. The inspirational Jack Ma who grew from a poor background to the richest entrepreneur, the founder of China’s biggest tech company, will not go for a retirement, instead, he will pursue his long lasting dream to be a teacher!
A mammoth empire of net worth $40.5 billion makes Jack Ma one of the richest and a statute person on the planet. An active speaker on global conferences, Jack Ma advocates globalization and eagerly interacts with other world leaders.
Ma was not too happy with the newly inflamed trade war between US and China and warned about its adversities . He stressed that “it’s going to be a mess” lasting decades probably. Ma originally planned 1 million jobs in the US, after meeting Trump in January 2017, which now seems “completely destroyed” after the recent actions.
Alibaba will steer into a new era after Jack Ma, who founded the company in a small apartment and out grew it into a $420 billion company making it a leading tech company of the world.
Ma’s considers becoming China’s biggest mogul as a “Hollywood story,” as mentioned in an interview for The New York Times in a 2005.
Early Life and Career
Ma was born to a poor family in 1964 in the eastern city of Hangzhou with a population of almost 10 million people.
Ma was a lean but active kid getting into fights with his class fellows. The kids teased him for his bony structure but he was always steady, as he recalls in his book Alibaba, quoting .
“I was never afraid of opponents who were bigger”. Jack Ma
Ma was eager to learn English for which he offered tours to the foreigners in exchange for the lessons. He also bought a radio to listed to the English broadcast like voice of America. The nickname ‘Jack’ was also given to him by a tourist, eventually sticking to his name.
Ma applied for college after finishing his school. In China’s collage entrance program, he failed twice due to his lower marks in Maths. He finally made it through in his third try and ultimately graduated from the Hangzhou Teacher’s Institute in 1988.
After college, Ma would apply for jobs here and there but was rejected rejected from all of them. Those included a shot at KFC, a position on the police force, and another as a waiter at local restaurant. Ma learnt a life lesson “to get used to failure” that would help him in his future entrepreneurial journey . At last he was hired on a little salary of $12 a month as an English teacher in a college. Ma loved the job despite the low income he made out of it.
Ma visited the US in 1995 where he discovered the Internet. Coming back, Ma quit teaching and launched his first venture: China Pages, borrowing some money. It was his first internet business as well as China’s first commercial website, but according to The New York Times he was pressurised by the government to merge with Hangzhou Telecom.
Alibaba and the Rise to Fame
Ma survived the trauma and came up with his next venture four years later. He held a meeting of his 17 friends in his apartments and convinced them to invest in his online marketplace Ali Baba.
Together they raised roughly $60,000 for Alibaba.com, a platform for Chinese exporters, manufacturers, and entrepreneurs to list and sell their items worldwide. Reportedly, Ma conceived the name ‘Ali Baba’ in a San Francisco coffee shop, inspired by the famous Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves story in which Ali Baba overheard the password to unlock the treasure.
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