Alibaba Jack Ma’s “crazy ideas” at Clinton Global Initiative 2009

Jack Ma, founder, Chairman and CEO of Alibaba Group, shared his “crazy” ideas to create 100 million jobs globally in the 10 years with the members of the prestigious Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) 2009 Annual Meeting as part of a panel on “Harnessing Innovation for Development.”  The panel included former Vice President Al Gore (Alliance for Climate Protection), Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (Managing Director, The World Bank), Judith Rodin (President, Rockefeller Foundation), and Muhammad Yunus (Founder, Managing Director of Grameen Bank).

Alibaba breaks preconceptions about China and Small/Medium Businesses

Jack confronted many Western misperceptions about China and Small & Medium Sized Businesses/Enterprises (SMB/SME) in his remarks.  First, Alibaba’s vision of being a world innovator goes counter to China’s overall reputation for being a country whose businesses compete on price. Second, innovation will come from large (mostly Western) multinationals and trickle down to SMB/SME.  But in fact, according to Jack, “70% of innovation in the world is being created by small businesses” despite the fact that they are not being aided by government or policymakers.  Finally, “many people think it is impossible to make money on small businesses,” said Jack.  Perhaps the saying “not impossible,  but difficult” is more accurate.  Coming from Alibaba’s “Alifest”conference attended by over 27,000 Alibaba customers (see Web2Asia’s excellent trip report), Jack shared with the CGI audience Alibaba’s accomplishments: 17,000 employees serving 30 million SMBs worldwide and 250 million consumers.  “By helping people make money, we are making money,” said Jack.

Jack Ma: “We are half-crazy, but not stupid”

Watching from the press risers at the back, I’m almost certain that the CGI crowd–composed of over 60 current/former heads of state, Nobel prizewinners, and leading CEOs and NGO leaders–failed to fully comprehend the scope and scale of Alibaba’s corporate strategy and Jack Ma’s personal ambitions.  I almost feel that Jack wanted to be intentionally underestimated: on a panel stocked with gravitas from Grameen Trust, World Bank, Rockefeller Foundation, the one word Jack kept repeating was: “crazy”.  Of the 33+ Plenary session speakers of the  4 day conference, Jack Ma is the only speaker that is from China.  I’ll share my opinions on this fact later.

Blogger and US-China consultant Aimee Barnes captured the flavor of the crowd reaction well in her excellent post on the speech:

“What [does Alibaba] want to do? Create more crazy,” he exclaimed, looking intensely ahead as if to add an unspoken guarantee. A few chuckles rippled through the crowd, but it was difficult to discern whether they were born from amusement or provoked by nervousness. Perhaps another remark from Ma hints toward the latter. “Many people in the rich world here [are watching] what is happening in China; many people here don’t want to see it succeed.” He certainly has a point; the US has been tensely monitoring China’s rise as its businesses simultaneously seek opportunities in the East while taking advanced measures to protect their own brands and patents.

Jack shared his dreams for the next 10 years for Alibaba–to help create more small “garage” companies and to “create more crazy companies like Alibaba.” Jack shared, “I have another crazy idea, that we will create another 100 million jobs for small business in the world.”  This vision is a clear example of turning constraints into opportunity — in China, state owned companies get all the support, but SMEs have driven a significant part of the growth.

The Three Crazies of Jack’s 10 year Dream

In deference to the Chinese tradition of formulating policies or goals in numbers (see Three Represents), perhaps Jack’s vision can be best characterized as The Three Crazies.  This vision was shared at Alifest and reported by Web2Asia.

First Crazy: 10 mm people “working at” Alibaba

Jack envisions an ecosystem of “netrepreneurs” using Alibaba’s platform to make money.  Western companies that have successfully mobilized a network of small businesses include Ebay’s Sellers and Google’s Adwords/Adsense advertisers.

Second Crazy: 100 million jobs created worldwide

Jack highlighted this goal in his speech to CGI.  A key component of this vision is revolutionizing financial markets.  In 2007, Alibaba entered the SMB financial services business with its Ali-loan program.  In September 2009, Alibaba just announced its $5 mm investment and partnership with Grameen Trust to form a microlending institution called Grameen China focusing initially on making approx. $400 loans to people in Sichuan and Inner Mongolia.  Here’s a quote from their press release:  “We are at the beginning of an Internet-driven revolution where small businesses around the world will be able to compete with larger companies for customers like never before…Micro-credit is the oxygen to make entrepreneurial dreams come alive.”
Funny Jack didn’t mention this even though Grameen Trust founder and Nobel prize winner Muhammad Yunas was on stage with him.

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Third Crazy: 1 billion people using Alibaba’s trading platforms.

Finally, Jack envisions Alibaba platform to become one of the largest consumer e-commerce platforms in the world.  See Web2Asia’s Alifest post for a flavor of their plans.

“In the 21st century, small is beautiful”

Jack also shared his belief that the 21st century, with its advances in technology, will empower small businesses, not big ones, to be more successful in the future.  He remarked that there are plenty of conferences for the “Fortune 500″ type companies, but claimed that there are none for Small Businesses.  With his partnership with Grameen Trust, initially targeting $400 loans to 8,000 people in Sichuan and Inner Mongolia, its clear that Jack has a plan to become a globally dominant player in providing enabling technology and finance to small entrepreneurs of all sizes and in all countries.