in China all his life.”
With fresh capital, new recruits, and more than 150,000 members in 188
countries signed up on the website, things were looking up for Alibaba. But the
bubble was about to pop.

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Chapter Eight
Burst and Back to China
Be the last man standing.
—Jack Ma
By the spring of 2000, Alibaba was signing up more than a thousand new
members a day.
Connecting suppliers in China with global buyers was clearly a good idea.
But other companies with the same idea were proliferating, and some actively
raising capital, too. MeetChina raised another $11 million, some of which came
from a SoftBank fund, and announced a sales target of $10 million that year and
planning for an IPO. Global Sources, the veteran publisher of trade magazines,
announced it had hired Goldman Sachs to prepare for a Nasdaq IPO and stepped
up its hiring in China.
Other contenders entered the fray as well, including entrepreneurs
1
who
pivoted to business-to-business e-commerce after seeing Alibaba’s success in
raising capital.
Faced with increasing competition, and flush with cash, Alibaba accelerated
its expansion. In the months following SoftBank’s investment, the company
went on a hiring spree in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Fremont, California,
where incoming CTO John Wu set up their U.S. outpost.

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