In 1995, Jack Ma had never used the internet. He was working as an English teacher in Hangzhou, China, earning approximately $12 a month, when a friend introduced him to the web for the first time. He searched for beer in Chinese. No results. He searched for China. No results. In that absence — an entire country of a billion people essentially invisible to the world's newest medium — Ma saw an opportunity that would take him a decade to reach.
The years before Alibaba were a study in compounding rejection. Ma failed his university entrance exams twice before passing. He was rejected from 30 different jobs after graduating, including a position at KFC when the fast food chain expanded to Hangzhou. He applied to Harvard Business School ten times and was rejected each time. What he possessed instead of credentials was an English teacher's understanding of communication and an entrepreneur's instinct for identifying what was missing from a transaction.
He founded China Pages in 1995 — described by multiple sources as one of China's first internet companies — to help Chinese businesses establish an online presence. The venture struggled to gain traction in a country where internet penetration remained below 1%. He took a government advisory role briefly before returning to the private sector with a conviction that had not dimmed despite the failures: that the internet would transform commerce in China, and that a company focused on connecting Chinese businesses to global buyers could define that transformation.
In February 1999, Ma gathered eighteen friends and colleagues in his apartment in Hangzhou and announced that he intended to build Alibaba — a platform to help Chinese manufacturers reach international customers directly, removing the layers of middlemen that made Chinese exports expensive and slow. The pitch, by later accounts, was both audacious and specific. He spoke of competing with American internet companies, of serving small businesses that no one else was building for, of the scale that China's manufacturing base would ultimately require.
The company that emerged from that apartment focused on infrastructure before product. Taobao, launched in 2003, created a consumer-to-consumer marketplace modelled on eBay but adapted to the realities of Chinese commerce — where trust between strangers required more than a rating system. Alipay, launched in 2004, solved the payment trust problem that was blocking Chinese e-commerce from scaling: it held funds in escrow until buyers confirmed delivery, a simple mechanism that made hundreds of millions of transactions possible.
In 2005, Yahoo! invested $1 billion for a 40% stake in Alibaba — one of the most consequential early technology investments in history. The stake eventually returned tens of billions of dollars. In September 2014, Alibaba's IPO on the New York Stock Exchange raised $25 billion — at the time, the largest initial public offering in history. The English teacher from Hangzhou who had been turned down by KFC was now running the company behind the world's largest equity issuance.
Ma stepped down as executive chairman in September 2019, handing the role to Daniel Zhang as part of a leadership transition he had described publicly for years. He framed the decision as deliberate — a commitment to allowing Alibaba's next generation of leadership to grow without operating permanently in his shadow.
The Jack Ma story is, among other things, a story about the relationship between timing and persistence. He arrived at the right moment — China's internet dawn — but he had also spent a decade failing, learning, and refining his instincts before that moment arrived. The day after tomorrow, in his telling, is always beautiful. But you have to survive today and tomorrow first.