Jack Ma: The Biography of an Unlikely Tech Tycoon

By Brian Keller

Founder of the internet company Alibaba, Chinese businessman Jack Ma ranks as the richest man in China. But his road to success wasn't so simple.

 

Inside this biography, you'll learn how Jack Ma overcame all odds to rise to fame and fortune. After a bumpy start and a string of failures, he pushed on with perseverance and determination, and went on to become one of China – and the world's – richest men.

 

From his early work in teaching and translation to the world-changing founding of the e-commerce website Alibaba, Jack Ma: The Biography of an Unlikely Tech Tycoon delves into this entrepreneur's incredible yet volatile life.

 

Including Jack's school years, his first brush with the internet, and failures which shaped him, this book also includes a wealth of invaluable advice from the man himself about life, business, and success.

 

Buy now to learn about the incredible story of Jack Ma's life and legacy, and how Alibaba changed the world of e-commerce forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brian Keller
• Release date: Apr 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393829775

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Jack Ma

The Biography of an Unlikely Tech Tycoon

––––––––

By Brian Keller

© Copyright 2019 - All rights reserved.

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Beginnings of an Unlikely Star-trepreneur

Chapter 2: Jack Ma: The Failure, the Struggle

Chapter 3: A Simple Life Turned Upside Down

Chapter 4: Jack Ma, Meet Internet. Internet, Meet Jack Ma

Chapter 5: A Name Everyone Knows—Alibaba

Chapter 6: Alibaba and Its Rise to Power

Chapter 7: A New Age of E-commerce for Alibaba and China

Taobao: From B2B to C2C under Jack Ma’s Guidance

Alipay: Pushing the Boundaries of Chinese E-commerce

Alibaba and the Tiger: When Jack Ma Went Yahoo!

It’s Finally Happening: Alibaba Goes Public

Alibaba and Jack: Life after Success

Jack Ma: Beyond the Legend and the Mistakes

A Unique Management Style

Chapter 8: Jack the Wiseman: How to Live and Run Your Business the Ma Way

Learn from Others—Particularly, Their Mistakes

Entrepreneurship Is Not for the Faint of Heart

Rejection Is Not the End of the World

Be Unique

Be the First

Be Adventurous

Your Customers Are Everything

Give Back, Always

It’s All about Helping

Money Is Not Everything

In Fact, Money Can Ruin It All

Surround Yourself with Good People

Patience Is Key

Price Isn’t Everything

You Need a Diverse Team

Never Give Up

Dare to Dream Big

Don’t Lose the Pleasures of Life

Live for the Future, Keeping the Past in Mind

Always Listen to Complaints

Take Responsibility for Your Actions

Don’t Care about Other People’s Opinions

Dreams Push You Forward, Not Money

Don’t Throw Yourself at Multiple Endeavors

Looking at Your Competition Is Fine, but It’s Not Key

Don’t Take Praises Too Seriously

Keep Your Team Close

Look Where Others Aren’t Looking

You Have No Enemies

Even If You Fail, You Have Still Won

Be Adaptable

Try

Chapter 9: The Man Who Had Nothing

Introduction

It doesn’t happen every day that eBay is overthrown in any country in the world, yet Jack Ma did it.

In fact, Jack Ma defied all odds. He went beyond stereotypes and challenged conventional wisdom with an entirely different approach to business.

While he may not have come from nothing (as legend has it), Jack Ma came from a background of failure, political and social unrest, and a general unlikelihood.

In a country that forbade access to the internet until the late ’90s, Jack Ma built one of the largest online businesses of all time.

In a background where everyone had some sort of business training, Jack Ma was uneducated and relied on intuition and folklore stories rather than know-how.

In an economy that was circled around itself by communism, Jack Ma opened the gates and showed the world that, yes, you can.

In fact, in many interviews, Jack Ma himself has mentioned that if he can do all this, anyone can.

In reality, not anyone can do what he did. It takes a whole lot of courage, a pinch of madness, and just a touch of luck to make it as big as he did it.

Decades ago, Jack Ma was not hired at KFC.

Today, Jack Ma’s net worth is no less than $39.7 billion.

Jack Ma’s story is fascinating even if you don’t even think of ever building a business of any kind. But more than anything, Jack Ma himself is a fascinating person with views that preceded the age and the economy he was brought up in, and he pushed the limits of a country that is now very much on its way to being a true world power in the realest sense of the word.

Why does Jack Ma matter?

He matters because in his uniqueness and rebelliousness, he made a difference.

This book is dedicated to the unlikely hero that Jack Ma represents to anyone who comes across his story, to the courage and dedication, to the avid power and thirst for knowledge and work, to the dreamer inside the martial arts aficionado that he is.

This book is also dedicated to you, kind reader, for having searched for inspiration in one of the most unlikely stories of entrepreneurship the world has ever seen.

They say Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg were college dropouts, thus unlikely to succeed. Even so, neither Gates nor Zuckerberg came from the background Jack Ma did, which makes his story all the more impressive.

This book is for the true misfits, the rebels who want to do things their way and need to be shown that, yes, even the unlikeliest of circumstances can give birth to a beautiful story of fighting, winning, and gaining wisdom beyond popular convention.

Adventure with me in a voyage through the life of one of the most successful online entrepreneurs of all times, through the things that brought him here, through the country that put him down and raised him up, through the background that made Jack Ma’s story even more amazing, through the business he built out of thin air and just a small lot on the grand scheme of the internet map.

Chapter 1: The Beginnings of an Unlikely

Star-trepreneur

The world would be decidedly less interesting without Jack Ma in it.

More than just an entrepreneur, Jack Ma is a hero, a hero for those who fail, a hero for those who fight, a hero for those who rebel against the status quo and change the world with their unique life view.

Jack Ma was born into a modest family. Legend has it that they were far more modest than they were, but given the fact that his parents were Chinese folklore artists (who dedicated their lives to playing a specific type of ballad and storytelling called ping tan) and given the fact that their family lived in a reputable area of South China tells us that Jack Ma wasn’t as poor or as uneducated as some market him.

Sure, he might not have had the same outlook as Bill Gates did (who was born in a well-off family already accustomed to charitable acts and high education). But even so, Jack Ma’s upbringing is, without doubt, what made him be who he is.

I’ll get to that later in the book, though, to show how the stories Jack grew up with influenced not only him as a person but his very way of running a business as well.

Until then, however, let’s turn our interest to Hangzhou, somewhere in the mid-sixties to mid-seventies. Jack Ma was born in 1964, right at the offset of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. You would think events of such a large grandeur would not affect a baby and much less a future style of entrepreneurship.

But it did.

Not only were Jack Ma’s parents artists who belonged to a world Chinese communism was trying to bring down, but they also had roots in political affiliations that went against the Chinese communists in the civil war a decade prior.

In every way possible, Ma’s family was regarded beneath the concern of society. Even more, they were part of the five blacks, the five groups that became the political and social enemies of both the people of the masses and the state itself. These groups consisted of counterrevolutionaries, evildoers, rich peasants, landlords, and rightists.

As the Cultural Revolution was setting in, the public station of these aforementioned groups went from disregard to downright hatred. Persecutions had begun and those who were seen as enemies of the newly established order were beaten and tortured.

In this environment, Jack Ma was growing up in a family that valued traditional arts that were all about speaking and listening. Even more, he was growing up in a city where people were said to be either great speakers and storytellers or great listeners.

Jack Ma pertained to the second group. It may not seem so today when you hear him speak, but in childhood, Jack Ma was all about listening. He listened to the stories of his mom and dad, he read martial arts novels vivaciously, and he absorbed the world around him.

This is not to say Ma was docile in any way. On the contrary, from the early days, Jack was the kind of kid moms usually worry about. He was rebellious, he loved to fight, and he always appreciated the hardest things in life. To him, nothing had to come easy, for if it did, it was not exciting any longer.

This might have been related to Ma’s appetite for martial arts books, it might have been related to his own innate personality, or it might have been related to the background upon which he was raised. Perhaps it was all of these things combined. Either way, one thing is for certain: Jack Ma loved a good fight, and as time has proven, this personality trait followed him through thin and thick, through failed businesses and mega-business wars against giants like eBay.

Having grown around performers all his life, Jack Ma (Ma Yun by his Chinese name) absorbed all the information and the stylistics of performance arts from his parents. It is quite clear, to date, that Jack uses the same style as traditional ping tan artists did: his speeches are grander than life, yet he always uses simple, direct sentences to send his message across. This may have been one of the reasons that made Ma so popular, not just among his Chinese peers and in Alibaba but among those beyond the borders of China as well.

His parents’ heritage and Jack’s appetite for martial arts novels that praised outlaws definitely imprinted on the little boy and made him become the adult we all know and love.

Beyond that, there is perhaps an even more important figure in Jack’s upbringing: China itself.

As mentioned before, Jack Ma was not born in a family that was well