JACK MA LESSONS

The Inspiring Life Story Of Alibaba Founder Jack Ma, Now The Richest Man In China.

By Haby Joseph

Fresh off the biggest IPO in history, Alibaba founder and chairman Jack Ma is now the richest person in China.

Ma is a true rags-to-riches story. He grew up poor in communist China, failed his college entrance exam twice, and was rejected from dozens of jobs, including one at KFC where they applied for the Job when they were 24 and 23 were accepted and he was the only one rejected.

Ma was scrawny and often got into fights with classmates. "I was never afraid of opponents who were bigger than I," he recalls in "Alibaba," a book by Liu Shiying and Martha Avery. Still, Ma had hobbies just like any other kid. He liked collecting crickets and making them fight, and was able to distinguish the size and type of cricket just by the sound it made.

Without money or connections, the only way Ma could get ahead was through education. After high school, he applied to go to college — but failed the entrance exam twice. After a great deal of studying, he finally passed on the third try, going on to attend Hangzhou Teacher's Institute. He graduated in 1988 and started applying to as many jobs as he could.

Source: Business Insider, Crocodile in the Yangtze

Soon, the service started to attract members from all over the world. By October 1999, the company had raised $5 million from Goldman Sachs and $20 million from SoftBank, a Japanese telecom company that also invests in technology companies. The team remained close-knit and scrappy — "We will make it because we are young and we never, never give up," Ma said to a gathering of employees.

He has always maintained a sense of fun at Alibaba. When the company first became profitable, Ma gave each employee a can of Silly String to go wild with. In the early 2000s, when the company decided to start Taobao, its eBay competitor, he had the team working on it do handstands during breaks to keep their energy levels up.

In 2005, Yahoo invested $1 billion in Alibaba in exchange for about a 40% stake in the company. This was huge for Alibaba — at the time it was trying to beat eBay in China — and it would eventually be an enormous win for Yahoo too, netting it ~$10 billion in Alibaba's IPO alone.

Ma stepped down from his post as CEO in 2013, staying on as executive chairman. Alibaba went public on Sept. 19. "Today what we got is not money. What we got is the trust from the people," Ma told CNBC. The company's $150-billion IPO was the largest offering for a US-listed company in the history of the New York Stock Exchange. It also made Ma the richest man in China, with an estimated worth of $25 billion.

Alibaba employees threw a big party at the company's Hangzhou headquarters to celebrate. One employee even took the party as the perfect opportunity to propose. Ma told employees at a press conference that he hopes they use their newfound wealth to become "a batch of genuinely noble people, a batch of people who are able to help others, and who are kind and happy."

The IPO may have made Ma an extremely wealthy man, but he hasn't made any flashy purchases (yet), and he still has some pretty modest hobbies. "I don't think he has changed much, he is still that old style," Xiao-Ping Chen, a friend of Ma, told USA Today. He likes reading and writing kung fu fiction, playing poker, meditating, and practicing tai chi. He has even teamed up with Jet Li to spread awareness of tai chi, and he brings a trainer along with him when he travels.

Ma developed an interest in environmentalism when a member of his wife's family became sick with an illness that Ma suspected was caused by pollution. He sits on the global board of The Nature Conservancy, and spoke during a session of the Clinton Global Initiative this September. He's also been instrumental in funding a 27,000-acre nature reserve in China.

Ma has largely kept his family life out of the spotlight. He married Zhang Ying, a teacher whom he met at school, after they graduated in the late '80s.

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