
Jack Ma founded Alibaba in 1999 from his Hangzhou apartment with 17 friends and built it into China's most dominant e-commerce and technology conglomerate — comprising Alibaba.com, Taobao, Tmall, Alipay, and Alibaba Cloud. Born in Hangzhou in 1964 to a family of modest means, Ma failed China's college entrance exam twice and was rejected from dozens of jobs including KFC before discovering the internet in 1995. His vision that small businesses could use the internet to compete globally drove Alibaba's founding mission. Alibaba's 2014 IPO on the New York Stock Exchange raised $25 billion — the largest IPO in history at that time.
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