For a man who once had job teaching English for a measly monthly salary of $12 (Sh1,200), his is a phenomenal rise to the club of the world’s wealthiest.
Jack Ma, one of China’s richest persons, is worth Sh3 trillion - enough to comfortably finance all of Kenya’s 47 county budgets.
The founder of e-commerce site Alibaba was in town Thursday and met a number of dignitaries, including President Uhuru Kenyatta at State House, CEOs, and senior government officials.
But these meetings were not as symbolic as the afternoon session he had with about 1,000 young men and women, mostly students, at the University of Nairobi.
At a time when despair among Kenya’s youth is at an all-time high due to unemployment, a story of hope and determination is refreshing.
Jack Ma, who was on a two-day visit to Kenya, is the embodiment of steadfast optimism and entrepreneurship to millions of young people in the country who wish to make a future in the growing world of business.
His rags-to-riches story has been told and retold over the years. It is the story of a man who grew up poor in rural China, but who after several setbacks, rose to the pinnacle of success.
Jack Ma, whose public lectures attract thousands, failed his university entrance exams three times and was even rejected 10 times by Ivy League University Harvard.
As a boy, Jack Ma grabbed opportunities as they came. He painstakingly taught himself English when he realised the value of the flurry of English-speaking tourists and traders who flocked his town in Southeast China.
It is a lesson that would see him get a trip to the United States as a translator. It was while on his US visit that he was first introduced to the internet by a friend.
The friend told him that he could find just about everything on the internet. However, when he did an online search of ‘beer’, there was no single Chinese beer in the search results. In fact there was nothing from China.
“It was then that he decided to found an internet company for China,” said Business Insider.
So, when he returned home, he started China Pages, a directory of various Chinese companies looking for customers abroad, and some say, the country’s first internet business. It flopped. But he did not despair.
Four years later, Jack Ma gathered 17 of his friends in his apartment and convinced them to invest in his vision for an online marketplace he called ‘Alibaba’. This site, he told them, would allow exporters to post product listings that customers could buy directly.
Alibaba, the Chinese version of Amazon, is today a giant in e-commerce. Known today as Taobao, it is a marketplace for almost everything - from watches to cars, handbags and houses.
In 2014, Alibaba, through an initial public listing offer (IPO) that attracted about $150 billion (Sh15 trillion), Jack Ma retained a small stake of about eight per cent in the company that he helped to found. He also maintains a 50 per cent stake in payment processing service Alipay, two investments that have made him one of the richest people in the world.
The IPO pushed him to the pinnacle of China’s billionaires, a result that also saw Jack Ma shower his employees with newfound cash.
He is said to have told his employees to use the newfound wealth to become “a batch of genuinely noble people, a batch of people who are able to help others, and who are kind and happy.”
Unlike his business rival Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, who graduated from Princeton University with Bachelor of Science degrees in electrical engineering and computer science, Jack Ma had no experience with computers or coding.
But the man with an unrivalled passion for the internet is fun to be around, his wife and employees have attested to this.
“[He] is not a handsome man, but I fell for him because he can do a lot of things handsome men cannot do,” his wife Zhang Ying, a teacher whom he met at school, was quoted as saying. They have two children — a daughter and a son.
He likes reading and writing kung fu fiction, playing poker, meditating, and practising tai chi.
newsdesk@standardmedia.co.ke