Alibaba audiobook

The impact of Alibaba is not fully appreciated outside China as much as it is within China. Outside China, people may have known the big IPO of Alibaba ($25 billion in 2014) and perhaps some odd founder but I don’t think they understand how much the Internet has changed people’s lives and, particularly, companies such as Alibaba boosted that process. Without the internet, it’s hard to imagine how China would have evolved over the last few decades and how the private sector would have driven the county forward.When it comes to Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, he is presented as a very entertaining person. The book goes back to his youth, the struggles and the failures that he had in the past. Jack is a self-made man, not interested in the government-connected privileged Harvard types. Moreover, he is a kind of icon in China as he did not come from a great family. He did not have a great educational background and yet he was able to achieve a position of business magnate, investor, philanthropist and a global ambassador for Chinese business. He started out as a translator but, simultaneously, was selling carpets on the side to make ends meet. The book also tells a few stories which depict how tough his career was. For instance, once he tried to get a job at KFC, together with other 23 candidates. The only person who was rejected was Jack.Later, the book focuses on his business endeavours. On one hand, the book presents him as a very dedicated and passionate entrepreneur, focused on customers, employees and technology. On the other hand, the story clearly underlines that he didn’t have any clear vision of making business on the internet and, actually, he and his companies have evolved based on issues he got to grips with.In great majority, the book focuses on the story of Alibaba and Taobao. How these companies looked like at the beginning and how they have performed over time. It is worth to say that for almost five years the whole platform was free and the goal was to provide business-to-business (B2B), consumer-to-consumer (C2C) and business-to-consumer (B2C) sales via its platform. These companies were far from being successful overnight, however, the book provides a logical and disciplined approach of shaping their current structure and values. The book also details the scale of the business based on the singles’ day in 2015, the equivalent of Black Friday, when Alibaba’s website generated four hundred and sixty-seven million packages requiring more than 1.7 million couriers and 400,000 vehicles to deliver the goods. It also states that Alibaba would not be the giant as it is today without its army of couriers which adopted clever methods to keep the cost at rock-bottom. In Shanghai, for instance, couriers shuttled back and forth on the subway passing packages over barriers to one another to avoid buying multiple tickets.The book is also a riveting story of how the company competed with major multinational conglomerates specialising in e-commerce and retail. It was really interesting to read about how a better understanding of local customs has helped Alibaba to battle much bigger companies such as E-bay, Google or PayPal.The one thing about why is Alibaba so impactful is Jack’s formulation of the iron triangle. this is bringing together e-commerce, finance... (if you like to read my full review please visit my blog https://leadersarereaders.blog/alibab...)

Never underestimate Jack Ma. Those 4 words are the repeated storyline of this book. While this "school teacher" may come across as humble and common, his fondness for Forest Gump is foretelling. For those who liked The Everything Store story of Amazon, this book is the best English account of the unlikely tale of Alibaba and a Gump-like character known to the world as Jack Ma. Read this book and you will find that China has quite a few insights to teach the west about online shopping. Far more Chinese consumers order their groceries online than groups in the west and the levels of customer service provided set a very high comparative mark. The SARS scare had a huge impact on Alibaba and also e-commerce in China as it drove more people to shop online when they didn't want to be exposed to a pandemic. With a Gump-like ending, Jack has vast successes that seem pedestrian. The results run much deeper than luck, never underestimate Jack Ma.

“Today is brutal, tomorrow is more brutal, but the day after tomorrow is beautiful. However, the majority of people will die tomorrow night .”Jack Ma’s quote finds resonance with any team/organization striving towards a lofty goal. There are days in your professional life when you are on the verge of throwing it all away and walking off and a lot many of us do just that. But still a few still persevere and this hard work eventually finds it’s worthy rewards. Alibaba’s rise to prominence in China is a chronicle of how hard work, perseverance, luck and a canny business acumen can take you a long way. It is also the story of the charismatic Jack Ma whose soundbites have since then made him a darling of social media. The book however focusses more on Alibaba as a company than it does on Jack Ma as an individual. While their lives are more or less intertwined, there is but precious little you can take away about Jack Ma especially from the years after he became the successful head of the entire Alibaba umbrella. The author has had a direct access to Jack and he uses it along with his own personal connections to weave a pretty good yarn.China has been a consumer market that businesses have been keen to explore and tap into but with governmental focus being what it is, how would a business find its footing ? The struggles Jack underwent until the creation and eventual success of Taobao and Tmall is also a history of internet fuelled entrepreneurship in China. While the author does not go into too much of detail, the gradual lowering of walls in China is a factor that helped usher in a new age. A few of the internet portals rose to prominence prior to the entry of Yahoo into the mix and all this while Jack slowly kept his company going. The eventual all-trumpets-blaring arrival of eBay changed the whole outlook about Alibaba and the eventual humbling of this global major cemented Jack’s position as a tech tycoon to watch out for. All through the eBay v/s Alibaba battle, the shrewdness that Jack and his second-in-command Joe Tsai exhibit makes for great reading. The book ends with the IPO V2.0 of the firm and also ponders on some of the challenges that the road ahead might bring for Alibaba. The material in here is just splendid. You cannot really read about the contributions of people like Jack Ma, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin/Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg et al without being truly impressed at the scale with which their businesses have grown and how they touch our lives virtually . But even with such a treasure trove of information, the book suffers from superficiality at a lot of places. For instance where the subject matter would have asked for a detailed analysis (like the business strategy at Alibaba), the author skips over with only a customary view at things. It would have been understandable if this was done for Jack Ma’s biography but considering the fact that it is biography of the company, this did not sit too well with me. Ironically I also felt that at places where brevity would have admirably done the job in conveying the message to the reader, there is quite a lot of information poured out.It is a good read to perhaps start off in understanding Jack Magic but a deeper and more analytical view of the organization would have done wonders as a book. Note : The rating is somewhere in the hinterlands between a 3 and a 4 star.

After reading Porter Erisman's "Alibaba's World" recently, this book by Duncan Clark is a useful continuation of the Alibaba story for me. Not continuation in the literal sense (since it also covers the period from startup to the second IPO) but rather it adds layers of information which I found useful.While Erisman actually worked at Alibaba, Duncan Clark on the other hand only consulted for it. As such, I found Erisman's book much more anecdotal (based on his personal experiences), whilst Clark provides a lot more information on the competitive and regulatory challenges facing Alibaba during that time. Other China internet giants like Sohu, Sina, NetEase, Tencent, Baidu, etc are covered in sufficient detail (including its battle with the then uber internet giant Yahoo), giving the reader a better grasp of the early battle for China e-commerce supremacy and how Alibaba managed to not only survive but thrive. Overall, I enjoyed this book very much although there is one minor complaint. Towards the last one third of the book, the number of end note references seemed to mushroom for no good reason. For instance (just examples for illustration, I can't be bothered to go back and hunt for actual sentences) a sentence would go like "In 2010, Alibaba acquired XYZ (9)". When I checked the end note it would read something like "9. For $380 million". Or another example, "then CFO XYZ (3) stated that ....' and the end note would say "3. Now CEO of ABC". I don't understand why the additional information being so short couldn't just be incorporated into the main text. After a while it just got annoying flipping back and forth and seriously interrupted the flow.

A good book that also gives quite an introduction to the Chinese business and entrepreneurial reality as well as challenges.

A very interesting perspective on the whole Chinese Internet market, not just Alibaba. I learned quite a bit about American companies’ struggles in China, the history of e-commerce battles between Alibaba and eBay, and also how Yahoo’s history was in many ways a story of a successful investment in Alibaba followed by massive mismanagement by the CEO. Add to that the colorful personality of Jack Ma and the involvement of Softbank (its CEO, Masayoshi San has a very different philosophy to Jack) and it makes for an entertaining and enlightening read.

The first 100 pages feels like a stint from Ocean Eleven. Jack Ma built an industry where internet penetration was non existent. With government watching every step you take, Alibaba transformed how small businesses function in an isolated country. With fierce competition from local players and eBay on the horizon, Jack Ma was able to defend the bastion and led the company to a record breaking IPO.The last 50 pages are average and hence I had to bring down one star. I would highly recommend this book.

"Alibaba is not a story it is a strategy" the ending lines reverberate the current path the businesses are going on. The investor capital forges the power to launch the cannon which goes through the air of offers and discounts to drive out the competitor from the market. The current economic scenario of loss making businesses to become profitable is the distant future. The free and discounts distorts the market in a way that competition is bound to be destroyed.This is the strategy that Alibaba used to succeed.The success that Alibaba got is a blend of vision and culture that the company stands for. The customer first approach mixed with employees second strategy is what Alibaba paved the road with. The culture of martial arts characters name was something that Alibaba employees got free apart from the dedication to go through the difficult phases be it late night works or SARS. This book gives you a good management education through central protagonist Jack Ma and other Chinese entrepreneurs. China is a market that is hard to crack due to its government regulations and heretical consumers yet, those who cracked it reaped the benefits and surely Jack magic did that. Cultural clashes can be pain: is taught by this book and need to taken into consideration while mergers and acquisitions. From a old side apartment in Hangzhou to headquarters in China is surely a strategy of Forest Gump and a stubborn 💓.

Great story about the history of internet and ecommerce in China, and how Jack Ma succeeded to be the father-like winner in the competition.The book tells interesting story of Jack’s early entrepreneurship ventures (China Pages) that didn’t succeed and what he learned from there. Having visited Hangzhou personally it was captivating to read the encounters happened to Jack near West LakeThe book also covers chronological development of China’s dot-com-boom ventures in early 2000. As a westerner you’ve never heard of companies like Sina, Sohu and NetEase, which were China’s largest portal websites at the time.It’s funny and surely well-inteded that the story always underlines how all the entrepreneurs were well-educated in IVY league schools in the US, before returning and venturing in China, while Jack had only teacher qualification from a low-tier Chinese university.The book is easy to read, the author is well-informed (being Jack’s friend). At the same time the book is overly positive and perhaps lacks some more uncomfortable analysis.Nevertheless, this is a must read if you’d like to understand China and it’s development to internet economy

A very detailed account of China’s dotcom era and the rise and fall of the many. I liked the super-fast pace of the book, which is probably because there was so much to cover in such a short period of time. One of the few books I couldn’t let go till I had read it cover to cover. It’s a must read for anyone who wants to understand how China’s dotcom became the global engine that it is today and what to expect if Alibaba comes to your country. In my own context, it was a very interesting read, given the recent acquisition of Pakistan’s biggest online e-commerce portal Daraz.pk by Alibaba. A must read for all and be sure to keep your eyes on Alibaba!

More like 3.5 stars. I’m a big fan of Jack Ma and Alibaba, but this biography just didn’t do a great job of introducing the reader to him. It was adequate, but focused on a lot of pointless details in some places, and short on facts and analysis on other places. It is especially hard to see how replicable what he did really is. The book felt sometimes fawning to a degree which really calls into question overall objectivity, too.

Interesting overview of the China macroeconomic state. Also demonstrates how little the outside world knows about the way China operates. Especially after the much celebrated Ma simply disappeared from the Public eye for more than a year. Imagine the same thing happening with (say, a) Zuckerberg or Musk in the US.

Finished listening to Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built by Duncan Clark in Audible. I would recommend this book highly if you want to know how software giants got built outside of Silicon Valley. This book does give a great deal of insight into Jack's personality, his work ethic, how he motivates his employees as well as gains the trust of business clients and customers. How he dealt with his competitors - Yahoo and eBay, for example - as they tried to break into the Chinese market. The growth of e-commerce as in turn, the government loosened control on financial institutions as well as on business opportunities. I was struck by Jack’s ability to persevere through difficult circumstances countless times.Some key take-aways from this book are - * It is mostly unfavorable for foreign companies like eBay and Yahoo to enter into the China market, mainly due to government hindrance, information censorship and approaches to localize their products or websites.* There are several equivalently important factors contributing to Alibaba's success: timing, leadership, the ability to seize opportunities, business connections, and government policy.* The difficulties to explore other business opportunities when Alibaba is at its peak in recent years, especially after its IPO. Exploiting different business strategies such as M&A and develop new business lines is not positioning Alibaba to crack Tencent's dominance. Instead of competing with each other, coalitions or partnerships are a better option. * I thought much of what was said in the book about other Chinese internet startups was not helpful, as Clark was not able to effectively draw out the differences between Alibaba and these startups. Learning about why these startups failed could have been potentially valuable to readers in understanding Alibaba’s success, but I felt that the book lacked depth in this area.And here are some quotes -* Alibaba changed China in the past 15 years. We hope in the next 15 years, the world will change because of Alibaba.* Today is brutal, tomorrow is more brutal, but the day after tomorrow is beautiful. However, the majority of people will die tomorrow night.* Many people think of Alibaba as a story. It's not just a story, it's a strategy.* A private tycoon once said, In the eyes of a government, we are nothing but cockroaches. If he wants to kill you, he kills you. If he wants to let you live, he lets you live.* In traditional Chinese society, people have three dreams. The first is a wise emperor. People hope to have a good leader so that they can have peace in the country. The second dream is clean officials. If there are no clean officials, then comes the third dream, chivalrous heroes. People hope that heroes could stand for them, kill the greedy officials, and bring justice back to society. However, if there are no heroes, people can only seek comfort from martial arts fiction. That's why many Chinese people like kung fu novels.* As a business, if you cannot change the law, follow the law... Respect the local government. WE're not interested in politics. We're just focused on e-commerce.* Come up with an idea, make it fun, and breathe some magic into it which otherwise is still just an idea. That’s Jack Magic for you.* When you are managing a platform with nine million merchants on it, you’re running a country.* American B2B sites are whales. But 85 percent of the fish in the sea are shrimp-sized. I don’t know anyone who makes money from whales, but I’ve seen many making money from shrimp.* At that time, my slogan was ‘Be the last man standing.’ Be the last person to fall down. Even on my knees, I had to be the last man collapsing. I also believed firmly at that time that if I had difficulties, there must be someone who had worse difficulties; if I had a hard time, my opponents had an even harder time. Those who can stand and manage will win eventually.If you can’t tolerate your opponents as enemies, you have already lost the beginning of the game. If you hang your opponent as a target, and practice throwing darts at him every day, you are only able to fight this one enemy, not others. Competition is the greatest joy. When you compete with others, and find that it brings you more and more agony, there must be something wrong with your competition strategy.* I believe that we should give opportunities to young people in China, sharing the future with them… * I believe [in] customers first, employees second, shareholders third. We wouldn’t have this company without our staff.* It is not necessary to study an MBA. Most MBA graduates are not useful… Unless they come back from their MBA studies and forget what they’ve learned at school, then they will be useful. Because schools teach knowledge, while starting businesses requires wisdom. Wisdom is acquired through experience. Knowledge can be acquired through hard work.Source: http://www.dragon-bishop.com/2020/08/...

The House that Jack Ma Built is a story of Alibaba and Ma Yun (Jack Ma). Jack Ma as he is known outside China, is one of the most well known, if not the most well known Chinese tech entrepreneur. But, unlike other well known tech entrepreneurs, like Bill Gates, Tim Berners Lee, Steve jobs, Jerry Yang, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page etc, who have a gackground in computer programming, Jack Ma started his carreer as an English teacher. He was an ordinary child and student growing up. Born in 1964 to a photopgrapher and a factory worker. Though ordinary, he had a strong desire to learn English. Therefore, it is not surprising that In 1994, whilst teaching English, he forms his first company, Hangzhou Haibo Translation Agency. Which basically translates either China into English, or English into China. It is through this agency that he is hired to go to the US to help resolve some contractual misunderstanding, arising due to the language barrier. There in the US, he learns about the internet but he cannot find any information on China or Chinese products and so the idea of China Pages was born. On his return he founds China Pages, which created web sites for Chinese businesses. This was one of China’s first Internet companies. However, he left the company two years later and joined an information technology company established by a department of the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation as its head. Two years later he quits his job and founds Alibaba with 18 other people including his wife in their apartment. Then, the journey of Alibaba starts, with its ups and downs.It is really an interesting and inspiring read, especially for those interested in startups or just doing business in China or with Chinese partners. I particularly liked this biography because it did not just focuss on Jack and his business but it also gave context to Jack's business environement. Thus, the book is loaded with lessons and wisdom for entrepreneurs, not just from Jack's experiences but also from his rivals. The only drawback for me in this book is that it focusses more on his business than on Jack's personality. Perhaps, this is due to the fact that the author of the book is an investment advisor.

It is really a great book to know about Jack Ma and the story behind the rise of Alibaba. Duncan Clark made great efforts in pointing down each and everything to give us a detailed theory behind the Alibaba empire. At his young age, he learned English with the help of foreigners who visited China when the Open Door Policy was launched. Every morning, he used to visit the lake to give a free tour for the visitors and learned English with the help of them. Later he changed his childhood name, Ma Yun to Jack Ma as one of his Australian friends gave him the nickname as 'Jack'. He was rejected from many jobs including one as a hotel waiter because of his height. He is also very weak in Maths at his earlier life but later he improved his skills in several ways. When there was internet boom, he understood that there are lots of opportunities over e-commerce and made it effective. This book also describes how China opened up to the internet and the global economy. In Alibaba, they follow six principles as veins of their organization and everyone treats them very seriously which are really interesting (1.Customer first, 2.Team work, 3.Embrace change, 4.Passion, 5.Integrity and, 6.Commitment). Also, Chinese government regulations helped Alibaba's growth in several ways by avoiding several foreign companies. He also brought development on the internet in his country so that he can take his e-commerce business to the next level. If you read the book, you will know more about Jack Ma's strategies in developing the business worldwide. The Journey from a school teacher to a billionaire is really interesting and people who would like to know more about Jack ma, Alibaba should read it without fail.