So Joe, excited to have this conversation with you. In 1999 you were making $700,000 a year in a job and you were offered to join the startup Alibaba where you were actually going to be paid $600 a year. You did this after a mutual friend introduced you to Jack Ma, who your friend said was very smart and kind of crazy. So my question is: why did you pick kind of crazy?
Well, thanks Jeffrey. Before I get to your question, I want to say I'm actually very honored to be interviewed by you on this stage. You've been a mentor to me, and one thing you taught me is how to treat people – treat all walks of life, no matter who they are, with respect. I've learned a lot from you, so thank you very much. I'm very honored to be here. So the question about kind of crazy – why did I, what kind of crazy am I talking about? This was in 1999 when I showed up in a second-story apartment in Hangzhou to visit Jack. I had read a little about him – in fact, in The Economist. This was before anybody got famous, but the editor of The Economist, Chris Anderson, identified Jack as the Jeff Bezos of China. Very few people knew Jeff Bezos back then, much less the person in China. I went to his apartment. Before I went in, there were like 10 or 12 pairs of shoes in front of it – you take off your shoes before stepping into people's homes – so I said there must be 10 or 12 people working in this apartment. I went in, obviously Jack being the charismatic individual he is, I was mesmerized by him for about an hour. Then I had to go to the bathroom. I said, 'Jack, excuse me, let me use the restroom.' He said it's right over there. I went in and saw there were like 12 toothbrushes on the sink. I realized these people were just living there 24/7, in sleeping bags, working away. Something dawned on me: this was the garage equivalent – the HP garage of China. The thing that really struck me wasn't really the crazy part. Jack was talking about a big vision that I didn't really quite understand. He said to do a startup, you don't really have a business plan, you just kind of go along. Those are all the crazy aspects, but that wasn't the reason I decided to quit my job to join Alibaba. It was really the idea that he was a leader, leading these disciples who truly believed. He gave them the mission about what technology was going to do – in particular, internet technology – not just for the company but for the whole country.
The vision at the time was to create an internet platform so that all the small companies, manufacturers, and trading companies from China doing exports could list themselves on this platform. In fact, we called it the BBS – the bulletin board system. That was the first website of Alibaba.com. It was in English, actually, because it was made for non-Chinese people sourcing from China to use and buy stuff. We were at the cusp of China entering the WTO. Once that happened, Chinese exporters – the export-driven economy – came to life, and that propelled the early success of Alibaba.
But talk about a pivot. You're a lawyer, a private equity investor, to give all that up to walk away and go into a tech startup is just a huge leap. So why did you think you could do it? What gave you the courage?
I've always been a curious person, someone who's not satisfied with where I am. I always wonder what happens on the other side of the fence. As a lawyer, I was doing advisory work. Lawyers rarely control the decision – they give advice and clients make decisions. I decided I wanted to go from being an adviser to someone in a decision-making role. I joined a private equity firm. When you're investing, you're committing capital, you have to underwrite the investment thesis, and you're making decisions. But then I realized as an investor, I was sitting on boards of companies but not really involved in the actual business itself – simply allocating capital to entrepreneurs and management teams. So I became curious about the other side. I wanted to be in an operating company. The confluence of factors at the time was the rise of the internet. Companies like Yahoo and eBay had come before Alibaba, two or three years prior, and that felt really exciting. For me, it was an opportunity to get on the other side of the fence to see how a company actually operates, but in an exciting business like the internet.
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