- People ask me all the time, who is my role model,
who is the hero that I look up to, what entrepreneurs
do I follow.
Well, I don't actually follow a lot of other entrepreneurs,
I have a handful of role models I look up to
in the business world, and Jack Ma is definitely
one of them.
You see, I'm fortunate enough that I have the ability
to read Chinese.
All the books, every single book written by Jack Ma,
written about Jack Ma, I have probably read them,
maybe because his background as a poor English teacher,
he's always very compelling, and persuasive,
and very articulate, a great public speaker, a visionary.
Me as a global educator, that teacher's heart,
I could relate.
Today, we're gonna talk about Jack Ma's rules of success.
- Remember my first time in Time Magazine, they called me
crazy Jack, and I think crazy is good.
And I think crazy is good, we are crazy,
but we're not stupid.
(audience laughs)
So many people I talked to at that time for Alipay,
they said, "This is the stupidest idea you have ever got."
And I say, "I don't mid if it's stupid or clever,
"as long as people use it."
Now we have 800 million people using this Alipay.
- Well, just like when I was younger,
people think I'm crazy, and they think I'm brash,
and they think I live out of the box.
But when you're successful, then they call you eccentric,
they call you old, you know, you are so innovative, right.
It is the difference between success and failure,
when you're successful nobody cares, all your ideas,
they're being validated, so I totally agree with Jack.
I love what he said when he says, "Focus on the user."
As long as you're focusing on the user, your customers,
and they love it, that's all that matters.
Sometimes all your competitors, all the other nay sayers,
they don't quite understand, and they don't see your vision.
- I think opportunity is everywhere, honestly.
When people think about internet is the future,
10 years ago, internet was so good, when nobody believed
internet was so good.
Now internet is so tough, because all the smart people
go to internet, so you should go to the off ground.
- So I think when it comes to opportunities,
I do believe in that.
At a certain degree, I think we create our own
opportunities, but also being a good entrepreneur,
or being a visionary, it's being able to see
the opportunities before anyone else.
Just like my other videos, I talk about the blue ocean.
How do you create that blue ocean opportunity?
Identify that and take advantage of that,
before anyone else.
- This is one of the secret sauce of Alibaba, is that we
have 49, almost 47% of the employees
in our company are women.
And if any country, any company, if you want to make
your company excellent, you should have hired more women.
- All the business, like bad business partnerships
I've ever had in the past, they're all men.
The ones that are very successful, they are women partners,
so, and also I wouldn't be where I am today without my wife
Jenny, absolutely our company, our organization,
really it's women that has all the major buying power.
In terms of like husband and wife, if I wanna buy a new
house, guess what?
I gotta talk to the wife, or I'm buying a new car,
I gotta talk to the wife, right.
Even though you might think, oh, maybe the husband
is bringing in the money, well, guess what?
It's the wife that makes the buying decision.
In closing, in sales, I teach all my students,
sell to the wife, their husband can't move forward
without the wife saying yes.
Sell to the wife, if the wife says yes, it's a done deal.
- I believe one thing, when you have a couple,
two or three million dollars, that money do not
belong to you.
When you have 20 million dollars, you have problems
about money depreciation, you buy this stock, or that stock.
When you have more than 100 million dollars,
one billion dollars, that money does not belong to you.
It's the social responsibility, people trust you, ask you
to manage the money better.
So, that was the thinking and then we decided to say,
we should make a economy that is big enough to,
with that economy, we can enable every young people,
every small business, every woman, globally,
they wanna global buy, global sell, global deliver,
global pay, and global travel,
with the technology we're giving.
We can create 100 million jobs for the world,
today we create 33 million jobs for China.
- This is so, it's very powerful and I think in the
beginning of my career, at first, why I started
my own business, is because I wanted to support my mom.
Once I have enough income coming in, then I'm able
to support my mom, support my family, support myself,
then it's about kind of living the lifestyle,
I want that car, I want that house.
Once you also accomplish that, then it goes
into something bigger.
Now, it's about the company, about the team, right.
Then once you get bigger than that, then it's about now
solving bigger, bigger problems.
With me, that's why, if you study my work, if you're my
students, you will know that the way I'm building
my organization, it's not just your Dan Lok
organization, it's about just offering product and service.
Really what I am doing with everything that I do,
I'm building an ecosystem, where you help not just
yourself, but the people around you, creating opportunities,
creating a better lifestyle, creating more abundance
for them, because when you have the skill
as an entrepreneur, you actually have the skillset,
this is something, probably the most important lesson
I learnt from Jack Ma, it's think bigger,
and create an ecosystem.
Apple is not a cellphone company, there's an entire
ecosystem that helps the manufacturer to make money,
it helps the vendor to make money, it helps the app
developer to make money, it helps others to make money,
right, that's an ecosystem, it's not just one thing.
So that's profound.
- That is the innovation of the colleagues, of the people,
so I'm not knowing the technology,
we hire the best technician.
We do not know the finance, we hire the best.
We respect, we work, and that really make the business grow.
- Business is a team sports, it's not a sport that
you play on your own, because it doesn't matter
how good you are, how talented you are.
As a leader it is not about you doing all the work,
it's about you having the vision, having known exactly,
figure out what are the most important critical drivers
within a business, and then you find the team that
can execute that vision, execute your vision,
and turn that into reality.
- My belief always is, small is beautiful.
If nobody help the small guys, we can use internet
to help the small guys.
Our philosophy is always this, "If you can help others
"successful, and then you will be successful."
- Myself, I've made, continue to make most of my money
serving small business, individuals, the people,
my students, small percentage come from big companies,
but a majority of my wealth comes from
working with small business.
- We would love to have great students from Tel Aviv,
from Ching Hua, or Harvard, but the most important
is that you find the people with the fighting spirit,
learning spirit, and this is what you hire people for,
not because you, which school you're from.
- Oh, this I absolutely totally agree, because within
my company, we never hire based on resumes, we don't look
at the resumes, we look at your attitude, we look and see
if the culture fit, and what talents you can bring to the
table, or skills, we could also develop, we can train,
but attitude and culture, that is number one, culture
is the most important, so it doesn't matter if they're
MBA, or they have a degree.
Myself, I never went to university, so that has nothing
to do with what Jack was talking about.
Your learning spirit, the fighting spirit, the hunger,
anyone, any skill, if somebody wants it badly,
they could develop, but I can not teach them culture.
- And then year 2002, and three, four, I spent a lot
of time training up our people, with the value,
mission, and professionalism.
And then we got more managers, more leaders, than most
of the other start ups, then we started to do better.
It's not about business model, later it's about create
values for the others, and that is very good advice for me.
- Technology might change, your product might change,
your service might change, but if you have the right people
in place, the right culture, you can work together
as a team, you can pivot, you can innovate, you can adopt,
so it's definitely, it's people-driven,
it's customer centered.
When you are focusing on the customer, when you're
focusing on people, focusing on your team,
that's what makes the company grow.
And that's what makes the company stay, that's how you
can sustain that growth.
- The future of E-commerce is C2B, consumer to business.
The world is changing, it's not a B2B, it's not a B2C,
it's not a C2C, it's C2B, consumer to business,
because we have a large amount of consumers.
The consumers can ask, can say, "I want it tailor-made."
"I want large scale tailor-made."
And this made the E-commerce in China,
fundamentally changed it.
- I think this is the most important tip out of all of them,
where how you set direction for your company, meaning,
what does that mean?
It's not B2B, it's not B2C, it's C2B, meaning that
consumers, now they're more demanding than ever, that they
want it the way that exactly they want it, they want the
consume content exactly how they want, where they want,
whatever technology, a computer that they want.
You know, they choose to watch a show without interruption,
without ads, they wanna do that, right.
They wanna watch it from their iPad, they wanna watch it
from their iPhone, they wanna watch it from their TV,
they want to be able to do that.
It's up to them, they want to buy, and they want to consume
on their own terms, meaning companies, organizations,
we need to be able to fulfill that need.
If you are still going that model of, "Oh, this is
"what we have, this is what we created,
"and you should buy some.", that model doesn't work.
People want to buy on their own terms, and they want to
spend money on their own terms.
So as a company, as your company organization,
how do you do that?
Even Coca Cola, you can see, now one of the very successful
campaign that they've done, they personalized the Coca Cola
with people's names.
You've seen that before, with their first name.
Why?
That's now the personalization, that's what's working,
even as big, as broad, as Coca Cola, you need to think
about how do you custom tailor the needs of your customers.
So, there you go, those are the rules of success,
from Jack Ma.
If you want to see more of these type of videos, from me,
Dan Lok, comment below.
I'll see what other leaders, what other entrepreneurs
that I follow, you wanna hear from their perspective,
and you also wanna hear from my perspective, comment below
and type in the entrepreneurs you want me to comment next.