Jack Ma

Businessman

1964-09-10

Quotes by Jack Ma

• A trade war would be a disaster for the world. It's very easy to slip into a trade war.

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• Our philosophy is that we want to be an ecosystem. Our philosophy is to empower others to sell, empower others to service, making sure the other people are more powerful than us. With our technology, our innovation, our partners - 10 million small business sellers - they can compete with Microsoft and IBM.

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• Alibaba is an ecosystem that helps small business to grow.

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• My job is making money, helping other people make money. I am spending money, trying to make sure more people get rich, because you cannot spend a lot of money, right? So my job is spending money, helping others. This is a headache.

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• Spending money is much more difficult than making money.

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• My dream was to set up my own e-commerce company. In 1999, I gathered 18 people in my apartment and spoke to them for two hours about my vision. Everyone put their money on the table, and that got us $60,000 to start Alibaba. I wanted to have a global company, so I chose a global name.

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• A startup for entrepreneurs is like a baby, and I have five babies so far - experienced father.

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• I call Alibaba '1,001 mistakes.' We expanded too fast, and then in the dot-com bubble, we had to have layoffs. By 2002, we had only enough cash to survive for 18 months. We had a lot of free members using our site, and we didn't know how we'd make money. So we developed a product for China exporters to meet U.S. buyers online. This model saved us.

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• We should keep on going along the path of globalization. Globalization is good... when trade stops, war comes.

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• There's an examination for young people to go to university. I failed it three times. I failed a lot. So I applied to 30 different jobs and got rejected. I went for a job with the police; they said, 'You're no good.' I even went to KFC when it came to my city. Twenty-four people went for the job. Twenty-three were accepted.

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• Alibaba spends money on improving the products and services, not on kickbacks. That's a good thing. It's called a value system, and because of that, we get more and more small- to medium-sized companies to support us in China.

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• If Alibaba cannot become a Microsoft or Wal-Mart, I will regret it for the rest of my life.

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• Never give up. Today is hard, tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be sunshine.

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• I don't think I'm a workaholic. Every weekend, I invite my colleagues and friends to my home to play cards. And people, my neighbors, are always surprised because I live on the second floor apartment, and there are usually 40 pairs of shoes in front of my gate, and people play cards inside and play chess. We have a lot of fun.

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• The world needs new leadership, but the new leadership is about working together.

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• There are big problems that change the world. If we are working together, that will make us understand each other, appreciate each other, help each other.

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• I think Yahoo is a great company, with great assets.

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• Help young people. Help small guys. Because small guys will be big. Young people will have the seeds you bury in their minds, and when they grow up, they will change the world.

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• On privacy issues, it's just like hundreds of years ago when people said, 'I would rather put my money under my pillow than in a bank.' But today, banks know how to protect money much better than you do. Today, we may not have the answers to privacy issues, but I believe our young people will come up with the solutions.

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