He didn’t give up though, four years later, Ma gathered 17 of his friends in his apartment and convinced them to invest in his idea for an online marketplace.
They scraped together roughly $60,000 for Alibaba.com, which let Chinese exporters, manufacturers, and entrepreneurs post product listings for international buyers.
Ma reportedly came up with the company name while sitting in a San Francisco coffee shop, when he thought of how Ali Baba overheard the secret password of the 40 Thieves and unlocked untold riches.
Within a few months, the venture had raised big money, $5 million from Goldman Sachs and $20 million from Japanese telecom company SoftBank.
The company survived the dot-com crash and began turning a profit. Alibaba spawned Taobao.com, a bartering marketplace that was its eBay competitor, in 2003.
Fast growth led former tech powerhouse Yahoo to buy a 40% stake of Alibaba for $1 billion in 2005.
Since those early years, Alibaba has amassed millions of customers and become one of the biggest tech companies on the planet, helping merchants sell everything from luxury goods to fresh groceries.
When the company went public in 2014, it raised $25 billion on Wall Street, in what was the world’s largest initial public offering ever.
Alibaba today is a huge tech investor with a wide range of businesses: Like its main competitor Amazon, it has expanded into video streaming, online payment platforms, and cloud services, among other things.
END OF ERA
While Ma plans to remain on Alibaba’s board until 2020, over the next 12 months he will pass his executive chairman duties to chief executive Daniel Zhang, who has previously held a variety of senior management positions.
“No company can rely solely on its founders,” Ma said in a letter to customers, employees and shareholders.
Since stepping down as chief executive in 2013, Ma devoted time to other projects, including starting a charity in 2014 and even performing in a kung fu movie.
He has said he hopes to follow in the footsteps of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates by devoting more attention to his Jack Ma Foundation, dedicated to improving education, the environment, and public health.
The former English professor said he will return to teaching, describing that he is still young and has “lots of dreams to pursue.”
Duncan Clark, author of Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built, told CNN that Ma’s retirement should come as no surprise. "He has long talked about his desire to go back to his roots as a teacher.”
Title : Alibaba and the Rise to Fame
Description : He didn’t give up though, four years later, Ma gathered 17 of his friends in his apartment and convinced them to invest in his idea for an ...
