Jack Ma grew up in a working-class family in Hangzhou, China, and failed China's brutally competitive college entrance exam twice before finally getting into a local teacher's college on his third try. By his own retelling, he was also rejected by Harvard ten separate times over the years.
After graduating, he was turned down for dozens of jobs — including, in a story he tells often, the only rejection out of 24 applicants for a position at the first KFC that opened in Hangzhou. He worked as an English teacher for years before a 1995 trip to the United States introduced him to the internet.
In 1999, he gathered a group of friends in his apartment and founded Alibaba as a business-to-business marketplace connecting Chinese manufacturers with buyers worldwide.
Alibaba grew into one of the largest e-commerce and technology companies on Earth, going public in 2014 in what was then the biggest IPO in history. Ma became one of the richest people in Asia before stepping back from day-to-day leadership in 2019, ahead of a period of intense regulatory scrutiny of the company.
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