Jack vs Jeff: The two biggest ecommerce billionaires in the world are total opposites

In 1990, Jack Ma was teaching English to a group of university students at Hangzhou Dianzi University. Who would have thought that, 24 years later, he would be China’s richest man?

In that same year, Jeff Bezos was working at D.E. Shaw & Co., an investment management firm based out of New York City. After graduating summa cum laude from Princeton university with a Bachelor’s degree in computer science and electrical engineering, there was no doubt Bezos would end up in tech, it was just a matter of time.

Years later, both of them would come up with similar names for their companies. Bezos wanted Cadabra, a name that signified magic. Ma wanted Alibaba, hoping that the name would open doors with an “open sesame”. But that might be as similar as they can get: ecommerce and magic.

These origin stories are tell-tale signs of two diverging philosophies and the companies they gave birth to. And yet they meet in some inroads. Just one month after Alibaba’s IPO, let’s take a deeper look at the two founders and the companies that are destined to shape the future of online retail.

Putting customers first?

Amazon is notorious for its obsession with customers. In fact, it’s Bezos’ go-to mantra and arguably his number one rule when it comes to how the culture of Amazon should be set. Bezos is a customer-centric founder:

We have so many customers who treat us so well, and we have the right kind of culture that obsesses over the customer. If there’s one reason we have done better than of our peers in the Internet space over the last six years, it is because we have focused like a laser on customer experience, and that really does matter, I think, in any business. It certainly matters online, where word of mouth is so very, very powerful.

But Jack Ma has a slightly different angle. Ma told CNBC newscasters, minutes after Alibaba listed on the New York Stock Exchange on September 22, “Customers first, employees second, and shareholders third.” What the newscasters didn’t realize was that when Ma thinks of customers, he’s not talking about everyday consumers in the same way as Bezos. To Ma, his customers are the small businesses that use the firm’s Taobao and Tmall marketplaces. Speaking at Stanford in 2013, Ma outlined this clearly:

Alibaba is not a company for consumers […] I knew that we didn’t have the right DNA to become a consumer company. The world is changing very fast, and it’s hard to gauge consumers’ needs. Small businesses know more about the needs of their customers. We had to empower our power sellers and our SME’s to support their customers.

This divergence is profoundly clear when you dig into stories about Amazon’s dealings with small businesses. In 2006, Amazon throttled the sales of a 200-year-old German business selling knives. In 2007, when Amazon released the Kindle, it didn’t reveal the US$9.99 price to publishers until the day of the release. And just this year, Amazon is making it harder for customers to buy books from publisher, Hachette, all because, as Forbes notes, “Amazon wants a bigger piece of its suppliers’ profit margins to purportedly pass on to its customers in the form of lower prices.” Amazon functions like a monopolistic empire.

You just won’t see this kind of behavior at Alibaba. The philosophy is poles apart from Amazon’s. This is what Jack Ma had to say on this very topic at Stanford in 2011:

No money, no technology, and no plans

Epilogue: Beyond Alibaba, beyond Amazon, beyond money, beyond humanity