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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Jack understands people more than any business. He knows business well, but if you ask me the three skills Jack has amongst people, business, or IT? IT is the worst. Business second. First is people.”
“We are a B2B marketplace. Nobody comes to trade every day. We are more important a community than our marketplace. The same for Taobao; nobody comes to shop every day. If you downgrade this forum you are focusing too much on profits.
beating, Alibaba would survive the global financial crisis. And, as with SARS five years earlier, the crisis created some unexpected dividends for the company. First, Jack realized that the downturn gave him a way to increase the loyalty of his paying customers. He initiated a dramatic reduction in the cost of their subscriptions, telling David, “Let’s be responsible to our customers. They are paying fifty thousand yuan; we can give them thirty thousand yuan back.”
Jack was not espousing “an ideology of ‘let’s give everything for free.’” Instead, Jack was “always trying to understand how to get the money back later. He’s just not greedy about getting the money first.”
“I have three principles of doing things: first, one hundred percent legal; second, one hundred percent transparent; third, I must let the company develop sustainably and healthily.”
I believe customers first, employees second. We wouldn’t have this company without our staff.
