The stock of China-based Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd.started trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Friday. The opening price of was $92.70 per share, which translates to a market capitalization of of $168 billion. By the end of the day, the stock rose $25.89, or 38 percent, to close at $93.89. The founder of the company, Jack Ma, is now worth ober $10 billion.
In the clip below, Ma, in 1999, delivers a speech to 17 friends in his apartment to introduce Alibaba and lay out his plan to compete.
One thing I've learned is that a dedicated small group of people with focus can always outmaneuver large companies on trends if they know what they are doing. He's exactly right that the standard work week doesn't cut it if you're a start-up trying to play with the big boys.
ReplyDeleteIn my experience though, what originally made that company successful doesn't usually carry over the long term. Typically the bigger a company gets, the more resistant it becomes to change as the more bureaucratic it becomes. The executive management typically comes in from the outside and follows typical B school practices that still model the top-down approach to the military industrial complex. Or they are beholden to share holders or investors that are really concerned with getting a quick return back on investment that means expansion and growth at the expense of quality and innovation.
Or, If you have sole proprietors that made the company successful, they are usually excellent at the original reason they made it big, but are lacking in expertise outside of that original idea. Since they are driven and usually control freaks, it becomes very hard to innovate past that original successful idea because they are so focused on what they know.
In general this cycle is hard to break. How many hugely profitable successful innovations as a corporation can you have? To sustain that pace of breakthroughs requires a balance of vision, control, trust, personal introspective on what you lack as a leader and what you need to be successful in others, and great communication skills so you can build a network of talent to reach your vision.
Ma nailed it on everything but his IPO date. Damn impressive. He deserves his billions.
Wow i am really inspire Jonathan Lu
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