Charisma and great timing – our review of ’Alibaba: The House that Jack Ma Built’

Photo modified by Tech in Asia; original photo credit: UN Climate Change.

Duncan Clark’s Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built is as much about the rise of China’s tech and startup scene as it is about Jack Ma.

Ma, now one of the richest men in Asia, is the founder of the Chinese online shopping behemoth. It has since ventured into logistics, finance, entertainment, healthcare, cloud computing, and lots more areas. If Alibaba’s story is the backbone of Clark’s book, the context around it – how the internet was adopted in China, the impact of SARS on the country’s online shopping industry – does the crucial work of filling out the body of the narrative.

Clark is a veteran of China’s early tech industry and a true insider. He met Ma in 1999 – the year the startup launched – and advised the entrepreneur on its international expansion strategy during the early years. Clark had the chance make a fortune from Alibaba’s IPO when Ma and Joseph Tsai, the vice chairman of Alibaba, offered him a few hundred thousand shares at the price of thirty cents in 2000. However, Clark declined; a US$30 million mistake he laments at the introduction of the book.

Despite Clark’s ties to the company, Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built does a good job of balancing well-earned praise of Ma and Alibaba while analyzing the company’s pitfalls and challenges. In particular, the book is packed with anecdotes and case studies of not just Alibaba executives, but other relevant players in China’s burgeoning tech landscape.

Take Jerry Yang, the former CEO and co-founder of Yahoo, for example. Originally from Taiwan, Yang struggled with English when he moved to America as a young boy. He only knew one word: “shoe.” Clark then goes on to describe the origin story of Yahoo, which starts with sumo wrestling. It turns out that Yang and David Filo, the other co-founder of Yahoo, bonded over their mutual interest in the sport and ended up taking residence in a Stanford trailer to develop what would later be known as Yahoo. In Clark’s account, Yang and Filo’s trailer is colorfully described by Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital:

With the shades drawn tight, the Sun servers generating a ferocious amount of heat, the answering machine going on and off every couple of minutes, golf clubs stashed against the walls, pizza cartons on the floor, and unwashed clothes strewn around…it was every mother’s idea of the bedroom she wished her sons never had.”

Eleven years later, as CEO, Yang made the life-changing decision to invest US$1 billion into Alibaba and hand over Yahoo China to Ma’s company.

Clark also does an impressive job of covering the life and development of both Jack Ma and Alibaba, from Ma’s humble beginnings as an English teacher, to his gleeful takedown of eBay, to Alibaba’s more recent tensions with the Chinese government and counterfeit products.

As Clark quotes from anonymous tech entrepreneur at the end of his book: “Alibaba is more of a strategy than a story.” And therein lies many strategic lessons for entrepreneurially-minded readers.

Timing is everything

“You’re seeing the unleashing of the consumption power of the Chinese consumer.” – Joseph Tsai, executive vice chairman at Alibaba

Charisma is essential

In China, localization matters a lot

The future of Alibaba and Jack Ma