From Bankruptcy to Billionaire
1982, Hangzhou. An 18-year-old walked into his college entrance exam for the third time. The first two attempts yielded math scores of 1 and 19. This time he scored 79 — still 5 points short of the cutoff. But his near-perfect English score earned him a special admission to Hangzhou Normal University. His name was Jack Ma. Nobody imagined this "academic failure" would reshape global commerce.
A String of Failed Ventures
After college, Ma became an English lecturer at Hangzhou Institute of Electronics. He started a translation agency on the side — his first business. It lost money from day one. To keep it afloat, Ma carried sacks to Yiwu wholesale market, buying trinkets and flowers to sell on the street. Three years later, the agency turned a profit. This was his first entrepreneurial lesson: even the best idea needs the will to survive.
In 1995, Ma visited the U.S. for the first time and discovered the internet. He typed "beer" into a search engine and found no results about Chinese beer. He realized: the internet was a gold mine, and nobody in China was mining it. He returned home and founded China Pages — one of China's first internet companies.
The Ultimate Bet
China Pages was eventually acquired by a state-owned enterprise. Ma moved to Beijing with his team to build websites for the Ministry of Foreign Trade. But bureaucratic constraints suffocated him. In early 1999, at his modest apartment in Hangzhou's Lakeside Garden, he gathered 18 people — now known as the "Eighteen Arhats" — for a meeting that would change everything.
Standing in the center of the room, Ma declared: "I want to build the world's largest e-commerce company." People exchanged uneasy glances. Their combined 500,000 RMB (about $60,000) would only last six months. But they believed in Ma, pouring their life savings into the pot. Ma said, "This money is everyone's. I won't take a salary. If we succeed, we share."
💡 Entrepreneurial Insight
Ma often says "belief" is the most underrated asset. He doesn't know technology, coding, or product design. But he has one gift more precious than any skill — the ability to make talented people want to fight alongside him. A founder's vision is a startup's greatest asset.
The 'Crazy Man' Rejected by Silicon Valley
After Alibaba was founded, Ma flew to Silicon Valley to raise funds. Over 30 VC firms turned him down. In front of Masayoshi Son of SoftBank, Ma had just 6 minutes to pitch. Son listened and said, "I want to invest $40 million." Ma hesitated — he was hoping for $20 million. They settled on $20 million from SoftBank, Alibaba's most crucial early investment.
When the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Alibaba teetered on the edge of collapse. Ma was forced to close overseas offices, lay off staff, and pivot from "burn cash" to "earn cash." In 2002, Alibaba turned a profit — the first B2B e-commerce company in the world to do so.
A Force That Changed the World
The rest is history: Taobao beat eBay in China, Alipay solved the trust problem in online payments, Tmall created a premium brand channel, Alibaba Cloud grew into Asia's largest cloud provider. Today, Alibaba is valued at hundreds of billions of dollars, touching the lives of hundreds of millions in China.
Ma's favorite saying remains: "If you have a dream, you have to defend it. When others say you can't, that's not a reason to give up. Never, never give up — that's the only faith a true entrepreneur needs."