The Rags-to-Riches Story of: Jack Ma

“Giving up is the greatest failure.” Once quoted by the co-founder and former executive
chairman of Alibaba and a well-known motivational speaker.

Today, we’ll talk about a former English educator who is now the richest person in China,
with a net worth of 62.1B dollars and considered as the 17th richest person in the world.
This is the rags-to-riches story of Jack Ma.

Born to a musician-storyteller parents in Hangzhou, China on September 15 1964, Jack

Ma was raised along with an elder brother and younger sister. During the peak of the
communists in China, their parents didn’t make enough money.

When tourism boomed in China, he worked as a translator in exchange of English

lessons.

Jack struggled in school. Before he passed, he failed in his primary school examinations
2 times, and 3 times on graduating exams in secondary school. Wanting to join Harvard,
he also tried 10 times but failed. Instead, he got into Hangzhou of Normal University for
the third time and graduated with a Bachelor in English.

He applied to 30 different jobs, even in KFC, but was rejected with all of them in 3 simple
words, “You are no good”.

In 1995, he got introduced to the internet. The first word he searched on the web was
‘Beer’, and it popped out results from different countries, but there was none from China
on the web. He saw potential and then came up with an online marketplace.

With his first attempt, he launched a website about Chinese products called “China
Pages”. Within the same day, they received emails from people around the world
requesting them to partner with their company. The experience taught him that online
connectivity can impact the worldwide trade especially for small and medium businesses.
However, due to lack of funding his business was shut down.

He took a break and worked for the government and met the founding member of Yahoo,
Jerry Yang that soon invested 1B dollars in Alibaba.

Later in 1999, Jack left his job. He grouped 18 people including himself and his wife, and
formed Alibaba, as the second attempt in internet-business. They wanted to boost their
funding, but got turned down with a funding group telling them that their business is
unsustainable that time. Eventually, in 2000, they got 2 bigger companies to invest 25M
dollars in Alibaba. They received their first ever profit, only in 2002.

They expanded and engaged Alibaba in international services and raised 25B dollars in
2014, driving eBay out of China and making their worth more than Facebook. Now,
Alibaba is one of the world’s largest companies with a market value of approximately
200B dollars.

Jack Ma is one of the world’s greatest living examples of entrepreneurs nowadays. He

lies as an exceptional and talented leader who redefined the part of success. Even though
he failed education, got rejected on jobs, got problems on his business, he proved all of
those were never a hindrance for him to pursue his dreams.

Dream big, work smart, don’t lose hope, and never leave a stone unturned. This is the
story of success through failure of Jack Ma.