Jack Ma

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Jack Ma (Chinese: 马云; pinyin: Mǎ Yún; born November 1964) is founder and chief operating officer of Alibaba.com.

[edit] Background

Born in the city of Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China, Ma graduated from Hangzhou Teacher's Institute in 1988 (he initially failed the entrance exam twice) and became a lecturer in English and International Trade in the same university. Ma founded a couple of small service enterprises before, according to a 2005 New York Times interview, enduring a bizarre incident which Ma described as "a Hollywood story [of] why I went into the Internet".

According to Ma, he traveled to the United States in 1995, intending to recover money owed to a Chinese company by an American businessman in Malibu. But the businessman refused to pay the debt, took Ma at gunpoint, and held him captive for 2 days. Ma only managed to negotiate his release by agreeing to help the American start an Internet company in China, though Ma had no familiarity with the technology before this moment.

Ma had no further connection with his American kidnapper, but once he returned to China, he borrowed $2,000 to found China Pages, one of the first Chinese internet companies.

He first started building websites for Chinese companies with the help of friends in the US. Ma has commented that "The day we got connected to the Web, I invited friends and TV people over to my house," and on a very slow dial-up connection, "we waited three and a half hours and got half a page.... We drank, watched TV and played cards, waiting. But I was so proud. I proved the Internet existed."

[edit] Alibaba.com

After a stint as head of the China International Electronic Commerce Center's Infoshare division, he founded Alibaba.com in 1999, a China-based business to business marketplace site which serves 12 million members from 200 countries. In 2003, Alibaba launched Taobao.com, a consumer to consumer auction website similar to eBay, which also provided an innovative escrow-based online payment service, Alipay (necessary in China, where credit and debit cards are not widespread). Ma remains as chief executive officer and chairman of board after Yahoo! acquired a 40% economic stake (35% voting rights) in Alibaba in exchange for $1 Billion USD plus all of Yahoo!'s Chinese-based assets (formerly known as Yahoo! China - valued at approx. $700mm), on August 11, 2005. Japan's Softbank will have a 27.4% in the new Alibaba company.