Career, Internet, and Alibaba
Ma was not lucky, if we are talking about achieving a corporate career. He failed no less than thirty job interviews. When he applied to KFC, 23 of 24 candidates were accepted 23 (guess who didn’t get a job; yes, it is all about Jack). Ma believes that he was not accepted by KFC due to his unattractive appearance. According to Chinese standards, he is considered to be ugly. Later, he managed to get a job as an English teacher at a local university with a salary of $12-15 a month. Jack Ma saw his first computer in 1995 when he was 31 years old. It was during the time when he went to the USA as a translator.
He was told about the “internet”. So, the first word Ma entered into the search bar was “beer”. Search results included American beer, Belgian, and any beer you could want, but not Chinese. And when Ma realized that there was no information about China on the American internet at all, he understood that it could be a good opportunity to “introduce” the internet into China (or China on the internet). Then he realized that he wanted to help Chinese entrepreneurs bring their business to the internet. He knew that China produced a huge amount of goods that were cheaper than similar ones from any other country in the world. Thus, it could be considered as the start of Alibaba history. Ma, ironically, called his company “1001 mistakes”. Spoiler, in 2014, Alibaba’s IPO attracted $25B IPO of investments.
The first two attempts to create an internet company failed. Only after 4 years, Ma managed to recruit a team of 17 people (all of them were his friends). He convinced them to invest in the project, which was named Alibaba.
The company’s office was located in Jack Ma’s apartment in Guangzhou. The whole point of the project was so the company gave sellers-exporters (small and medium-sized traders) an opportunity to post the lists of their products, and customers could buy those very goods directly from the site. Nevertheless, the project wa
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