Never give up. Today is hard, tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be sunshine.
Jack Ma
I call Alibaba '1,001 mistakes.' We expanded too fast, and then in the dot-com bubble, we had to have layoffs. By 2002, we had only enough cash to survive for 18 months. We had a lot of free members using our site, and we didn't know how we'd make money. So we developed a product for China exporters to meet U.S. buyers online. This model saved us.
You should learn from your competitor, but never copy. Copy and you die.
When I am myself, I am happy and have a good result.
The very important thing you should have is patience.
I don't want to be liked. I want to be respected.
I try to make myself happy, no, because I know that if I'm not happy, my colleagues are not happy and my shareholders are not happy and my customers are not happy.
Help young people. Help small guys. Because small guys will be big. Young people will have the seeds you bury in their minds, and when they grow up, they will change the world.
We should keep on going along the path of globalization. Globalization is good... when trade stops, war comes.
My job is making money, helping other people make money. I am spending money, trying to make sure more people get rich, because you cannot spend a lot of money, right? So my job is spending money, helping others. This is a headache.
I'm humble 'cause I think many years ago people say, 'Well, Alibaba's terrible company'. And I know we were not that terrible. We're pretty good; we're better than people thought. But today, when people have a high expectation on you, and I start to worry and nervous because we are not good yet.
I'm not a tech guy. I'm looking at the technology with the eyes of my customers, normal people's eyes.
I'm coming to this world not to work. I want to come to this world to enjoy my life. I don't want to die in my office. I want to die on the beaches.
A trade war would be a disaster for the world. It's very easy to slip into a trade war.
Our philosophy is that we want to be an ecosystem. Our philosophy is to empower others to sell, empower others to service, making sure the other people are more powerful than us. With our technology, our innovation, our partners - 10 million small business sellers - they can compete with Microsoft and IBM.
My vision is to build an e-commerce ecosystem that allows consumers and businesses to do all aspects of business online.
Before I left China, I was educated that China was the richest, happiest country in the world. So when I arrived Australia, I thought, 'Oh my God, everything is different from what I was told.' Since then, I started to think differently.
There are big problems that change the world. If we are working together, that will make us understand each other, appreciate each other, help each other.
Trust the young people; trust this generation's innovation. They're making things, changing innovation every day. And all the consumers are the same: they want new things, they want cheap things, they want good things, they want unique things. If we can create these kind of things for consumers, they will come.
Spending money is much more difficult than making money.
The world needs new leadership, but the new leadership is about working together.
If you're doing business, not that simple to only buy. You have to create something. You have to create something that never exist for the future.
If we work so hard and put all the money in the hospital to buy medicine - it will be a disaster. Why we should work? So without a healthy environment of this Earth, no matter how much money you make, no matter how wonderful you are, you have a bad disaster.
I think globalization is a great thing. And now a lot of people complain about globalization; a lot of people don't like, you know, the globalize of the concept, the idea of the results. I think the globalization is a great idea and to create a lot of jobs.
The lessons I learned from the dark days at Alibaba are that you've got to make your team have value, innovation, and vision. Also, if you don't give up, you still have a chance. And, when you are small, you have to be very focused and rely on your brain, not your strength.
The most important thing is to make the technology inclusive - make the world change. Next, pay attention to those people who are 30 years old, because those are the internet generation. They will change the world; they are the builders of the world.
I don't think I'm a workaholic. Every weekend, I invite my colleagues and friends to my home to play cards. And people, my neighbors, are always surprised because I live on the second floor apartment, and there are usually 40 pairs of shoes in front of my gate, and people play cards inside and play chess. We have a lot of fun.
In the beginning I just wanted to survive. For the first three years, we made zero revenue. I remember many times when I was trying to pay up, the restaurant owner would say, 'Your bill was paid.' And there would be a note saying, 'Mr. Ma, I'm your customer on the Alibaba platform. I made a lot of money, and I know you don't, so I paid the bill.'
A startup for entrepreneurs is like a baby, and I have five babies so far - experienced father.
Our focused customers are small business and young people. We did a great job in China. How can we help those young people in India, in Pakistan, in Africa. If they can use in the same ways.
I know nothing about technology.
I got my story, my dream, from America. The hero I had is Forrest Gump... I like that guy. I've been watching that movie about 10 times. Every time I get frustrated, I watch the movie. I watched the movie before I came here again to New York. I watched the movie again telling me that no matter whatever changed, you are you.
I like to play cards. I'm not very good, because I don't want to calculate, I just play by instinct. But I've learned a lot of business philosophy by playing poker.
The world is getting so small. Young people are mobile; they want to travel around the world. When you travel around the world, you exchange culture, you want to make friends, you want to exchange things.
My dream was to set up my own e-commerce company. In 1999, I gathered 18 people in my apartment and spoke to them for two hours about my vision. Everyone put their money on the table, and that got us $60,000 to start Alibaba. I wanted to have a global company, so I chose a global name.
When we started the e-commerce, nobody believed that China would have e-commerce because people believed in 'guang-shi,' face-to-face, and all kinds of network in traditional ways. There's no trust system in China.
I believe always you should have a philanthropic heart inside but business way. Because you have to get things done. That is what scientists tell us how to do properly. Business should tell us how to get things done efficiently. And government should have the good environment and the foundations of researching.
If you want to invest in us, we believe customer number one, employee number two, shareholder number three. If they don't want to buy that, that's fine. If they regret, they can sell us.
The big businesses are less willing to take risks. I talked to some young people in Hong Kong, and they said they are lost. Young people indeed have fewer opportunities than before. But is it true that there are no more opportunities for them? No!
Nobody wanted to believe Jack Ma.
When I was 12 years old, I went to swim in a lake, and I almost died in that lake because the water was too deep - much deeper than I thought.
You American people worry too much about the China economy. Every time you think China is a problem, we get better, but when you have a high expectation for China, China is always a problem.
Asia is changing, and China is changing. The 'Post' will have great opportunities. With its access to Alibaba's resources, data, and all the relationships in our ecosystem, the 'Post' can report on Asia and China more accurately compared with other media that have no such access.
Our philosophy is, using internet technology, we can make every company become Amazon.
The difference between Amazon and us is Amazon is more like an empire - everything they control themselves, buy and sell.
The more I come to know about the outside world's perception of China, the more I feel there are all sorts of misunderstandings, and to a certain extent, people do not get the full picture from the media. A lot of foreigners have few opportunities to visit China, and a lot of Chinese people do not have the chance to go to Europe or to the West.
If Alibaba cannot become a Microsoft or Wal-Mart, I will regret it for the rest of my life.
On privacy issues, it's just like hundreds of years ago when people said, 'I would rather put my money under my pillow than in a bank.' But today, banks know how to protect money much better than you do. Today, we may not have the answers to privacy issues, but I believe our young people will come up with the solutions.
Alibaba spends money on improving the products and services, not on kickbacks. That's a good thing. It's called a value system, and because of that, we get more and more small- to medium-sized companies to support us in China.
What a publication can do is to help people get a clearer picture without jumping to any rash conclusion. I'm very happy that the 'Post' can take the responsibility to report on China in a broader and deeper way. I believe the 'Post' must be fair to our readers. We should let our readers see China from more angles and perspectives.
