Jack Ma: ‘We’re not smart or hard-working, but we’re millionaires’

Late last month, Red Flag Publishing released a book called Jack Ma’s Internal Speeches: Trust in Tomorrow. Many of the speeches have never been shared publicly before, so I’m going to translate a few interesting excerpts from them. The first is about how Jack Ma sees his company’s success:

How do entrepreneurs slowly build startups into good, strong, large companies? Recently, I feel like my fame has gotten bigger; people are afraid to look me in the eye and everyone thinks Jack Ma and Alibaba are so great. After getting a little success, we may sometimes forget who we are, because when we were young we were just regular people. When we were just starting up, I constantly reminded myself of who I was, and where I came from. When Alibaba listed on November 6 [2014], everyone thought Alibaba is really very great, how could we get such a high market value? But for me, November 6th was the same as the 5th, I don’t think I changed at all.

After we listed, I held a meeting with all the Alibaba employees who’d been there for five years or more. I asked them a question: how does Alibaba have so many millionaires? In other people’s eyes, we are very successful. Why are we successful? Is it because we’re more hard-working? I don’t see it; we do work hard but there are a lot of people more hard-working than us in the world. Is it because we’re smarter? Not necessarily. Five years ago it was hard for us to hire people, but now we can just hire anyone off the street. We’re not hard-working or smart, but we’ve become wealthy, why?

Because we had good luck. Actually, we’re kind of dumb. Seven or eight years ago, lots of people joined Alibaba. But the smart ones felt the company didn’t offer enough opportunity, so they were poached by other companies or left to do startups, and their incomes went up. Those of us left weren’t smart, so no one was poaching us. But in the end, looking back from five years later, we somehow became rich.

See more: What is Jack Ma’s net worth?

(Source: Sina Tech)