Bill Barnett: Where Are the Authentic Entrepreneurs?

“I felt lonely when I started working in the internet business in China around 1995. Everyone thought you were a con man.” When Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba shared this memory with a packed audience at Stanford in the spring of 2013, lots of people chuckled. Who is this self-described “loner” who “didn’t know anything about technologies” yet built an unlikely internet start-up into the world’s largest e-commerce website?

The case study of Taobao vs. eBay China taught by Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor William Barnett details how Jack Ma and Alibaba-owned Taobao defeated the global leader of e-commerce and payments in mainland China. Alibaba’s momentum continues to build: in November 2013, the company’s Taobao and Tmall platforms broke a world record by posting sales in 24 hours that topped $5.7 billion, approximately four times the total of the previous Cyber Monday in the US. Now Alibaba is heading toward an IPO that may be valued at $100 billion or more--higher than Facebook.

The self-made Ma is not your typical tech entrepreneur. Without any business education background, or “rich father, and strong uncle,” as Ma said in his keynote at the 2nd China 2.0 annual conference in September 2011, he was “a blind man riding a blind tiger” when he first started. With strong government influences and a nascent online user base, China’s environment for starting an internet firm at that time was far less than ideal.

It took a lot of courage for Ma to embark on a journey into the unknown 20 years ago. As Barnett wrote in his blog “Where are the authentic entrepreneurs?” “…[I]t turns out that at times or in places where entrepreneurship is least likely, those few entrepreneurs who do appear are most likely to win big.” Jack Ma certainly is one of them.

To read Professor Barnett’s blog post, please click here.