- 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.
Dan pls make a clip about jeff bezoses strategy for long term growth