I say no to a lot of ideas because that's a CEO. I have to say no to opportunity figures if I say yes I probably got a 5,000 opportunities every day but whether yes or no, everything based on the mission that will help things doing business easier. If it's on that, will consider. If somebody's coming and tell " you can make a lot of money" I'm not interested.
Well, when I started I think we should have a global name and the name that interesting like Yahoo. I had been thinking of many these certainly name and I think Alibaba is a good name so I was happened to being sent to San Fransisco that day and I did have a lunch and the waitress comes. I asked "Do you know Alibaba?" He say yes. I asked "What is Alibaba?" She said "Open Sasemi". Good! So I ran down the street and ask about 10 people. They all know Alibaba for the "Open Sasemi" and I think this is a good name and started with "A" whatever you talk about, Alibaba is always on the top.
The _______ is very different from the Wallstreet would be the customers no.1, employee no.2, and shareholder no.3. This is my religion. It's the customers that pass the money. It's the employees that drive innovation. It's the shareholder, shareholder always say, I don't remember the day before the IPO and a lot of people say "Jack, can you give us the shares? We're a long-term shareholders." When the crisis came, they run away.
I'm gonna tell you young people. My most students complain, where the opportunity today is. People started to complain, some people complaints some stuffs, some people change themselves. Where opportunities is where the complaints are. Where is trouble, where is opportunity and I believed that.
Today, we are all here to discuss what we should do in the next 5-10 years. So, what will Alibaba become in the future? Since we were working on China Pages. I've always said our competitors are not domestic websites but overseas websites. Our competitors are not in China, but in America's Silicon Valley.
So first, we should position Alibaba as a global website not just a domestic website.
Second, we need to learn the hard working spirit of Silicon Valley. If we go to work at 8am and go home at 5pm, this is not a high-tech company and Alibaba will never be successful. If we have that kind of 8am-to-5pm spirit, then we should just go and do something else.
Americans are strong at hardware systems. But on information and software, Chinese brains are just as good as theirs. All of our brains are just as good as theirs. This is the reason we dare to compete with Americans. If we are a good team and know what we want to do, one of us can defeat ten of them.
How cost is culture? It's not technology. I think technology is a tool that the core competence of our companies. We have 20,000 grown from 18 people to now 20,000 people and we focused a lot on the valley animation and making sure the culture everybody works for helping on each others instead of just making money.
So many people I talked to at that time for ali pay leap in "This is the stupidest idea you have ever got" but I think I don't read this stupid a club as long as people use it. Now we have 800 million people use this ali pay.
From movies, I learned how to make a speech from the movie called "Body guard-Whitney Houston". When she sings the songs I look at her, wow! that's the way that you make us picture 'cuz I've never known how to make a speech, 'cuz I'm not an actor.
But when I saw the movie I see wow!. If you sing from your heart, if you sing naturally, if you're yourself, so I realized. I learned a lot from movies, from the godfathers. My favourite movies is Forest Gump. These are the things I learned so much that I would discuss about the means of inspiration that we got from movies.