Alibaba: The Race is Over

alibaba logoThe Village Grouch doesn’t claim to the best technology observer in the region. But he may have the best memory.

He remembers the night that Jack Ma, Alibaba’s founder and CEO, stood before a packed house at the (now demolished and re-built) Furama Hotel. He addressed the salivating crowd at I & I (remember that?), less than a month after closing the company’s second round of funding–a US$25 million investment from luminaries including Goldman Sachs and Softbank. The next morning, the Grouch wrote on asia.internet.com (in an article incorrectly attributed to another writer): Jack Ma had told the crowd that Alibaba was “running too fast for revenue.”  Jack, you may now stop running.

TVG also remembers being the only foreign reporter to attend an event held in Hangzhou in 2001 billed as “Weekend with the Warriors.” Jack and some of his Net pals–including Sohu founder and CEO Charles Zhang, Sina’s then-CEO Wang Zhidong, once and future Netease CEO and founder Ding Lei, and then-CEO of then-company 8848 Wang Juntao–got together for a bit of panel discussion, a bit of stretching to pat themselves on the back, and the chance to hang out with a modern Chinese legend, kung fu novelist Louis Cha, a.k.a. Jin Yong.

The theme was that Internet entrepreneurs were the new “swordsmen.” And this was after the dotcom crash. Read that list. How many of those guys are still in the CEO’s chair.

Alibaba’s been around for a while. So has the Grouch. There have been a lot of doubters, but Alibaba’s gotten it done. It wasn’t long ago when the most popular auction site in China was owned by eBay. Taobao blew them so far out of the water that they packed up and went back to Mountain View, leaving a minority-held joint venture in their wake.

Has anyone else noticed the surge in Global Sources’ TV advertising, just before the Alibaba IPO? We used to talk about the two companies in the same breath, but not anymore. There was a company called MeetChina.com whose PR guy kept telling the Grouch they were in a “quiet period.” Try dead silent—their Web site now transfers to www.sexdvd2000.com–no kidding. With full coffers, one can only wonder whose lunch Alibaba will eat next.

Now the company’s worth billions, second in Asia only to Yahoo Japan. Yahoo China? That’s Alibaba, too. Sure, the stock is way, way overpriced. But frankly, the Grouch is glad that Jack and his team have cashed in. Jack was always a nice guy who always treated the Grouch with courtesy and respect. Good on ya, Jack.

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