Page 50 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

nothing, he vowed to help China get into the Internet mainstream. “When I
told my friends in China that I was going to do something called the Internet,
they didn’t know what I was talking about,” said Ma, whose impishness
compares to that of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Upon his return to Hangzhou, he
borrowed $2,000 from relatives, coaxed his wife to be his partner, and set up
China Pages in 1995, the same year eBay launched and one year after Yahoo!’s
debut. China Pages hosted Web sites for China’s numerous small businesses
and was one of the first Internet companies in the newly opening Chinese
market despite limited bandwidth and hours-long downloads of Web pages.
Two years later, Ma left China Pages after an ill-fated joint venture with
a subsidiary of the government-owned phone behemoth China Telecom; the
control was put in the subsidiary’s hands, and that killed the start-up. “It was
like an elephant and an ant,” said Ma, who had pocketed the largest sum he
had ever seen in his life—$185,000—from the deal. Next, China’s Ministry of
Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation came to the rescue and put him in
charge of information at its newly opened e-commerce initiative for Chinese
businesses, the China International Electronic Commerce Center. That post
paid off big-time in 1997 when Ma played host to Yang on a tour of the Great
Wall and the Summer Palace.
Acting on his entrepreneurial impulses, in 1999 Ma gathered 18 people
at his apartment in Hangzhou and pitched them for two hours on his dream
of building an online international trade fair for China’s numerous mom-and-
pop enterprises, which make everything from shirts to toys. He asked each
one to commit and put his or her money on the table—all $60,000 of it. In
December 1999, as dozens of Internet start-ups debuted in China, Ma started
Alibaba.com with global ambitions. He chose the Arabian Nights–inspired
name because it means the same thing to people all over the world: “Open
sesame” is the command used by the fictional character Ali Baba to enter his
cave full of treasures.

One-upping Meg Whitman

But Ma was not content with the successful Alibaba e-commerce site for busi-
nesses. His dream was to launch an online auction site for consumers like
eBay and to run a news, search, and entertainment site in China like Yahoo!
He did both and then some.

24 SILICON DRAGON