š Read with Me #3: The House that Jack Built
A book that I enjoyed recently
Title, Author: Alibaba, The House that Jack built, Duncan Clark
One Liner: The story behind Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba - one of the worldās largest tech company and one of the worlds largest tech IPOs. The book covers Jackās rise from english school teacher to Alibaba CEO
Other media: Check out a summary here
I enjoyed this book and definitely think itās worth a read. Instead of giving a summary, Iām gonna focus on a few the lessons I learnt.
Consistency of purpose
One of the fascinating things about Jackās story is the pattern of consistency in his purpose. Iām not sure whether he did this consciously - the book doesnāt speak to this, however, itās a pattern I spotted. His first business was a translation service to help Chinese companies that wanted to export their products. His next business, ChinaPage, was an online directory that helped Chinese companies looking for customers abroad. His next business was Alibaba, which yet again started off as a platform helping Chinese businesses connect with global businesses/ customers. Alibaba has of course grown and evolved since then. However, itās fascinating to see the consistency of purpose across the 3 businesses that Jack Ma built.
Every business starts with a purpose or a problem that youād like to solve. Reading Jackās story was a reminder that the failure of a business does not mean that you canāt take a different approach to trying to solve the same problem.On āfailureā
Itās quite amazing to read how often Jack failed. In China, they have/had an exam system called gaokao. I think itās equivalent to A-Levels, the IB, WAEC and such. Jack Ma failed the exam not once but twice. The first time, he got 1/120 on the maths exam. The next time, he got 19/120. The third time he got 89/120 but that score limited the schools he could go to which is how he ended up becoming a teacher. The message here isnāt that every failure will be ārewardedā with building a billion dollar business. However, itās a reminder that you can try really hard at something and still not get the outcome you want.
I struggled with āfailureā when I started my first business. I struggled to understand that I could really, really want an outcome and try really, really hard to get it ā¦ and yet still not get the outcome that I really, really wanted. šÆ.
Iāve heard this from a Jay Shetty podcast as well as from my life coach but itās important to understand that your life is a co-creative project with the universe. You can do your part and do everything perfectly and still not get the outcome you want. Instead, what I try to do is to spend a time in a place of gratitude for the journey Iāve come on. This doesnāt mean Iām no longer ambitious. Instead itās accepting the fact there are certain things my efforts alone cannot control.Its not ova till its ova
Back in the early 2000s, Alibaba was predominantly a B2B (business to business) company and eBay (a predominantly C2C - consumer to consumer) company) was trying to enter the market. eBay decided to buy a C2C company called Each.net which had ~95% market share of the C2C business. Jack Ma saw that over time, eBay could use this foothold to enter the B2B market since many small businesses in China kind of act like consumers (this alone is fascinating insight btw). He decided to square off with eBay and launched TaoBao. Slowly but surely, he cleared eBay such that by 2006, TaoBao had a market share of 67% and eBayās had slumped to 29%. This medium post does a good job of talking about how he did this (Tl;Dr - Alibaba did some things well and eBay also made some disastrous errors).
In any case, it was a reminder that in many industries, itās not over till itās over. So often, I hear people talking about businesses having āwonā a certain industry in African tech, for example. And whilst, itās true that in certain industries, itās very difficult to unseat incumbents .. do remember that even in the social media world with its famous network effects, Tik Tok is breathing down Metaās neck.
This is definitely a book Iād recommend. There are many more gems and lessons xx
Yasmin.