Never Give Up: Jack Ma in His Own Words
Jack Ma
★★★★★A curated collection of Jack Ma's speeches, interviews and remarks, arranged by theme rather than chronology, covering the founding of Alibaba, his views on competition with eBay and Amazon, hiring, failure, and the role of Chinese entrepreneurship. Ma's story is unusual enough to carry the format: rejected from Harvard repeatedly, refused a job at KFC, no technical background, building a company from an apartment in Hangzhou. The recurring themes are that customers come first and shareholders third, that the best hires are people better than you who are willing to be led, and that persistence past the point of reasonable hope is the actual differentiator. As with all quotation collections it is repetitive, and light on context or challenge.
Key takeaways
Customers first, employees second, shareholders third — stated as an operating order, not a slogan.
Hire people better than yourself and accept that managing them is uncomfortable.
Today is hard, tomorrow is harder, the day after tomorrow is beautiful — most people quit on the second day.
Small business and ordinary people were Alibaba's deliberate market, chosen because incumbents ignored them.
The format is a quotation collection, so expect repetition and little critical context.