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ARTS BOOKS BOOKSHELF
The Chutzpah of Jack Ma
"ALIBABA: THE HOUSE THAT JACK MA BUILT
By Duncan Clark
Ecco, 287 pages, $27.99"
Ma was turned down at nearly every job he applied for, including Kentucky Fried Chicken.
By TOM NAGORSKI
April 8, 2016 5:07 p.m. ET
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An English-speaking visitor to Hangzhou, China, in the late 1970s might have noticed the skinny, smiling teenager outside the Hangzhou Hotel, eager to strike up a conversation and always ready to translate or give a tour. His name was Ma Yun, and he had fallen in love at an early age with the English language. Richard Nixon and his delegation had been in Hangzhou when Ma Yun was only 8 years old; later the boy had taken to listening to readings of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” on a shortwave radio and riding 40 minutes on his bike so that he could be at the hotel at dawn. By 1979, thanks to the rapprochement Nixon had brokered with Mao Zedong, China had opened its doors. A trickle of 728 visitors to Hangzhou in 1978 jumped to more than 40,000 the following year. Ma Yun—15 years old by then—had plenty of tour-hungry customers.
One American tourist who befriended Ma Yun around this time happened to have a husband and father who shared the name “Jack.” She suggested that Ma Yun adopt the name for himself, since he sought more Western contacts. For whatever reason, the name stuck, and the boy became known as Jack Ma.
The story offers insight into the man who today ranks high among the most well-known and well-to-do of the world’s entrepreneurs. Ambitious, clever and precocious, Jack Ma would fail his college entry exams, get turned down at nearly every job he applied for (he couldn’t get hired at Kentucky Fried Chicken when the first franchises came to China), and go on to create and lead the e-commerce giant Alibaba.
The story of Alibaba’s rise—along with Jack Ma’s—offers a fascinating window onto China’s staggering transformation. Duncan Clark tells the story with flair in “Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built.”
Mr. Clark is an insider, having been an adviser to Alibaba in its early years, soon after Jack Ma and a dozen friends and colleagues decided to start an Internet company from their messy, malodorous Hangzhou apartment. It was a prescient idea but one that seemed foolhardy at the time, given that few Chinese had access to the Internet—this was 1999—and the country’s rulers were suspicious of any tool that might jumpstart a freer flow of information. Mr. Clark was a China-based consultant when he met Mr. Ma, who told him that he wasn’t interested in merely becoming a leading businessman in China. He wanted his venture, he said, “to be number one in the world.”
The parallels to certain Silicon Valley icons— Steve Jobs in particular—are hard to miss, from the smelly digs to the brash, unbridled confidence. Like Jobs, Jack Ma would spend the next 15 years building new businesses that seemed fanciful at first, but before long he had competitors kicking themselves and once-skeptical investors ruing missed opportunities.
Today the pillars of Alibaba’s corporate colossus (“my children,” Jack Ma calls them) include the Amazon-like Taobao site and the more high-end Tmall, which together generate sales that will soon eclipse Wal-Mart’s. There is also Alipay, which—with three-quarters of a trillion dollars in annual transactions—is by far the world’s most popular online payment tool.
Mr. Clark weaves statistics throughout his narrative, and like many of the numbers one hears about China these days, they are difficult to fathom: 330 million people made purchases on Alibaba sites last year, spending an average of $1,200. Alibaba doesn’t make anything; it’s a virtual wallet and virtual mall, among other things, and it doesn’t charge vendors. The company’s revenues—to the tune of some $10 billion annually—are derived from ad space sold on the various sites.
Mr. Clark is a fine writer, and his main character is, well, quite a character. If you Google “Jack Ma” you might find video of him sporting a Mohawk and a nose ring and belting out Elton John’s “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” to a crowd of Alibaba employees. He has (unlike Steve Jobs) a sunny disposition and a fondness for aphorisms: “Believe in your dream and believe in yourself”; “Customers first, employees second, shareholders third.” He often mocks his own failings: “I still don’t understand the technology behind the Internet.” His favorite film? Well, that would be “ Forrest Gump,” because “people think he is dumb, but he knows what he is doing.”
Jack Ma also has chutzpah. In those early days, when he tried to sell his vision in China, he took to quoting Bill Gates: “The Internet will change every aspect of human beings’ lives.” Nice line—except that Mr. Gates never said it. Later Mr. Ma explained: “If I said, ‘Jack Ma says the Internet would change every aspect of human beings’ lives,’ who would believe it?” And he added: “I believed that Bill Gates would definitely say it one day.”
If Jack Ma is a winning character, his 20-year path from struggling would-be entrepreneur to billionaire CEO has all the ingredients of a feature film. It is not hard to imagine a screen adaptation of Jack Ma’s first trip to the U.S., in which our protagonist is held at gunpoint, wins $600 in Vegas and hops a flight to Seattle, where he has his first encounter with a desktop keyboard. There’s a priceless moment when a Seattle Internet consultant helps him create a website for his translation agency (all text, no graphics—this is 1994) and reports happily a few hours later: “Jack, you’ve got five emails!” Says our soon-to-be high-tech icon: “What is email?”
As with the growth of many Silicon Valley titans, several potential investors missed the boat: Goldman Sachs sold its 33% share in 2004; and the author himself turned down a 2003 offer to buy hundreds of thousands of shares at 30 cents apiece. “An error of colossal proportions,” Mr. Clark writes, which by the time of the 2014 IPO had “mushroomed into a $30 million mistake.”
But if “Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built” is a good yarn, its greatest value lies in what it says about today’s China. You can read the daily journalism and academic reporting, but it’s another thing to watch a fledgling 35-year-old entrepreneur hunt desperately for investors and then captain the largest-ever Wall Street IPO 15 years later—a $25 billion haul that prompted Jon Stewart’s line: “The communists just beat us at capitalism.” It’s one thing to read about China’s growth and another to read Mr. Clark’s mesmerizing account of “Singles’ Day”—also known as Shuang Shiyi, or “Double Eleven.” These are the names given to Nov. 11 in China, a kind of mash-up of Valentine’s Day and Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving). In recent years it has become a consumer extravaganza.
Indeed, of all the hard-to-fathom spectacles that modern China has produced, few can match the spectacle of “Double Eleven”—and it’s a spectacle perfectly suited to Alibaba. The company featured Kevin Spacey and Daniel Craig at last year’s flagship 11/11 event; and in the day’s first eight minutes, shoppers bought more than a billion dollars of goods on Alibaba sites alone; by day’s end the figure stood at $14 billion, four times the sales in the U.S. on last year’s Cyber Monday.
What are all these people buying? Well, everything, according to Mr. Clark. Jewelry and cosmetics, groceries and consumer electronics, cars and real estate. Men can hire temporary girlfriends to bring to a social event or “outsource a breakup with their real girlfriend.” Mr. Clark examines the root causes of Alibaba’s success, beyond the rapid rise of a consumer class in China. For one thing, shopping has never been a particularly pleasant experience for the Chinese; the traditional retail sector rates poorly, for service and selection both. So while today some 10% of Americans buy groceries online, the figure in China is 40%. “In other countries e-commerce is a way to shop,” Jack Ma says. “In China, it is a lifestyle.”
While Mr. Clark comes across as a largely independent chronicler (he makes the point early on that he has never been an Alibaba employee and has no current relationship with the company), occasionally his admiration for his subject is too evident. He refers to Mr. Ma throughout as “Jack” and titles one chapter “ Jack Magic,” describing Mr. Ma’s ability to charm and cajole to attract capital and talent. Meanwhile, the last chapter has the feel of a late add, to include news of China’s recent market woes and Alibaba’s purchase of the South China Morning Post. The result is that an otherwise clean and compelling narrative reads at the end like a list of the latest headlines.
But these are small problems. Any account of a major Chinese company or business figure these days will require near-constant updating. As for the perils of hagiography, Mr. Clark dispels these with clear-eyed treatments of Alibaba’s bumps along the way: the company’s share-price plunge soon after the IPO; its intellectual-property squabble with the Chinese government; and the still-simmering issue of how Alibaba polices the traffic in counterfeit goods on its platforms.
What’s next for Jack Ma and Alibaba? For the company, an aggressive push into other countries and a push to expand in rural China. As for the CEO, he is making a foray into philanthropy and aiming for a Bill Gates-style global impact, particularly vis-à-vis the environment. China, Mr. Ma believes, is paying a profound price for having become a factory for the world. “Our water has become undrinkable, our food inedible . . . and the air in our cities is so polluted that we often cannot see the sun,” he said recently. A percentage of Alibaba stock has been earmarked for a philanthropic trust to help improve the environment in China.
Mr. Clark titles his final chapter “Icon or Icarus?”—and it is the right question to ask. Meaning, will Jack Ma and Alibaba prove to be lasting, iconic emblems of China’s 21st-century leap forward or will the man and his business suffer for flying too close to the sun? Put differently, can Alibaba continue to grow, given the headwinds facing China’s economy and the tricky business of what Mr. Clark calls Alibaba’s “dance with the government”? Business Week once wrote that “Alibaba’s Magic Carpet Is Losing Altitude,” and maybe it was, but that headline dates to April 2001. “Be the last man standing,” Jack Ma likes to say. It would seem foolish to bet against him.
—Mr. Nagorski is executive vice president of the Asia Society and author of “Miracles on the Water: The Heroic Survivors of a World War II U-Boat Attack.
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