Alibaba's World

Alibaba’s World is an inside look at one of the world’s largest e-commerce companies from one of its first Western employees, who served as its vice president and head of international marketing for several years, showing how this company turned from startup to global player in just 15 years.

The founder of Alibaba.com, Jack Ma, has not only never written a line of code, he also didn’t even own a computer until he was 33 years old. In fact, before starting Alibaba, he struggled in most of his jobs. Having failed his college entry exams three times and working as an English teacher after eventually graduating, he heard about the internet by coincidence in 1994.

Seeing how it offered little to no information for and about China, he started putting together websites with his friends, eventually making a decent living building corporate websites. However, until 1999, when founding Alibaba, he had never run his own before. What’s more, only 1% of the Chinese population had internet access, and none of these people were buying things online, because they didn’t trust the system yet.

But Jack didn’t choose to see those things. He didn’t focus on Google, or eBay, or his lack of knowledge. He chose to see a potential market of one billion customers.

If you lowball all of your goals, you’re cutting yourself short. Shoot for the moon, dare to test the limits of what’s possible, try to go beyond them. Even if the rest of the world doesn’t see a new reality yet, if you do, you might bring just what the world needs to make it happen.

There are many things you can screw up when launching a business. One of the most common ones is setting the wrong time horizon. You’d be surprised how many founders don’t even plan for the next six months, focusing just on the next few weeks at a time. Others plan on a big exit 2-4 years down the line, which is better, but still not right. If you plan to take on something as crazy as building a great company, which takes all of your energy, time, your blood, sweat and tears, how could you not make it the goal of a lifetime? Jack Ma decided right from the get-go that he wanted Alibaba to be around for at least 80 years. A goal he later even increased to 102 years. Wanting to build something that lasts a lifetime drastically changes your day-to-day decisions. No more short-term gimmicks, no more quick fixes, no more hacks. Only this extreme long-term focus allowed Jack to postpone the company’s IPO, start by offering free services and not give in to investors’ demands to…