Thank you Joe for making the time to come to be on. It's your second time to be on.
Yeah, thank you for having me. Thank you. So let's start at the beginning. I'd love to discuss a little bit more about Alibaba and its global journey. Alibaba, we all know, was started in an apartment in Hangzhou with a vision to connect entrepreneurs around the world. Over the years, you've built trust across very different cultures. Looking back, what's the one decision or the moment that helped unlock true partnerships, and what would you say to founders today who are trying to cross borders with their ideas?
Well, trust is built up over time. It's very difficult to establish trust overnight. So it's all about people working together to achieve a goal. I think it's easier if you have a common goal that you're aiming for, then you can work on the details of establishing that trust. At Alibaba, from day one, we had a mission: to make it easy to do business anywhere, because we wanted to help small businesses use the internet platform to reach global buyers. That's something that stayed true to us even today. Our mission 26 years ago is the same mission today.
Speaking of entrepreneurs that want to build trust globally, reaching across borders, going overseas, I think it's very important for people that want to set up business overseas to go there and spend time. Actually take two months and live in a place where you want to set up business, get to know the people, get to know the culture. That's how you get respect, and from respect you gain people's trust. At Alibaba, we say because of trust, everything becomes easy. I think that is such an important concept. If people don't trust each other, it's very difficult to achieve something together because you're always second-guessing, always wondering if people have ulterior motives. So I'm glad you mentioned trust right off the bat. I think it's a really important concept.
Right. Yeah. So I think this of course wanted to address an elephant in the room, because these months we are always talking about trade tensions and all that. How do companies, when they want to go global, being affected by all these trade tensions? What are your thoughts on how companies can adjust to all these global issues?
I just think that what's happened in the last few months with these trade tensions and tariffs and governments acting in a way that's very unpredictable is we're in a new paradigm. Companies are still trying to learn how to cope. It used to be that companies have their chief executives, part of their job is to communicate with government, with regulators, to achieve understanding of what they do, and they try to communicate that they're trying to bring good things to society, make the politicians comfortable, make the regulators comfortable. But in today's world, it seems like there's some irrational behavior even in the context of a tariff war. So everybody in our position managing businesses have to cope with it. But I still stick to the basic idea that communication and achieving understanding is the most important thing. If you hear about some kind of regulation that's going to be against your company, if you just sit there, that's not going to do anything for you. I think it's important for company managements to proactively reach out to people that make policy, that make regulation, to try to explain what they do. I think one thing is always true: doesn't matter whether it's shareholders, your investors, or whether it's policy makers and regulators, nobody likes to be surprised. Don't surprise people with your company's actions or what projects or what you do. So always pre-communicate, because that'll achieve better understanding.
Right. So I think when I mentioned this, because Beyond has been trying to push for a mission of helping Asian companies to go overseas market, or even Chinese companies can go to markets that may like Japan or Korea. So we created something we call the B Global Network this year. It's something that we wanted to try to bring in stakeholders together and help entrepreneurs to go global. So it's very contrarian because now globalists is not a popular thing.
So we actually have some setbacks. Yeah. Which leads to my next question about setbacks. I think you've seen Alibaba being known as a very global company, but I remember like a month ago when you were at Alibaba and you talked about how Alibaba should go more global in terms of B2B business. What are the most important lessons that you've learned about scaling internationally, not just from success but also from setbacks? How might those lessons apply to startups navigating today's global market?
Yeah, I would say Alibaba is not perfect when it comes to internationalizing our business. We've had some success in some countries, we've also had spectacular failures in other countries. I'll get into that a little bit, but I think the image of Alibaba being a sort of global company stems from the fact that Alibaba is based in China. China today is well recognized globally, especially in technology. People do look to China when it comes to AI, consumer internet, cloud computing, and things like that. China is definitely a weighty player in the global market, and Alibaba being in the Chinese market, as you know, something like 80 plus percent of our revenues are still coming from China. We do get recognized globally because China is a big country and a very important country in the whole global technology race. When it comes to successes and failures, I think the one principle is being able to really understand the local culture and localize your management team when you operate. Let me give you an example. In our case, we're very proud of our cloud business. We have great technology, great products, but when it comes to sales and marketing in a local market, we might not be the best. You definitely have to hire a local team to execute the sales and marketing piece of your cloud business. Otherwise, you're never going to get any customers. That's an example. We have the largest e-commerce platform in Turkey, but it's an acquired business where we retained the entire management team. We didn't try to replace the management team. We retained the people. We did a makeover of their technology platform, but it is the local team that's executing the business. We think that combination—China technology, local people—is a very good combination for expanding overseas. Now, I have to say, Chinese companies growing overseas have an inherent obstacle: most people around the world don't speak Chinese, whereas English is spoken everywhere. So it's inherently easier for an American company to grow to their office in Germany and Italy, where Germans and Italians can speak English with headquarters. Our offices in Germany and Italy probably won't have locals that can speak Chinese. That barrier is something we need to overcome. Hopefully with AI, with translation tools and things like that, it will make things easier.
Yeah. So, talking about technologies, we were talking about AI and robotics companies. I asked if I can ask you this question. So, because at Beyond this year, we do see a lot of AI companies and robotics companies like humanoids and different robotic arms doing coffee. What are your thoughts or what are your takes on humanoid? Do you have any what do you think is going to happen in the next five years or 10 years?
There are several aspects to this question. First, on robotics, in today's world, when you inject the AI element into robots, robots are just going to become smarter and can think, and robots can move in a way that could be driven by reasoning and thinking. I think that's very exciting. It's not just pre-programmed automation in the factory. So that's robotics when you marry robotics with AI. We think of very exciting things. Things like robots can make coffee for you, or they can come to your home and clean and vacuum your floor. When I walked into the exhibition hall today, there are robots playing instruments. So that's all great. There's a separate question on the utility of humanoid robots. I think most of the smart robots in the world don't need to look like human beings. I'll give you an example. If you want to have a robot come and clean your carpet, come home and clean your kitchen or living room, do you really want someone that looks like a human being? I'd get scared. I just want something that looks like a vacuum cleaner but can move intelligently around the room. So I think most of the use cases in the world are very applicable when it comes to robots or smart robots. But when it comes to humanoids, think about the scenarios where you actually want something that looks and feels just like a human being. That's actually a little bit scary. What are those scenarios? I can't think of very many, because in all those scenarios, I would actually prefer to have a real human being interacting with me rather than a robot. I'll get myself into trouble if I try to get into those scenarios.
Yeah, I think that's a very good point, because when we talk about robots, we always look at the movies that we've seen when we were young. So they all look like humans, but they're obviously not human beings. But now, are we trying to move towards machines looking exactly like human beings? I think that's actually technology-wise, there are still a lot of things to overcome. We've now done very well with AI, with large language models, with AI being able to understand knowledge and now being able to reason. But spatial intelligence is where there still needs to be more advances in order for the robotics industry to move forward. I think understanding space—that's an area where intelligence is not quite there like human beings.
Okay. All right. So moving from tech to sports, because that's your passion as well. You've been deeply involved in both sectors. Two very different worlds. So I assume it's both filled by passion and community. From Brooklyn Nets to I think you recently purchased San Diego Seals as well? Not recent, but that was the...
