By Christiana Ioannou
Jack Ma Yun, a Chinese business tycoon, innovator philanthropist is a pioneer and former chief executive of a multinational technology company, Alibaba. Being a staunch supporter of an open and market-driven economy, he is viewed as an influential figure by the start-up business community. As a young boy, Jack Ma had an interest in English and served as an English guide for foreign tourists to Hangzhou. In 1994, he set up his first company for English translation and interpretation named Haibo Translation Agency.
Working for the government and the creation of Alibaba Group
On his visit to America, he came across the internet and saw that Chinese websites are not benefiting from this new innovative, rapidly growing future of business opportunities. In this urge, he founded China Pages for creating websites for Chinese business. Although soon he left the company in wake of growing competition. Then for a year, he remained the head of a government-backed internet company, but soon he realized that working with the government means missing out on huge internet opportunities. Therefore he persuaded his team and launched the Alibaba group.
Alibaba
Alibaba is a multinational company facilitating small businesses by promoting consumer to consumer, business to consumer, and business to business sales services through websites. In addition to ease in sales, it also features shopping search engines, electronic payments, and cloud computing services.
The Hupan University
In 2009, Jack Ma and his entrepreneur friends started thinking to build an institution specifically for the education of Chinese entrepreneurship. They thought that a traditional MBA program is not enough to educate future business founders. They aimed to build an institution to help Chinese entrepreneurs to establish businesses, not for sale but to last longer.
In 2015, Jack Ma and his team turned its question into an answer by establishing Hupan University in Hangzhou, China. Unlike conventional schools, Hupan University was created as a space to learn from failures because its experienced founders knew that failures teach more than success. Therefore, the university does not treat its students like students, rather they learn like partners in a community advancing towards a common goal.
China Pages Website
As mentioned earlier, Jack Ma started his financial career with an English translation Agency called Haibo Translation Agency and ended up establishing a great and renowned multinational company, Alibaba. When Jack Ma founded his second company, he launched the website China Pages at 9:40 am, and in thirteen hours, he had received emails from multiple investors showing interest in his website. For Ma, this was the moment of realization that the internet has so much to offer, and it’s the future of business.
He registered the China Pages in the USA and after three years the website had produced 5,000,000 Rejminbi which at that time was equal to US$800,000. In September 2014, Alibaba raised $25 billion in the initial public offering on New York Stock Exchange making it the most profitable company in the US financial history.
Conclusion
Jack Ma holds the office of executive chairman along with its nine major branches i.e. Taobao Marketplace, eTao, Alibaba.com, Tmall, 1688.com, AliExpress.com, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Juhuasuan, and Alipay. In short, Jack Ma went through the time when he was rejected at KFC to the being one of the most successful business figures in the world through his determination and innovative vision.
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