The business story
Jack Ma (Ma Yun, b. 1964, Hangzhou) is a former English teacher who co-founded Alibaba in 1999 with a group of partners in his apartment. Non-technical but relentless, he built China’s dominant e-commerce platforms (Alibaba, Taobao) and, crucially, the Alipay escrow system that solved online trust. Alibaba’s 2014 NYSE IPO was then the world’s largest. After Ma criticised regulators in an October 2020 speech, Ant Group’s record IPO was suspended, Alibaba was fined ~$2.8B for antitrust, and Ant was forced to restructure; Ma withdrew from public life before a partial rehabilitation from 2023.
Ma's strengths were persuasion, persistence and a sense for where trust was missing.
Early life and background
Jack Ma, born Ma Yun in Hangzhou in 1964, grew up in an ordinary family and has never claimed technical skill. His early edge was language. As a teenager he cycled to a Hangzhou hotel for years to guide foreign visitors for free in return for English practice, and it was one of those visitors who gave him the name "Jack."
School did not come easily. He took China's national university entrance exam, the gaokao, three times, with very low maths scores on the first two attempts, and entered Hangzhou Normal University because its foreign-language department had places to fill. After graduating in English in 1988 he became a teacher, work he has said he enjoyed. His well-known stories of repeated job rejections come from his own speeches, change between tellings and have never been independently checked.
Building Alibaba
A 1995 trip to the United States introduced Ma to the internet, and to how little information about China was online. He started "China Pages," an early directory of Chinese businesses, then spent time in Beijing at an organisation linked to the foreign-trade ministry before leaving to build his own company.
In 1999, in his Hangzhou apartment, he and a group of partners founded Alibaba, pooling a few hundred thousand yuan. The original idea was business-to-business: connect China's small manufacturers with buyers worldwide. The name was chosen because people everywhere already knew the folk tale behind it. Around twenty-five million dollars, led by Goldman Sachs and SoftBank, including a quick decision by Masayoshi Son to invest, carried the company through the dot-com crash. Even so, it had overextended abroad and had to cut back hard, refocus on Chinese small businesses and bring in executives with the financial discipline Ma lacked.
Taobao, a free consumer marketplace launched in 2003, beat eBay in China. The larger breakthrough was Alipay, an escrow service that held a buyer's payment until goods arrived. In a market where neither side trusted the other, it removed the main barrier to online commerce, and it later grew into Ant. Alibaba's 2014 NYSE listing raised about $25 billion, then the largest IPO on record, and made Ma China's richest man.
