Jack Ma The Man :
It is a common notion that Asian people are often denoted as hard taskmasters and shrewd businessmen. Jack Ma was all of that yet none if it either.

First of all if you ever wondered why did a Chinese man have an English name like Jack, then add this to your knowledge, that Jack is his adopted name. His real Chinese name is Ma Yun.

He hailed from an incredibly middle class family whose earnings just saw them through the day, yet Jack's passion for learning with whatever means he was provided served as the building blocks of his career. Fluency in both Chinese and English is a trait which is in high demand these days and somehow Jack was far sighted enough to see this demand in his childhood. He didn't know that this acquired talent of his would be so beneficial for him in the future. He just liked the language and tried to learn it from the tourists who came to his city in exchange of a free guided tour! One such tour led him to develop connections with an Australian family whose contributions towards Jack's achievements can never be tallied in figures.

Although Jack had an incredible taste for learning, his knowledge of mathematics was poor to say the least. Gaokao is a major test in China and in his first attempt, he scored a meagre 1/120 in mathematics. He tried again and again, and by the third time, his maths score improved a bit to get him admitted in an unvalued college, but that was enough for Jack. He just wanted education, he didn't want to be in a topnotch college. Soon Jack turned out to be the best in his institution, and years later, he was called to Harvard to give a speech, the same college which had rejected him admission on account of his Gaokao scores.

Eventually Jack went on to become a professor of English, and opened his first translation business with his students. The business had come to an end, but because of his profession he was called for a government assignment, which had definitely put his life in extreme danger, but had also exposed him to the gadget that changed his life forever : the computer. Jack brought the computer from USA to China, when China was a country steeped in poverty. The China we know now is not the China Jack Ma grew up in. It was essentially an agrarian country with people facing severe hardships to just make it from day to day.

Jack Ma, was, is, and will always remain a technical noob. He stands out as tech company founder with no background in any form of technology. He proudly claims that he has no idea about coding or what goes on behind the internet. He tells people that he may look smart but has an incredibly dull brain. This ofcourse, we know is his modesty speaking. He may lack technical prowess but his business acumen can hardly be matched. A man with huge ambitions and the most weird strategies one can possibly think of, Jack had earned himself the nickname Crazy Jack.

If you search on YouTube, you will find Jack's speeches in an unfinishable queue. Jack is an excellent speaker and works his charm wonderously. He can move his audience from cahoots to tears any time. Never carrying any notes, he speaks in the simplest of terms with the easiest of messages to drive home the essence of what he is saying, incredibly hard. Duncan Clark, the author of the book says that if Alibaba hadn't worked out for Jack, he could have easily gained fame being a stand-up comedian for sure.

An educator from the very core, Jack coined a new version of CEO for himself. He named himself the Chief Educational Officer. A man of literature, he tried to include aspects of his favourite novels in the aesthetics of his company's campus, in the nicknames of his employees and in his speeches as well.

 
Jack and His Employees:
While the world would bring in a comparison between Jack Ma and Jeff Bezos on the basis of the growth of their company and their passion for E-Commerce, the biggest difference I find between the two is the kind of treatment they meted out to their employees.

Jack always believed that without his employees Alibaba could have never been what it is today. He says he may have seen the vision, but had his wonderful employees not been there, this vision would have been impossible to achieve.

He had a mantra : Customers First (very much like Bezos), Employees Second (very much Unlike Bezos) and Shareholders Third.

Alibaba provides cycles to its employees so that they can easily roam around the campus, unlike Bezos who refused to curb the parking fee for his employees. After several pleas, he has finally allowed a public transport pass for his employees which gets reimbursed regularly.

Jack Ma, himself celebrates the weddings of his employees on the company annual day AliDay, and even calls their immediate relatives, whose fooding and lodging is looked after by the company, to join the celebrations. Bezos on the other hand preferred his employees to not have any kind of a personal life, the private life of his employees never mattered and he couldn't even dream of spending any additional money on them barring their salaries.

The best workers were rewarded with expensive gifts such as Louis Vitton wallets, belts, cars or even hefty bonuses and so on and in Amazon the best workers got at most an old pair of sneakers. More so, he even allowed his employees to take a loan upto 50,000 Chinese dollars for paying the downpayment of their new appartments. Bezos would have fainted had he heard of such costs.

Jeff was always known to hire the creme de la creme students of the best colleges. Anything else but a topper, he couldn't even dream of being near them. He was a person who judged people by their grades. He wanted the best brains to join his company. Jack on the other hand is a complete opposite. He onboarded students who did not top in their class. His belief was that those who topped couldn't survive in the real world and would soon drop out. But those who weren't top notch students would figure out a way to survive.

Those who were experienced workers usually got a major shock when they were exposed to the Alibaba work culture. Alibaba didn't just focus on results and say that these many sales need to be made (typical Bezos style).

To be in Alibaba, you need to be a healthy person, with a good mind and a good heart according to one of their co-founders.

Jack Ma and Jeff Bezos : 
It is an obvious comparison that would come to anyone's mind when one comes across any one of these names. I, for one, kept remembering bits and pieces of The Everything Store (the book that describes the entire journey of Jeff Bezos). In fact even The Economist had said that USA has Jeff Bezos, China has Jack Ma. Both are major heads in their zones and going against another would just be a horrible battle that would deal E-Commerce a major blow in the guts.

The similarities between the two are hard to ignore, barring them sharing the same first letter of their names. Here we have two major entrepreneurs, both of whom have carried on their journey with precisely two things in mind : 1) Customers should be happy with their service 2) Sell everything under the sun in their websites. Jack's working logic is very similar to that of Bezos - Customers must find any random thing they want in their site, their logistics should make sure that the customer gets the product as soon as possible and that customers should be able to shop with complete ease.

Also, despite the different mindsets the two held regarding employees, both had one thing in common. They expected their employees to give them cent per cent of their time, energy and loyalty. Work in both Amazon and Alibaba went round the clock. It went for both the founders as well. They too taxed themselves with incredible working hours, and always expected the same from their workers as well.

Another thing that I found majorly similar between the two is that both had modest beginnings to their company. Jack and his wife bet everything they owned into his company and worked out of one stinky apartment with one computer and four other people. Jeff on the other hand started out from a basement with his wife and a couple of other guys. Both of them made their families invest in their companies as well and made sure there weren't any hard feelings if the venture failed.

Jack was always of the firm belief that he should never hold the highest stake in an business venture of his, because he always wanted to give an equal opportunity to all the voices who wanted to be heard for the benefit of the company. Contrary to that Bezos has always been the only individual holding the highest stakes in his company.

Done, with the similarities, there is a huge difference between the two men apart from all that I have mentioned so far, and that is the presence of technical knowledge. Jeff was a wunderkid in school, a genius precisely. Outrageously good in academics, especially science and maths, Jeff was a star student all his life, whereas Jack is exactly opposite on the scale of academics. He began a journey in the most technical realm with absolutely no knowledge of any form of technology and went on to become a force to reckon with.

The other difference that I noticed, and getting back to what I have already spoken about, is employees. Cost cutting is mandatory when you are running a business, and it majorly reflects on the perks and salaries that the employees are offered. Jeff was harsh about it, but Jack had a benefit that Bezos didn't. Bezos was bang right in the middle of the silicon valley, right opposite Microsoft and Google and lost numerous employees to them because they had better work conditions and pay packages. Bezos told his people that if they wanted to be a part of something revolutionary they could be in Amazon and if not they could leave, 'cause he wouldn't raise the money. Jack took advantage of his hometown. He made his initial base in his hometown far away from Shanghai and Beijing where the demand of employees was high and so were their pay packages. If you take the cream, you have to pay for the cream right? But because of Jack's far-sightedness, what he would have to pay 1 employee in Shanghai covered expenses for 10 employees in Hangzhou. So this was another way of cost cutting.

Birth of Alibaba:
The legacy of Alibaba began with a rustic index of the businesses available in China, called ChinaPages. It was basically a directory of all the Chinese businesses.

Slowly slowly when things started becoming cumbersome, Jack had to move on to bigger stages one at a time. His company started creating websites for people of China. But when the world was hit by revolutionary blast of Internet, China was as far away from the revolution as possible. Internet was a scarcity there and what was available was super slow to say the least. The websites that he offered his clients were built by his US counterpart who sent him screenshots which he printed and showed to his clients. His customers had no way of seeing what their site actually looked like.

A company which started off as a basic, unappealing Chinese version of Yellow Pages, is now the brand that houses sites like Taobao.com (a C2C website - Consumer-to-Consumer), the one stop destination for luxury items Tmall.com (a B2C website - Business-to-Consumer), a groupon ripoff Juhuasuan.com, AliExpress.com, Alibaba.com, 1688, alimama.com, Alibaba Cloud (like the much popular AWS -Amazon Web Services), Ant Financial. You can even buy cars from Tmall.com, and not only that but also real estate as well. If you wish you can buy yourself an island in Greece or Fiji from Tmall as well! Taobao is a service provider as well, and the services provided are myriad. You can hire a fake girlfriend to even get counselling from the services listed in Taobao. Juhuasuan even has tie-ups with sperm banks.

Moreover, people of China never had the mindset of splurging on themselves. Whatever they could, they saved for education and medicine. Also, the products available available to them weren't upto the desirable mark, which is why they never bothered buying those items. It was in such times that Alibaba came into existence and put the people of the country forward. He brought quality products to their doorsteps. He put the needs of the common people first. And as a result, Jack tried to introduce online business to a country which didn't even know what online meant because it had no internet.

Alibaba's thorns: 
The biggest rival to Alibaba's initial days was the government itself. The rules and regulations going on in China weren't very pro people. The banks were least bothered about the common masses, about providing better interest rates or anything better for that matter. Land in China is overtly expensive, which is why the market scenario in China is vastly underdeveloped.

To add another obstacle to his path, the government wasn't too keen on the internet. The Communist party wanted to filter and control the information that entered the boundaries of China, lest it should ignite any unfavourable actions in the country. Can you imagine a day in the present world, where you are denied access purposefully from an abundance of information? But Jack used this drawback to his advantage, and his respect for the government norms is substantial to the growth of Alibaba. Ebay had conquered most of the other countries, and China was its next target. But unfortunately, a tough battle was fought out between Alibaba and Ebay, and AliExpress the Chinese contemporary of Ebay, emerged as the winner. There are some bitter notes between Yahoo and Alibaba as well, described in plenty detail in the book.

Additionally, China has always had the issue of counterfeits. Even Alibaba had a tough time to try to weed out fake sellers from their site, but it is so heavily integrated in the root of China that it is absolutely impossible to kill the fakes.  There are not only products which are fakes, but also hotels which are fake and pass off as closebys like Hiyat from Hyatt and so on.

Alibaba End Note: 
The reason why Jack Ma believes his company has survived is because they didn't have any money, any technology nor any plan. That sounds like bull crap to any person, but somehow Jack firmly believes in saying so.

He is often asked, why did he choose an Arabian name Alibaba for a Chinese company. Jack's response to that is everyone knows who Alibaba is, and because of that they can connect to this name, remember it and recognise it very easily. Also, whatever you do, alphabetically Alibaba always comes on top.

Throughout the book, there are numerous instances of various companies raising funds and how they go about doing so, Jack always exercised one motto : Raise money when you don't need it. When you need it don't go out to raise money. It is too late.

Alibaba's primary aim is to expand sustainably and conquer whatever it touches. Alibaba heavily invests in the entertainment industry, it even produces films. It has an internet only, no branch bank called MYbank. It even has an online mutual fund services product called Yu'e Bao.  

Grab the book from Amazon!