MFM Mini - Shaan's 15 Minutes with the CEO of Alibaba

when i was i don't know twenty one i got this really cool opportunity to go on an all expense paid trip to china courtesy of alibaba and alibaba at the time wasn't as well known as it is today today it's pretty well none it's publicly was company you know forty billion dollar plus company something like that and yes so the question is what would you do if you had fifteen minutes talking to the ceo of vol alibaba because i had fifteen minutes and and i choked all i could must up with it was you know what's the key to success in business right what i one of my worst questions but whatever i shot my shot everyone else is too too scared to speak and so the ceo at the times guy david way he he drops a knowledge he goes you know asking what makes something successful you know modeling success is misleading you can't copy success because there's you know a million different factors a combination of luck and timing and specific context for every single success that's a big big outlier success instead you should ask me what are the keys to failure because those are always the same and you know i gave them the look like okay go ahead you've permission to blow my mind and he said there were there are three things that will kill any company if in excess so if you have an excess of any of these three things it'll kill your company money plans and technology that's not what i was expecting so then he continued to explain that and alibaba but they had this internal motto no money no plan no technology alright tell me what what is it so no money he goes money makes people stupid when problems arise the first instinct becomes throw money at it rather than attacking it with creativity and this works sometimes sometimes you do the easiest path is money but it becomes this crutch that you can never get rid of as a company that people are so used to solving everything with money and they lose the ability to solve problems with creativity so there they it would tell you story you know years ago alibaba wanted to create their own version of google adwords and google adwords at the time was like you know the main business model of google google was like a two hundred billion dollar company then it's like a trillion dollar company now and so you know how much money did alibaba fund the adwords project right clearly if you did this it was gonna be worth billions and billions of dollars so what did they give it hundred million dollars ten million dollars one million no they gave it two hundred fifty thousand dollars and you know two hundred fifty thousand not two hundred fifty million two fifty thousand dollars and that was for everything salary servers marketing office space everything that was the full budget and and they had the money they just done us one point seven billion dollar ipo so like they were strapped for cash but the ceo was basically saying look if we're gonna build this if we're gonna build something great here we're gonna build it due to creativity and he said his what told me in quotes he goes i wanted them to hunt like dogs these are from my notes i wanted them to hunt like dogs the team worked they worked out of my old out of the old founders old apartment just like when we started alibaba there was like seventeen people working out of jack m apartment the team the team for the the adwords project moved back into that apartment they literally found servers from like the trash like refurbished servers even still they needed more money they hired an engineer to architect their system and to this day what that one guy did is the single most creative engineering feat that they've ever seen inside the company and once the team was done they asked for money to create like backup servers like a redundancy to be safe and always said no no redundancy we would rather risk service crashing than risk spreading the attitude that money should replace our creativity our diligence are hustle and intelligence and and then you said you the it's funny the more money you have the more expensive everything seems to get alright second one no technology alibaba is basically like an online marketplace and they have about through you know at that time they had three four thousand engineers on staff probably triple that now but they never talk about themselves as a technology company so david said this pretty specifically he goes we are a service company we are here to solve customer issues not to build new technology so in order to serve as a service company yes we often use the best technology so we serve better but if it fails we'll do it manually because we are not a technology company we are a service company and this is very common you've seen this with amazon they talk about customer obsession zappos used to say we deliver happiness it is important to how you think about yourself as a company but also playa as a person how you how you define yourself will define what you what you were willing to do and not to do and the last thing was no plan so how the heck are you supposed to reach your goals is that a plan and and so you know david said he turned to the other kind of there was a bunch of other ceos kind of executive people in the room that were all pretty successful when and he goes okay all of you here you're very successful and how many of you today are doing what you planned on doing when you started right crickets everybody everybody's everybody's success was sort of off plan and david said the plan always changes but the mission never waivers and sometimes you need to make a plan to get others to believe and to figure out what to do next but you must follow your gut you must adapt to the circumstances do not follow the plan you wrote when you started it follow the mission follow the vision and follow the reason why if you if you're if you're just trying to follow the mission you will always come up with the right plan right in time and too many people get married to the plan that they wrote and forget the reason they wrote the plan to begin with and so that was my fifteen minutes with the ceo of alibaba and even though my question kinda sucked i think i got my money's worth no money no plans no technology if you like stories like that you gotta be smashing the subscribe button to my newsletter it's a free newsletter i send out one or two stories like this a week and yeah they're always entertaining they're got a little nugget of insight in there so i think you'll like it and go to sean p dot com s h a a n p r i dot com i know that's hard to spell but figure it out i'll put the link in the in the description as well subscribe to the newsletter to get more stories like that hey my first million listeners this is steph again from trends dot c now most of you probably know trends as the idea newsletter because that's what we do we send you business ideas weekly and then we show you how to capitalize on them but anyone that's run a business before knows that ideas only get you so 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