How Alibaba's Jack Ma Became the Richest Man in China
Steve Tobak
English teacher and Internet entrepreneur Jack Ma founded
Alibaba 15 years ago
in his tiny apartment in Hanzhou, China. On Friday, 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.
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.
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.
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/237692 September 23, 2014
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For a long time, Google has been very aware that a
business’ reputation was a major factor
in how their business should rank. However, it wasn’t
until relatively recently that they were
able to accurately incorporate reputation into their
algorithm in terms of how websites rank.
If you haven’t been taking enough time to manage your
reputation, it could impact how well your website ranks in very short order. Do
you know what your customers think about your company?
Why Google Wants
to Know About Your Reputation
The point of the Google algorithm is to put websites that
are working hard
to be there for their customers at the top of the ranks
when a search is performed.
It isn’t just about having the right keywords, or even
the right length of content.
It is about having precisely what your customers’ need,
when they need it. You need to be able
to show that you can put the right information out there
to reach customers, but then
you also need to show that customers are seeing the
benefits of using your products or services.
By adding user-generated content, also known as reviews,
into the algorithm that ranks websites,
it allows Google to put companies higher on the list that
are proving their worth to their clientele. It proves that you say you can do
it, and that customers agree, you truly can.
If you ignore this aspect of your reputation, Google is
going to start lowering
where you rank as a way of letting customers know that
the highest ranked companies
are not only good enough to impress Google itself, but
also customers in your area.
Reputation
Management Is Something Every Business Needs to Focus On
When you decide that you want to work on your reputation,
it is important to look up your company in the same way a potential customer
would. Find out what others are saying about you. You will likely find many
sites that could have information about your company. Read through the
different reviews that have been left, and get a feel for how your customers
see your company.
When a user puts up their review of your company, that’s
considered a first-party review.
These are great testimonials as to how you do business,
and they can naturally help you rank higher when search engines look over your
website.
You having testimonials on your site is great, but when
you can back them up with real reviews from customers who have worked with you
and want to do so again,
this helps Google see you in a shining light and boost
where your website falls in the rankings.
Don’t overlook
your company’s reputation.
It is a very imperative component to where your website
ranks. It tells potential customers
a lot about you, and it can also instil a lot of trust in
your company before a person
even comes to you for help. Put your company in a
position to improve your rank, plus help
even more customers than you already do, by hiring a
reputation management company today!
Within a few years she took the business global, selling
throughout the UK, USA, Canada,
Australia and Europe and receiving over 100,000
hits on the website every month.
In 2011 Carrie launched the Female Entrepreneur
Association as a way to help inspire
and connect female entrepreneurs from around the world.
The network has grown to over 140,000 women and they now produce a digital
magazine,
This Girl Means Business, weekly videos, free online classes and more.
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local,
self-organized events
that bring people together to share a TED-like
experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video
and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and
connection in a small group.
These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx,
where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides
general guidance for the TEDx program,
but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject
to certain rules and regulations)
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Say Your Excuses
Out Loud to Get Better at Fighting Them
Eric Ravenscraft
If there’s one thing humans are good at (besides
regulating body temperature
and manipulating objects with opposable thumbs), it’s
rationalizing.
The next time you catch yourself making excuses to
yourself, say them out loud.
As advice site Impossible explains, your irrational
excuses are likely to sound less reasonable
once you say them out loud to yourself. Internally, you
can feel like there’s a good reason
to justify breaking your diet or giving up on that habit.
Once you say it out loud, you’re more likely to face
reality:
Here’s a simple trick: Say your excuses out loud.
Make a list of all the reasons why you’re NOT doing
something and then say them out loud – with your mouth.
Unless the reason why you can’t do something is “a cheetah
is closing in on me at 70mph
for a late brunch”, then most likely your excuses start
to sound pretty stupid pretty quick
when they’re verbalized.
This self-argument is a handy way to distinguish between
the excuses you have
that are legitimate, and the ones that your emotions are
filling in.
No one would blame you for staying home from work because
you have the flu. However, someone might think it’s dumb to max out your credit
card because you’ve had a hard day.
Why a Phone Call Is Better Than an Email (Usually)
Ross McCammon
This isn’t going
to be about efficiency. Sometimes the phone is a more efficient way to
communicate than e-mail, and sometimes it isn’t. If two people leave a dozen
messages on each other’s voice mail, that’s a lot less efficient than sending a
single e-mail and reading a reply to it.
No, this isn’t going to be about how telephonic
communication helps you work faster.
This is about how the phone makes you
work better.
Because unlike e-mail, the phone forces you to be more
emphatic, more accurate, more honest.
Tell that to a neuroscientist, and before you’ve even
finished the sentence he’ll start laughing
—at what you’re saying, and the accompanying emotional
gradients.
What, you’re not aware of emotional gradients? You have
tons of them, and you’re constantly communicating them to people—but only when
you speak, not when you write.
“We’re picking up and processing heard information
within
50 milliseconds of someone speaking.
A lot of this information doesn’t get processed at a
cognitive level,” says Seth Horowitz,
an auditory neuroscientist. “Some of the first targets
for heard information
are emotional substrates, so [when] listening to
someone’s voice,
you’re picking up emotional gradients from them.”
Read the following e-mails and consider the emotional
gradients that aren’t being conveyed.
From: Corleone,
Michael “Don”
To: Staff
Subject: Me
Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back
in!
Best,
DC
From: Gekko,
Gordon
To: Fox,
Bud
Subject: Lunch
… is for wimps.
-G
From: Blake
To: The
Fellas
Subject: Reminder
ABC. A—always. B—be. C—closing.
Always be closing. Always be closing.
Yours in closing,
Blake
Joe Huff, co-founder of Los Angeles-based LSTN
Headphones, which partners with a nonprofit
that provides hearing aids to people in need,
is—obviously—a believer in the power of voice.
“There have been so many times, a new store or account or
potential press relationship,
we’ve gotten on the phone with them and after the
conversation, even [after] just a 15-minute story about what we do and why,
they say, ‘Wow, I read everything on your website,
but to hear you tell it, there’s a huge difference.’
Because we have a passion-based business, it’s really
important for us to get that across.”
This happens all the time in business. Yet we are still
wary of picking up the phone.
We don’t want to bother people. We think they don’t want
to talk. And maybe they don’t.
But you’re not ever going to find that out through
e-mail. You’ll find it out on the phone.
If they stammer, hedge and pause, then you have valuable
information.
Maybe not the information you were looking for, but
valuable info nonetheless.
THE MEANING OF SILENCE
Speaking of pausing, it’s important to remember that some
of the most valuable information comes from the pauses in a phone conversation.
Pauses that simply don’t exist in written communication.
Says Horowitz: “There have been studies that show
that if you’re presenting a listener
with a series of words or tones, and you
take an extended silence,
certain populations of cells in their brains start
looking for the signal,
and if it doesn’t happen in a certain period of time,
it triggers arousal centers, emotional centers.
Silence is an important part of communication, and
something people don’t pay attention to.”
Our obsession with e-mail denies a crucial truth about
human beings: that we have evolved
as listeners, not as readers. Here’s Horowitz again—and
as you read this paragraph,
think about how much more powerful it would be if this
guy were talking to you on the phone:
“We think about ourselves as being the new smartest
rulers of the planet, but our ears
have evolved, and a basic brain circuitry of hearing has
evolved over 400 million years,
and a lot of it centered on hearing the sound of your own
species. That’s the most important signal, even if you can’t see them. Hearing
evolved as your alarm system, because we’re diurnal, we don’t see well at
night, but our hearing is running all through the darkness
and even when we are
asleep. A sound, even without a visual tie to it, is very important to us.
We’ve evolved to listen to other people talk.”
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/238385
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Reputation Management for Your Business: The Competitive
Advantage You Can’t Afford to Neglect
Jaz
In the business world of today, reputation management is
everything.
Consumers, perhaps more than in any time in history, are
technologically savvy
and will do their research before committing to do
business with your company.
As such, you cannot afford to neglect placing a heavy
emphasis on reputation management.
Doing so will pay off many times over;
neglecting to do so will drive potential customers into
the waiting arms of your competitors.
We utilize next-generation software that enables us to
manage your reputation in real time.
This means we steer clients to you on an ongoing basis,
and we update your company profile
to reflect the latest developments in product and service
offerings.
Here are just a few of the things we can do for you.
Build local brand
awareness
The Internet is a big place. What’s more, given
that there are no boundaries between websites,
it’s entirely possible for a potential customer searching
for your product to find the website
of a company a few states over. And, given that
many companies offer perks such as free shipping, there’s not much that keeps a
company like that from stealing your customers.
Fortunately, we are able to build local brand awareness
for you.
What this means is we aggressively market your company to
those consumers
in your geographic area. When they do a search for
your product or service,
they will find you instead of your competition from a few
states over.
Drive traffic—both
online and offline
Of course, having clients who are aware of your brand
and
getting them to commit to the purchase are two different things.
So we
take things a step further, and help drive traffic to your door—be it a virtual or a real door.
We take steps to encourage potential customers to
actually make the purchase of your good
or service. There are a number of ways to do this,
and we tailor our traffic direction strategy specifically to meet the unique
strengths of your business and industry.
The result: higher sales, both online and in person.
Turn mobile
searchers into buyers of your good or service
Mobile search is one of the most rapidly growing areas of
opportunity in Internet marketing.
At one point, so few people used mobile phones for Internet
searches that businesses could essentially ignore this market segment and focus
instead on personal computer Internet users.
No longer is this the case. In some segments of the
population,
mobile searches are markedly more common than personal computer
searches.
What’s more, given the constantly improving technology of
smartphones, tablets,
and other portable devices, this figure is only going to
increase.
We take advantage of this trend by utilizing software
that targets mobile searches
and optimizes your company’s website to do the same.
The result is that we are able to capture a significant
portion of mobile searches.
If you’re serious about taking your business to the next
step in Internet marketing,
