Jack Ma Returns to Hupan: Birthplace of Alibaba
When I come back here, it’s…it’s like a movie in my mind. This is the place we start. I’m the person always looking forward; I don’t want to look at the things back.
It was not easy. So every time I come back here, I…I have an emotion that how could this thing happen? I mean, how can we go through all these days? But we know, without these tough days, we can never be today.
I remember exactly the first day when we came back, we would take all the luggage, come here, and I told everybody: This is the place we’re gonna work for a year probably. We’re gonna eat here. We’re gonna sleep here. We’re gonna work day and night here. And we will probably achieve something. Or probably, we’ll have to go out looking for jobs together.
The goal at that time: We want to be the Top 10 websites in the world. At that time, we are ranking like, probably like one million or something, one or two million. But the most important is that the Alibaba service should help millions of small business, young people, empower them, enable them to realize their dreams.
In this room, we have…we have nothing to lose. One night, I put 18 people here all together because we have a lot of internal fights. As you guys remember, now we’re lucky we’re in a small room. I believe 10, 15 years later, you cannot even find each other. You probably work in Beijing, you probably work in Shanghai, somebody work in the United States. You probably don’t meet each other. So we should respect now, appreciate the days we’re together.
We had Alibaba here. We had Taobao here. We had Alimama here. We had the DingTalk(s) here. Most of the very good strategic companies, startups that we want to do, we put it here. That’s why I always want to keep this place.
Because no matter how big Alibaba is, no matter where Alibaba will be, no matter what industry we are in, we always remember this Hupan culture, this garage culture.
And the thing that I want this company never forget is the dream because we are at today’s size, a lot of people just want, you know, a lot of companies I learned when they fail because they want next quarter. They want revenue; they want profit. They forget about dreams. It’s important Alibaba dreams. It’s dreams that keep us working hard. It’s dreams that keep us never afraid of the mistakes, the setbacks we have.
I hope 60 years later, 80 years later, people still remember this apartment. We shall never lose the dream we had from Hupan – at the apartment.
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