Alibabas World
How a Remarkable Chinese Company Is Changing the Face of Global Business

In September 2014, a Chinese company that most Americans had never heard of held the largest IPO in historybigger than Google, Facebook, and Twitter combined. Alibaba, now the worlds largest e-commerce company, mostly escaped Western notice for over ten years, while building a customer base larger than Amazons and handling the bulk of e-commerce transactions in China. How did it happen? And what was it like to be along for such a revolutionary ride? In Alibabas World, author Porter Erisman, one of Alibabas first Western employees and its head of international marketing from 2000 to 2008, shows how Jack Ma, a Chinese schoolteacher who twice failed his college entrance exams, rose from obscurity to found Alibaba and lead it from struggling startup to the worlds most dominant e-commerce player. He shares stories of weathering the dotcom crash, facing down eBay and Google, negotiating with the unpredictable Chinese government, and enduring the misguided advice of foreign experts, all to build the behemoth thats poised to sweep the ecommerce world today. And he analyzes Alibabas role as a harbinger of the new global business landscapewith its focus on the East rather than the West, emerging markets over developed ones, and the nimble entrepreneur over the industry titan. As we face this near future, the story of Alibabaand its inevitable descendantsis both essential and instructive.