Chairman and Chief Executive of Alibaba Group Jack Ma speaks at a news conference in Beijing, in this file picture taken January 19, 2011.
In 1995, a former school teacher from China named Jack Ma visited the United States for the first time.
Ma had recently started a translation company to capitalize on China’s export boom.
When he was in the U.S., as part of his translation business, a friend showed him the internet. His friend told him that just about everything was on the internet.
Ma decided to search for beer. The results didn’t turn up a single Chinese option. In fact, he could hardly find anything about China on the Internet at all.
When he returned home, he decided to found China Pages, a directory of various Chinese companies looking for customers abroad, and some say, the country’s first internet business.
China Pages was a flop. But four years later, Ma took another stab at an internet business. He called his second company Alibaba.
Next week, Alibaba will start trading on the New York Stock Exchange, in what could be the biggest offering in U.S. history. Bloomberg reports that Alibaba wants to sell 12% of the company. Analysts value the company at $160 billion. Tht would mean Alibaba raises ~$20 billion, which is more than Visa, the current high for an IPO which raised $19.65 billion.
Ma still owns a 8.9% stake in the company, which means he’ll be worth ~$14.5 billion if the $160 billion valuation holds. Ma is no longer the CEO of Alibaba. He’s the chairman, but he’s still the face of the company.
Ma has never been a typical tech CEO. He failed the college entrance exam twice before he finally got in. He founded an enormous tech company, yet he had studied to become a teacher and still doesn’t know how to code. Back in the mid-2000s, when Alibaba was battling eBay in China, reporters used to call him “Crazy Jack” because of his animated manner of speaking and bold goals.
Ma’s story starts in Hangzhou, China, a city of 2.4 million people near Shanghai, where he was born in 1964 to parents who made a living as professional ping tan performers (a traditional style of storytelling and ballad singing).
“I was scrawny when I was young, but I was a terrific fighter,” Ma recalls in “Alibaba,” a book by Liu Shiying and Martha Avery. “I was never afraid of opponents who were bigger than I.”
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