​【原声视界】Day 105 马云谈成长奋斗史

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I was born in a very normal family and poor family. Six people share $7 a month. We can only eat to one chicken a year. Was terrible. Nixon visited my city. 1972, China USA sign the Mao Zedong and Nixon signed the agreement. So China become open door. My city Hangzhou was one of the first cities that opened to the west. We got a lot of American tourists to visit my city.

What he would do is he would befriend foreign visitors who came to Hangzhou to walk around the West Lake there.

And I learned English by being a free guide for tour guide.

No more than the language, Jack was learning about the culture.

The things I learned from books from China are so different from the things I learn from the American visitors. So I started to think differently.

You know in China, for so many decades, the kind of personal ambition that he exemplifies was suppressed. When Deng Xiaping came along and sort of took the top off of things and said, "It's OK to have your private ambition to make something of yourself, it won't get you in political trouble," this was a kind of an invitation from people like Jack Ma.

His goal was always to create something that would change China.

When I tried to be a Policeman - reject. When I tried to be a KFC person - reject. I want to be a hotel waiter - rejected. So I get used to it. As entrepreneur, one of the qualities I have is that when I'm rejected by people, I get used to that.

The road to wherever we all end up is not always perfect. It's paved with lots of difficulty and challenge and failure and you have to summon up some sort of strength within you to believe in yourself.

Jack Ma grew up in relatively modest means and then he became a teacher. And by all accounts that’s sort of where he expected to be for quite some time.

Then I came to America in 1995. First a trip to the States. And first time in my life I touched to keyboard of the computers.

And he started searching things on the Internet. When he searched China, nothing came up in the search results. So he said to himself, "If I can put Chinese companies on the Internet and allow them to connect with business people in the U.S. and other countries, I could create possibly a really powerful business.”

I called myself at that time like a blind man riding on the back of blind tigers. Without knowing anything about technology or computers, we started our the first company.

He's gone against all convention. He says that he doesn't know anything about technology. It's hard to believe. When he started his first company, called China pages, he would go knocking on the doors of government officials. They would really just turn him away saying that what he was doing wasn't appropriate. He should just go back to maybe teaching English.

This was opening day for something called Windows 95 that has something to do with computers. With Deng now gone, China's future will be shaped by a great power struggle. 1997 proved to be a watershed year for Asia, the year when the Asian economic miracle became a thing of the past. There seems to be no stopping the speeding tech train; technology stocks keep climbing into record territory.

2000 and when the internet was starting to boom in China, a friend told me that there was a company trying to go global from an apartment in Hangzhou.

Eighteen years ago, in my apartment, I told the 18 founders that one day we would build up a site. This site would be the top 10 sites of the world. Very few people believed that we would make it happen.