How did Ma Yun start his business? How much did it cost?
1995,31year-old Ma Yun, the "best English in Hangzhou", was entrusted by the Zhejiang Provincial Communications Department to collect debts in the United States. As a result, the money didn't reach a penny, but he found a "treasure house"-in Seattle, Ma Yun, who knew nothing about computers, went online for the first time. As soon as he learned to surf the Internet, he thought of making an online advertisement for his translation company. In the morning 10, he posted the advertisement online. Before noon 12, he received six emails from the United States, Germany and Japan, saying that this was the first webpage they had seen about China. Ma Yun realized at that time that the Internet was a gold mine. I began to fantasize about going back to China and setting up a company specializing in the Internet. Ma Yun came up with the idea of collecting information about domestic enterprises and publishing it online to the whole world. He immediately decided to cooperate with friends in Seattle, which is the world's first B2B e-commerce model, and thus began to have creativity. And named it China Yellow Pages.
On the night of returning home, Ma Yun made an appointment with 24 friends, who were also nominal students of his night school, to introduce them. As a result, 23 people objected, and only one person said that he could try. Ma Yun thought about it all night and decided to do it the next morning, even though 24 people opposed it.
"In fact, the biggest determination is not that I have great confidence in the Internet, but that I feel that doing one thing, the experience is success, you can take a trip, you can turn around if you can't, but if you don't do it, it's just like thinking about thousands of roads at night and getting up in the morning to take the same road." When Ma Yun mentioned it, he appreciated his courage, not his vision.
1April, 1995, Ma Yun, aged 3/kloc-0, invested 7,000 yuan, and joined his sister, brother-in-law, parents and other relatives to raise 20,000 yuan to establish Haibo Network, becoming one of the earliest Internet companies in China, and the product was China Yellow Pages.
1996, 32-year-old Ma Yun made great efforts to promote his Chinese Yellow Pages. In many cities without internet, Ma Yun is always called a liar, but Ma Yun is still as indomitable as a madman. He reminds himself every day: "The Internet is a 3000-meter long-distance race, which will affect human life in the next 30 years. You must run as fast as a rabbit and as resistant as a tortoise. " Then go out and talk to people about the internet and convince customers. This business is difficult to carry out. 1996 The transaction was actually 7 million! That is, this year, the Internet gradually became popular.
1March 1996, due to the disparity in strength of Hangzhou Telecom, Ma Yun finally had to cooperate with Hangzhou Telecom. Ma Yun's China Yellow Pages assets were converted into 600,000 yuan, accounting for 30% of the shares, and Hangzhou Telecom contributed 6,543,800 yuan+0.4 million yuan, accounting for 70% of the shares. Later, due to different business ideas, Ma Yun and Hangzhou Telecom parted ways, gave up their own China Yellow Pages and gave all their 265,438+0% shares in China Yellow Pages to employees who started a business together.
This year is 1997, which is the first failure of Ma Yun's entrepreneurial career. Ma Yun was 33 years old this year.
1997, after Ma Yun left China Yellow Pages, he was invited by MOFTEC to join China International Electronic Commerce Center (EDI), a newly established company founded and managed by MOFTEC, with 30% of the shares, and participated in the development of official website and later online China commodity trading markets of MOFTEC. In this process, Ma Yun's btob idea gradually matured, "serving small and medium-sized enterprises with e-commerce". He even thought about the domain name of the website-Alibaba. The Internet is like an endless treasure, waiting for people to explore, just like the cave opened by Alibaba with a spell.
1999, 35-year-old Ma Yun was fed up with the bondage, stumbling and timidity of working in government enterprises. He turned down the invitations from Sina and Yahoo and decided to start a business in Hangzhou. All the players gave up other opportunities and decided to follow. This year is 1999, which is the second time that Ma Yun failed to start a business.
199965438+1October 15, Ma Yun and his team quietly returned to the south.
1February, 1999, the first plenary meeting was held in Ma Yun's home on the lakeside in Hangzhou. 18 entrepreneurs are sitting or standing around the impassioned Ma Yun with serious expressions. Ma Yun delivered a passionate speech quickly and crazily. "Explore and shout together in the dark, and I won't panic if I shout forward." You rush forward with a big knife, and a dozen people rush forward. What's there to panic about? "In this uprising, Ma Yun and his partner * * * raised 500,000 yuan. And by convention, the whole process is recorded. Ma Yun firmly believes that this will have great historical value. At this meeting, Ma Yun said, "We want to run an e-commerce company, and we have three goals. First, we should establish a company that can survive 102; Second, we should set up an e-commerce company to serve the small and medium-sized enterprises in China. Third, we must build the world's largest e-commerce company and rank among the top ten global websites. From this day on, Ma Yun began to make up his mind to do e-commerce.