Ma Yun was born on 10 September 1964 in Hangzhou, China, to parents who worked as traditional Pingtan musicians and storytellers — a trade that came with prestige but not much money. School wasn't easy for him either; he failed the university entrance exam twice before passing it on a third attempt, eventually training as a teacher. For nine years alongside his studies, he worked as a volunteer tour guide to practice English on foreign visitors — it was an American family on one of those tours who gave him the nickname "Jack."
He kept teaching. By his mid-twenties he was an English lecturer at Hangzhou Dianzi University, earning the equivalent of about $12 a month — a low but steady income, and not obviously the starting point for anything larger.
In 1995, a work trip to the United States over a highway project put Ma in front of the internet for the first time. He searched the word "beer" and got results from breweries around the world — none from China. He searched "China" next and found almost nothing at all. He came home convinced the country needed a presence online, and founded China Pages, an early attempt at a business directory. It struggled, and he eventually lost control of it.
In 1999, back in Hangzhou, Ma gathered a group of friends and former students — accounts of the exact number vary between seventeen and eighteen — in his apartment and pitched them on a bigger idea: an online marketplace that could connect small Chinese manufacturers directly with buyers anywhere in the world. That pitch became Alibaba. The name came from a conversation in a coffee shop, where he'd been testing how many people, anywhere, recognized the phrase "Open Sesame" — he wanted a name the whole world would already know. Early funding came from SoftBank and Goldman Sachs, but the company itself started with nothing more than that apartment and that group of people.
Alibaba grew into one of the largest e-commerce companies in the world, and Ma became one of China's richest people on the back of it — a stretch of the 2010s where his net worth was regularly counted in the tens of billions of dollars.
Ma stepped down as Executive Chairman in 2019 to focus on education and philanthropy — the subjects he'd started in, before any of the rest of it. He's also been described as an entertainer at heart, known for singing and dancing at company events, and made an acting cameo in a kung-fu short film in 2017. Two decades after a failed business directory and a stack of rejection letters, the teacher who couldn't get hired anywhere had become one of the most recognisable businesspeople in the world.
Sources: Awfis, Entrepreneur, Inc., Wilson Luna, Caixin (via Yale Global) — facts cross-checked across multiple accounts, not taken from a single source.
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