Tag: Lessons from Jack Ma

5 failures Jack Ma had to face in life which helped him succeed in the long run

Here are the greatest failures/lessons from Jack Ma’s life.

Jack Ma, the 52 year old successful entrepreneur prefers considering himself to be an artist. The founder of the popular e-commerce platform, Alibaba, has had to face some major failures in his life which helped him succeed in the long run.

Here are the greatest failures/lessons of Jack Ma’s life:

1. He failed in school

Far from being the brightest student, he almost didn’t make it to middle school because he flunked too many subjects. However, he didn’t let this deter him and just like other successful men who weren’t the brightest in school like Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein etc, he went on to carve a niche for himself.
“I failed a key primary school test two times, I failed the middle school test three times, I failed the college entrance exam two times.”

2. He scored less than 1% in Mathematics

Jack Ma has also had the misfortune of scoring 1 out of 120 in the math portion of his college entrance. Despite not having heard of the term “computer” in his childhood or acing maths or management or any required subject, he managed to get past the weaknesses and succeed in building the e-commerce giant, Alibaba.

“I am not good at math, have never studied management, and still cannot read accounting reports.”

Related Post: Lessons entrepreneurs can learn from Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma



3. Rejection from Harvard

It was Ma’s dream to study in Harvard which never worked out as he was rejected ten times. Even though he never made it to Harvard, this failure gives us a glimpse of his persistence and determination.

4. The only candidate who got rejected by KFC

After being turned down by almost 30 companies, Ma applied to KFC and he was the only one out of 24 candidates who didn’t get the job. Ma believes that he didn’t get the job only because he was short in stature and not good looking compared to the other applicants. This was a huge setback for him but he didn’t take it too personally and went on to do greater things.

Related Post: 6 ways in which Alibaba is altering the internet for the better

5. Initial issues related to Alibaba

He suffered a dearth of failures in the initial days of Alibaba as well. it wasn’t profitable, he couldn’t find Venture Capitalists for the company and the company almost went bankrupt after the dot-com bubble burst. He was relentless which is why the company still exists today.





Lessons entrepreneurs can learn from Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma

English teacher and Internet entrepreneur Jack Ma founded Alibaba 15 years ago in his tiny apartment in Hanzhou, China. Jack Ma became the richest man in China on the heels of the biggest IPO in U.S. and possibly world history.

English teacher and Internet entrepreneur Jack Ma founded Alibaba 15 years ago in his tiny apartment in Hanzhou, China. Jack Ma became the richest man in China on the heels of the biggest IPO in U.S. and possibly world history.

With a market cap of $231 billion, the online retailer is nearly as valuable as Wal-Mart and bigger than Amazon and eBay combined.

And this is just the beginning. Alibaba plans to expand aggressively in America and Europe and has already invested nearly $1 billion in a host of U.S.-based startups, including Uber, Lyft, ShopRunner, Fanatics, Tango and Kabam.

Every current and aspiring entrepreneur and business leader should learn from how a Chinese English teacher turned a vision, a group of friends and $60,000 into untold riches and the world’s most valuable Internet commerce company. It will no doubt be studied in business schools for generations.

Also read: How Jeff Bezos Started – Life of Amazon.com’s founder

Start here, go anywhere. Recognizing the importance of English, young Ma would ride his bike to a nearby hotel and guide foreigners around the city just to learn and practice the language. His passion for entrepreneurship in many ways parallels Masayoshi Son who grew up poor, followed his dream to Silicon Valley and graduated from U.C. Berkeley before founding Softbank. As chairman of Softbank and Sprint, Son is now the richest man in Japan.

He had vision … and he had help. Ma saw the Internet’s enormous potential to bridge businesses across China’s huge population early on. So he and his wife brought 17 friends together and pooled $60,000 to start the company. That formed the basis for the company’s dynamic partnership structure and unique culture designed to drive collaboration, diminish bureaucracy and promote accountability for long-term growth.

Go big or go home. Even if crowdfunding existed when Alibaba was founded, I doubt if Ma would have gone that route. He’s simply not a “dip your toe in the water” kind of guy. Instead he and his friends went all in, raising a $5 million angel round, $20 million from Softbank in 2000, $1 billion from Yahoo five years later, and $1.6 billion from Silver Lake Partners and DST Global in 2011. That’s how you make it big.

Big problems lead to big opportunities. China’s lack of brick and mortar infrastructure has always been an insurmountable hurdle for the enormous nation’s small business merchants. Alibaba solved that and now accounts for 80% of the country’s ecommerce – a whopping $248 billion last year and more than twice that of Amazon.



Innovation comes from unique individuals who think and act differently. Everyone talks about changing the world and making tons of money these days, but those who actually do it are exceptional individuals with breakthrough ideas, uncommon vision and a passion to do great work. Disruptive innovation comes from people who break from the status quo and carve their own path.

Also read: How Elon Musk Started – The Life Of SpaceX and Tesla’s Founder

Stand on the shoulders of giants … but learn from their mistakes. Like Amazon and eBay, Alibaba is an Internet commerce company, but that’s where the similarity ends. Alibaba does not actually hold inventory or sell goods. It’s a middleman that collects annual fees and commissions from larger merchants and advertising fees from smaller ones. The result is one of the most scalable and profitable business models on Earth.

What’s in a name? Less than you think. Apple. Facebook. Google. Microsoft. Uber. One Kings Lane. Fanatics. Starbucks. Whole Foods. What do the names and brands of all these companies have in common? Absolutely nothing. Some are conjunctions or made-up words. Others are common words or phrases. There’s even a fruit. It’s what your business does for customers that counts … not your name or personal brand.

Jack Ma was sitting in a San Francisco coffee shop when he thought of how Ali Baba overheard the secret password of The 40 Thieves — “open sesame” — and unlocked untold riches. It resonated with his vision of unlocking the potential of China’s small and midsized merchants. Now you know the secret of how he accomplished his dream.

Also read: How Bill Gates Started – The Life of Microsoft’s Founder

Image credit: s1.zetaboards.com