This Jack Ma talk at Stanford’s GSB, given in Mandarin (with great English subtitles!), is minute-for-minute the best tech entrepreneurship lecture I’ve heard this year, maybe last year too.
Here were my notes. They are more copious than usual because there’s so much good stuff here: wisdom, humor, anecdotes, rah-rah. Enjoy!
- in relating a story about how he tried to stop a group of men who were stealing a manhole cover: if you don’t take action, no one will, and if you take action, you may be the beneficiary
- his whole life, no one told him he was smart, no one believed he would succeed
- he was first person in China to conduct business on the Internet
- he thought, Internet will be something, as long as I’m the last person to survive, I will succeed (wow!)
- Silicon Valley gave him a lot of inspiration
- when he started working on the Internet in China, everyone thought he was a trickster, but when he went to SV, all the parking lots were full, rush hour traffic, people were working on the weekends
- believes he and Alibaba succeeded in Chinese internet for 3 reasons:
- no money
- “when you have too much money, that’s when your real problems start”
- Alibaba has one of China’s largest cash reserves and that’s part of their culture
- money is like the armed forces, try not to use it, but if you do, you must win
- didn’t understand technology
- still doesn’t understand what coding is all about, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t respect it!
- it’s both a tragedy and a fortune that he’s not a CEO who understands internet; he isn’t looking over his engineers’ shoulders, and has great respect for his technical team
- “I don’t understand technology, I’m afraid of it, as long as it works I’m happy”, in that way he’s similar to 80% of Alibaba’s users
- was the company’s #1 tester but part of why he’s stepping down as CEO is because he doesn’t even use his company’s products anymore, he’s too old for the internet, young people are even better testers than he is
- “without belief, technology is a tool”
- mentions the need for reverence and respect of technology multiple times
- never planned
- wrote one business plan, VC rejected him and gave detailed feedback, never wrote another one
- it was 96, 97, if you wrote a plan you were either lying to yourself or to other people
- could get an MBA to write a detailed, beautiful plan, but would it be useful? no
- “life is a plan that is slowly unfolding…embrace change”
- “change is the best plan if you don’t want to lose your sense of direction”
- “I never plan, that doesn’t mean WE never plan”
- no money
- world’s never been in better place, yet never have people had more complaints; “best of times, worst of times”
- 30 years ago China was not much better than N Korea
- “change is what will give young people opportunities”
- it took him 7 years to finish elementary school
- he took the college admissions exam (the gaokao) 3 times before he passed!
- attributes it all to hard work, good friends, and a lot of LUCK
- luck is like seeds to be sown, it won’t come to you on its own
- when you have a lot of good luck, it won’t continue forever, your job is to sow other peoples’ seeds, spread it around, and it may even extend your own run
- some of you believe in God, some in Buddha, I’m still shopping around
- Alibaba is not a business for consumers, it’s for small businesses
- things change too fast, too hard to understand consumer tastes, not in our DNA, but small businesses know their customers, so we help them
- if run out of small business customers, we’ll break up the large ones!
- we’re not competing with eBay, Google, Yahoo…we’re competing with the previous generation, and with the future