Jack Ma, born in the city of Hangzhou, China, grew up in a poor family at the time of the Cultural Revolution. When US President Nixon visited Hangzhou in 1972, Jack Ma became entranced by the Western world. As a young kid, he visited hotels where US tourists frequented to learn English in exchange for tours around the city. In fact, befriending one of the tourists is how Jack Ma got his English moniker ‘Jack’.
He failed the university entrance exams twice, scoring less than a percent in Math both times. He eventually passed and began studying English at the Hangzhou Teacher’s Institute. After graduating, he applied for 30 different jobs and got rejected for all of them. Off the 24 people who applied at KFC, Jack was the only one to be rejected. He even applied for the police force, but was rejected and told he was ‘no good’. He ultimately found a job as an English teacher, earning as little as USD 12 / month.
Despite the failures, setbacks and rejections, Jack was throughout persistent. Relying on his English skills, he started a translation service business and got an opportunity to visit the US as a translator and was introduced to the Internet. Without any technical know-how of computers or coding, he was quite intrigued and interested in this new phenomenon.
While surfing the web, discovering the lack of Chinese beer options during his online search results inspired him to create his first online store. Soon followed by a second online venture called ‘Chinapage’ which listed Chinese businesses and products. This sparked a flurry of emails from people all over the world seeking to form partnerships. In order to expand and obtain more funding, he decided to partner with a government entity. As latter gained majority control over the venture, this stifled his vision for the business and led to his departure from the company.
Soon after, Jack took a government job at the Ministry for Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation, through which he was able to grow his network and connect with influential people, the likes of one of the co-founders of Yahoo!, Jerry Yang.
In 1999, after he left the government job, Jack persuaded 17 of his friends and pitched an idea of an online marketplace — Alibaba, for small and medium-sized businesses. To secure funding for this venture, he travelled to the US, this time to Silicon Valley to pitch his idea. He faced obstacles which he was quite familiar with by now. His idea was rejected and criticized as being unprofitable and unsustainable. Though persistent as he was, Jack managed to secure USD 5 million funding from Goldman Sachs and USD 20 million from Softbank.
In 2003, the future of Alibaba still looked bleak, with the company failing to make any revenue within the first three years and nearly facing bankruptcy in 18 months. He also faced internal issues within Alibaba, as part of his vision for the company to grow and attract young, outside talent required limiting his existing venture partners’ promotions to ranks above managerial roles. Inadvertently, this resulted in dissension amongst his team members who ended up walking out on him.
Not knowing how to quit, Jack picked up the pieces and managed to unify his remaining team to take Alibaba forward. He took on the challenge to compete with established online businesses like eBay with existing operations in China. Within 5 years, Alibaba managed to drive eBay out of business in China and with further funding from Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang, Alibaba was able to expand and grow further into the international market.
In 2014, Alibaba made history through the world’s largest IPO to date. The company has continued to grow from strength to strength, scaling its operations into various industries such as technology and logistics, turning the online business into one of the world’s largest conglomerates today.
Jack Ma’s life is perhaps the greatest example of success through failure and yet another rags through riches story. He failed twice in primary school and 3 times in middle school. He also failed his university entrance exam 3 times, rejected by the police force and even KFC. He applied to Harvard 10 times and rejected, every time. Yet, the almost stubborn persistence of a young man who refused to bend down to fate finally paid him off. To nobody’s real surprise, Jack is one of the richest persons in China and among the top billionaires of Asia. All this was possible because of his sheer persistence and drive to do something big which eventually paid off.
Never give up. Today is hard, tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be sunshine.
― Jack Ma
Sources:
https://yourstory.com/2017/05/jack-ma-success-story-2 [yourstory.com]
https://www.shoutmeloud.com/jack-ma-alibaba-founder.html [shoutmeloud.com]
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/275969 [entrepreneur.com]
https://www.inc.com/business-insider/alibaba-jack-ma-life-story.html [inc.com]
