近日，在史丹佛大學商學院的一場訪談中，阿里巴巴董事會蔡崇信首次公開談及一段創業往事：他早年加入阿里後曾擔任三個月 COO，隨後被馬雲直言 “不懂營運”，並調整崗位。蔡崇信透露，1999年接觸阿里時，公司尚未註冊、零收入，而馬雲僅擁有一個域名與初創網站。他被馬雲的領導氣質與溝通能力打動，認為教師出身的馬雲擅長識人、育人與凝聚團隊。在他看來，“創業要找你願意共事、能追隨、可學習的人，對我而言，馬雲既是夥伴也是導師。”蔡崇信稱，自己加入阿里前僅與馬雲交談了一小時，便決定投身這家初創公司。他還披露，當時自己是當了三個月的首席營運官，然後馬雲“解僱”了他，馬雲稱，“你根本不懂如何營運。”於是，他便轉為首席財務官。訪談期間，蔡崇信還談到了自己為何2013年離開阿里日常管理崗位，他表示，這是他和馬雲共同商定的策略，當時阿里業務已涵蓋B2B、淘寶、支付寶、雲端運算等多個類股，他們意識到需要給陸兆禧、張勇等年輕一代機會。官方網站顯示，蔡崇信於1999年加入阿里巴巴集團，為公司創始人之一，自公司成立以來一直為董事會成員。蔡崇信曾擔任首席財務官至2013年，並擔任執行副主席至2023年9月，目前擔任阿里巴巴集團主席。蔡崇信是阿里巴巴合夥人制度的創始合夥人之一。他同時是阿里巴巴集團關聯公司螞蟻集團的董事。以下為訪談原文(英文原文在後)：主持人傑裡米：Joseph Tsai，歡迎你。Joseph Tsai（蔡崇信）：謝謝你，傑裡米。很高興來到這裡。主持人傑裡米：很榮幸你能來。當我準備這次採訪並試圖理清思路時，阿里巴巴已經變得多麼龐大和全球化。真正讓我印象深刻的是，在你的職業生涯中，你是如何跨越文化的，嗯，東方和西方，法律和商業，體育和科技。所以我想從你的第一次跨文化專業經歷開始。你在台灣出生和長大，13歲時搬到美國，就讀於紐澤西州的勞倫斯維爾學校。那段經歷對你來說是什麼感覺？Joseph Tsai（蔡崇信）：嗯，當時很害怕。嗯，我去之前的第一次嗯，嗯，你知道我從未上過七年級。我在台灣上小學。然後我媽媽說，喬，我要送你去國外上學。但是你必須學會說英語。而且我當時根本不會說英語。所以呃，我去上了英語補習班一年，跳過了七年級。所以我八年級時去了勞倫斯維爾。呃，在那段補習班的日子裡，我基本上就是背單詞，但我連一句完整的英語都說不出來。這有點像，想像一下你並不真的懂這門語言。你不知道如何溝通，然後你就置身於一個全新的文化環境中，就像剛著陸。我的意思是就像剛下船一樣，對吧？然後降落在這裡，一個非常獨特的環境。你知道，寄宿學校，那是一所全男生寄宿學校，所以這有其自身的困境而你只能適應。我想我當時是想成為他們中的一員，我想融入其中。我看起來不一樣，我穿得不一樣，說不同的語言。嗯，所以對我來說，被其他人接受是非常重要的。嗯，然後很快，我就開始投身體育運動了。嗯，不幸的是我被棒球隊開除了。想像一個來自台灣的孩子，棒球小聯盟，你知道我沒有進球隊，沒有進游泳隊，嗯，然後我說該死，我要嘗試全新的事物。嗯，我踢足球，美式足球，然後進入長曲棍球，嗯，因為我不會打棒球，這是一項春季運動。長曲棍球，棒球是春季運動。我進不了棒球隊，所以我去打長曲棍球了。嗯，有趣的是昨天我跟傑裡米，我覺得他當時很擔心。你知道的，所以他想做個準備會議。所以我們昨天花了一小時準備這次談話。主持人傑裡米：是的，我倆都熱愛體育，我是湖人隊鐵桿球迷。很明顯，喬是個體育迷、網迷和自由迷。Joseph Tsai（蔡崇信）：是的，我不會怪你的。但不管怎樣，湖人隊現在做得更好了。恭喜你，主持人傑裡米：非常感謝。非常感謝。Joseph Tsai（蔡崇信）：然後我們發現我們都是橄欖球運動員，主持人傑裡米：身材矮小的線衛。喬，你找到感覺了。你從早期的體育挑戰中恢復過來了。你進入了長曲棍球。你曾就讀於耶魯大學的本科和法學院，對嗎？你在一家稅務律師事務所工作，最終進入了私募股權行業。但喬的投資生涯才4年，他就遇到了一個名叫馬雲的人，他正在建立一家公司。與其他17位聯合創始人一起，它是一個線上交易平台，早期零收入就只有幾千名使用者。那麼，是什麼讓你確信那是做出改變的合適時機？當時不僅僅是零收入，Jack（馬雲）甚至連公司都沒有。它甚至還沒有註冊成立。所以Jack，Jack當時只有一個域名和一個新網站。我還記得我第一次去看他的時候，我爬上了二樓的公寓。那裡有一堆鞋子。你知道的，在外面。你要脫下鞋子，你走進去，然後你知道，我們聊了大約一個小時。他就有那種魅力，那種領導氣質。Jack以前是個老師，我認為老師能成為很好的領導者，因為你必須善於溝通，你還需要具備識別優秀人才的能力，發掘並培養優秀學生，就像老師所做的那樣。所有這些品質都逐漸顯現出來，而這正是我覺得非常吸引人的地方。我沒能理解這個商業計畫，因為當時網際網路對每個人來說都是新的，他說的是利用網際網路讓中國所有製造東西的公司都參與進來，把東西交易到海外，讓外國買家和買家來網站購買中國的東西。嗯，這是一個批發市場。所以阿里巴巴的第一個網站實際上是英文寫的。因為它是為世界其他地區打造的。嗯，談話一個小時後，我說，Jack，你知道我需要去洗手間休息一下。於是我走進洗手間，水槽上有十把牙刷。所以我意識到人們只是睡在那裡，住在那裡，睡在睡袋裡。嗯，有點像創業文化。而我決定，嗯，你知道，我會這樣對年輕人說，當你想換工作，或是當你找到新工作想做點不同的事情時，找到你想合作的人。那些你想追隨的人，以及你想學習的導師，對我來說，傑克既是朋友，也是商業夥伴，也是導師。他教會了我很多東西。我覺得我可以從他身上學到很多。而且當時，你知道在網際網路時代，如果公司名字帶.com後綴，所有人都以為你會在6個月內成為百萬富翁。但對我來說，那個人是傑克。那種人格魅力，那種領導特質正是源自他曾經的教師經歷。主持人傑裡米：是啊，你和傑克的合作顯然挖到了金礦。在與傑克的合作中。史丹佛大學的很多同學都在考慮創辦公司和尋找聯合創始人。那麼，正確的公式是什麼？他們應該在聯合創始人身上尋找什麼？Joseph Tsai（蔡崇信）：首先，我認為他們應該，找一個能相處的人。比如你是否願意和這個人出去喝杯啤酒，在下班後。我認為這是第一次考驗。我認為接下來重要的是互補性，也就是他們擅長而你不擅長的方面。以及你擅長而他們不擅長的方面。保持這種互補心態。無論用什麼詞來形容。能夠互相彌補確實非常重要，這樣創始人就不會互相妨礙。阿里巴巴最初有18位創始人，我認為我們都很好地相互補充，我們帶來了不同的技能組合。我認為當你考慮創辦公司時，就是，你知道，你會想出去找18個人一起創業，但我認為只有兩三個創始人有時會成為問題，因為隨著業務規模的擴大，你的文化會被稀釋，而且周圍沒有創始人與員工建立接觸點，而有18個創始人，我們有這個優勢。你知道，我們能夠，每位創始人可以接觸更多員工，所以，我覺得這很重要。還有就是那些你想朝夕相處的人並共度美好時光，因為創業初期你不會經常回家或者說工作與生活的平衡不會是你該關注的重點。主持人傑裡米：是的，我想我應該問一下，你在公寓裡也有放牙刷嗎？Joseph Tsai（蔡崇信）：是的，嗯，我後來帶了自己的牙刷。主持人傑裡米：所以我想談談這一點，關於有這麼多位聯合創始人，總共有18位，這非常非常獨特。嗯，並於1999年加入阿里巴巴擔任首席財務官時，你才是真正進入公司。Joseph Tsai（蔡崇信）：我當時不是CIO。而是當了三個月的首席營運官，然後傑克解僱了我，因為他說，“喬，你根本不懂如何營運。我當時就想，"好吧，沒關係。那我就當首席財務官吧。主持人傑裡米：好吧，又一次，你從棒球反彈到長曲棍球，從首席營運官再到首席財務官。現在，這群聯合創始人彼此之間已經有些聯絡了，而你算是新加入的人。你是受過美國教育的律師兼投資人，你來自台灣，他們都是中國大陸人，你是怎麼找到方法跨越那種文化？Joseph Tsai（蔡崇信）：我認為首要的是，我通常更傾向於做一個傾聽者。我懷著謙卑的心態投入這項工作，我是去學習的。我對網際網路一無所知。我從未在一家以中國大陸員工為主的中國公司工作過，因為我之前的所有工作經驗要麼是在美國，要麼是在香港。所以我覺得自己沒有立場來指手畫腳，所以我傾聽了很多，然後試著去再次嘗試融入勞倫斯維爾的生活，試著成為人群中的一員，成為社區的一份子。我認為這對我幫助很大。我認為你必須全力以赴，你要帶著謙遜的態度去工作，因為總會有人，你會發現你的同事，你的合作夥伴比你更聰明，他們能教會你很多。你需要以這種心態對待工作。主持人傑裡米：是的，進入並成為一個傾聽者，並且保持謙遜，這顯然對你很有幫助。隨著時間的推移，傑克真的覺得這個超乎尋常的人物是中國科技行業的面孔。你全程都在那裡，但主要是在幕後。為什麼？Joseph Tsai（蔡崇信）：嗯，因為他更擅長站在舞台的最前面。他更擅長演講。他是一個更出色的精神領袖。嗯，對吧？我認為這非常重要。我原認為自己這些年來有所進步。在與人溝通方面，但這對他是天生的，只要站上舞台，讓所有員工共處一室，然後直接宣佈，看，這就是我們的方向。這就是我們這麼做的原因。而且他非常有說服力，所以更擅長這個。主持人傑裡米：這是另一個很好的例子，可以找到一個具有互補技能的人，共同致力於同一項任務。現在，據我所知，你和傑克是飛到沙丘路這邊只有幾分鐘的路程，對吧？向投資者推銷並籌集種子輪。你還記得那次行程嗎？Joseph Tsai（蔡崇信）：處理程序不算順利，我想我們搞砸了。我們開了大約15次會。我們連一個投資者都沒有找到。我想這是因為在史丹佛商學院，他們教你帶著PPT之類的東西去展示。對吧？你得向人們展示些什麼比如演示或類似的，比如演示什麼的。我們什麼都沒有，我們空手而來。人們會說，Jack，你的商業計畫是什麼？Jack說：我沒有商業計畫。他當時確實說過，我沒有商業。但當時中國的趨勢是，事後看來，你本可以看到的。我的意思是事後看來你本可以預見。這是網際網路技術的交匯點，也是中國加入世界貿易組織的時期，這意味著中國與世界其他地區的貿易往來將呈爆炸式增長。如今你來到中國，中國是一個製造業強國。一切都是中國製造的，而且質量越來越好，越來越高，技術越來越高。嗯，但種子在那時已經播下，那是一個即將加入世貿組織的時代。想像一下讓所有這些製造商和貿易公司把他們的產品都搬到網上，讓世界其他地方看到，這就是當時的一個商業構想。但傑克不僅僅談論業務。他說："我的使命是讓天下沒有難做的生意。”這就是我們當時的使命，這就是我們告訴投資者的話。至今這仍是我們的使命。你可以訪問我們的網站，阿里巴巴官網寫道“讓天下沒有難做的生意”。主持人傑裡米：太不可思議了。所以這是一個沒有商業計畫的任務優先領導者。你們從那趟旅行回來採納那些投資人的反饋了嗎？Joseph Tsai（蔡崇信）：並沒有。因為投資者看起來很困惑，他們沒有給我們很多反饋。他們有點沉默寡言。我想他們只是想直接拒絕我們。但那次經歷很重要，因為我們回來後說，我們必須做我們相信的事情，而不是讓投資者告訴我們應該做什麼。我認為這是一個非常重要的一課。幸運的是，我們籌集到一些資金。一些投資者終於非常懷疑地加入了。我還記得我們的A輪融資，我們當時確實請來了高盛。我是說你以為自己去了沙丘路，然後你就得到了高盛。他們當時，高盛像大型私募股權公司一樣進行投資。交易然後他們還有可以說是一個新興科技投資業務，而我恰好知道有個朋友是合夥人，當時在經營那家企業。然後她打電話跟我說，喬，你知道的。我有好消息和壞消息。當時，我已經很沮喪，被各種拒絕搞得心灰意冷。我當時想，再也受不了任何壞消息了，那就先告訴我好消息吧。她說：好吧，我們投資委員會已經決定追加阿里巴巴。我當時想，太棒了。差點都要掛掉電話，她說：等等，等等，你想聽壞消息嗎?我說，好啊，什麼壞消息?她說，“嗯，我們還決定投資另外五家公司，它們的商業模式與你們非常相似，我們就是想看看，讓你們互相競爭一下。主持人傑裡米：結果你們競爭得很好，你們上升到了頂峰，你們從高盛那裡拿到了第一輪，然後又從軟銀那裡拿到了另一輪，然後飛速發展了。在接下來的10年裡，你們推出了支付，即時通訊、消費者對消費者市場、企業對消費者市場，廣告和雲基礎設施產品，該產品目前是世界第四大，在中國擁有40%的市場份額。因此，阿里巴巴成為了一款超級應用。其中一項重大內部成果就是淘系業務。阿里巴巴的消費者對消費者市場，你能帶我們回到淘寶上線的那一刻嗎?當時面對的是來自eBay中國的真正壟斷。Joseph Tsai（蔡崇信）：那是在2000年代初，eBay收購了一家名為易趣的公司，所以他們立刻佔據了很大的市場份額。在最高峰時期，他們在消費者電子商務中佔據了90%的市場份額。而我們是新入場的玩家，話說有一天，我是說當時我正在和這裡的院長交談，她提到了一個叫簡的兒子，他是C-RIP的CEO，而她的丈夫是第一任CTO吳炯。阿里巴巴的第一任CTO他來自雅虎。所以，抱歉，這是個冗長的故事。當傑克決定推出一個消費者市場時，他非常興奮。他曾與軟銀的孫正義談過，孫正義非常支援，因為這是個宏大的構想。Masa會支援任何大項目，任何需要大量資金的事物，他都會支援。而且Jack非常興奮。他說："我從MASA那裡拿到了資金，我要做這件事。然後他去找John Wu，我們的首席技術官，John說，“想都別想，除非我死，否則我們絕不會做這個”，這是因為John的工作，John曾在Yahoo購物部門工作過。而且那並不成功。所以他對我們進入消費者電商領域並不看好。但顯然傑克否決了所有人的意見。我當時...我不知道我是有策略地，我...我無法做出那個判斷。但我決定我們要這樣來架構它，這樣在經濟上我們就不會完全受損。所以實際上從第一天開始，淘寶實際上是一家合資企業，由阿里巴巴和軟銀各持股50%的合資公司，直到大約六歲，七年後雅虎對我們進行了投資，我們抓住機會將淘寶剩餘部分整合進阿里以巴巴實現100%控股。這是我們做過的最明智的決定。否則如今淘寶仍將有一半歸軟銀所有，而我們也不知道它會走向何方。所以，但當我們開始做淘寶時，它是一個秘密項目。如果你們對阿里巴巴有點瞭解的話，幾乎所有的初創企業都曾在這個公寓裡起步，就是馬雲最初的那套公寓，你知道的，那裡有鞋子還有牙刷。所以我們帶了七個人的團隊進入這間公寓，他們都必須簽署保密協議。他們不能告訴同事、配偶或任何人。於是有一天，你知道，你就是那個坐在隔壁隔間的人，旁邊隔間的人消失了，然後他們，你知道，人們都在問，他們去那兒了？所以這最初七個人組建了淘寶業務，他們去了Jack原來的公寓，開展工作，建立那個市場。然後是我們首次推出時的情景，首批在淘寶上售賣的商品都來自每個人的衣櫃。大家只是打開衣櫃然後說:"我們有什麼？能找到什麼在Tabao上賣？我們用大量雜貨填滿了那個市場。這件事就是這樣開始的。據我記得我們把這個項目保密了將近一年，這是個秘密項目。我是說網站上線後人們就知道Taabao的存在了，但沒人知道它和阿里巴巴有關聯。主持人傑裡米：確實，當你想到它是如何將阿里巴巴如此成功的因素結合起來的時，你會發現這是非常了不起的，傑克是一個有遠見的人，他當時是你的首席技術官，有著更保守的心態，然後你組建了合資企業。然後是你們為實現這一目標所關注的焦點。你們在淘寶上取得了很大的成功。顯然，在兩年內，阿里巴巴奪回了市場。你們佔據了ebay 60%的市場份額，最終ebay關閉了中國業務。如今，阿里巴巴是世界上最成功、最重要的公司之一，地球上每六個人中就有一個人定期與阿里巴巴生態系統互動。Joseph Tsai（蔡崇信）：我需要把它放在我們的投資者簡報中。主持人傑裡米：幫我核實一下資料。如果你想讓我加入，我很樂意參與。所以現在你處於不同的位置。你就像ebay曾經一樣，現在正面臨著嶄露頭角的挑戰者。是的，那麼你們是如何從現有職位上繼續創新的呢？Joseph Tsai（蔡崇信）：嗯，我們並非總能做對。我們經歷過一些時期，當我們停止創新時，我們就為此付出了代價。嗯，作為一家大公司。你知道，從定義來說，我的意思是我們有12萬名員工。在這麼大的地方管理員工非常困難，每個人都有自己的角色，對吧？讓人們都去思考關於未來的新事物，創新是很困難的事。因為當你有一個成熟的企業時，你就必須制定商業計畫，你必須設定既定的目標。你有收入，需要達到預期。所有這些事情都會讓你分心，讓你失去創新思維。嗯，然後有人說，你知道為什麼你不成立一個名為創新部的部門，讓這些人創新？這也行不通，因為這些人往往會迷失方向，而且你也不會把最優秀的人才分配到這。你知道因為創新者的困境基本上意味著你的核心業務是最重要的，你會開發並分配最多的資源給它，因為它能帶來收入和利潤以及企業的商業價值。你該如何解決這個問題？你會怎麼處理？我認為這總是沒有完美的答案，但我認為你需要做的一件事是向人們灌輸某種主人翁意識。他們不僅僅是為老闆工作。每個人都應該為他們的客戶工作。你知道很多人都想讓他們的老闆高興。但我認為傑克會說的最重要的事情就是讓你的客戶高興。你如果你是企業的所有者，你就會關心客戶對吧，然後你就必須……如果你關心客戶，那你就會開始擔心了我的客戶正在使用，他們習慣這樣使用產品。但如果有人推出了不同的東西，就像我們這行的情況，一種不同的平台互動方式。你知道我們最初是從列表功能開始的，現在是搜尋功能，現在是短影片，類似不同的平台互動方式。你必須開始考慮這些事情，因為你的客戶不會永遠陪伴你，如果不創新。所以我認為擁有這種主人翁意識很重要，要擔憂顧客未來會需要什麼。你必須領先一步，就像史蒂夫·賈伯斯說的你只需要創造某個產品，然後告訴顧客這就是他們需要的。我認為這是你必須具備的思維方式。另一點是你必須快速做出決策，在我們的行業中，在一個高速發展的科技行業裡，你總是面臨著資訊不足的困境，無法讓你做出完美的決策。因此你必須能夠容忍資訊不全的情況，然後果斷做出決定並堅持執行。如果之後發現錯了，就迅速轉向不同的方向。因此保持這種靈活性也是創新的關鍵。主持人傑裡米：是的。這種敏捷性和主人翁意識顯然對阿里巴巴起到了作用。你們於2014年在美國上市，這是當時歷史上規模最大的首次公開募股。這標誌著阿里巴巴作為一家真正的全球性公司的到來，符合傑克最初的願景。這是一家全球性公司，現在可以接觸到全球投資者。為什麼這很重要？Joseph Tsai（蔡崇信）：全球化為什麼重要？嗯，我認為公司擁有投資者，上市後他們就是你的利益相關方之一，當然你也知道，我開場時就說過，我們只做我們堅信的事，而且我們不會聽從投資者的意見，但如今作為一家大公司，我們擁有非常精明的投資者，他們會就行業動態給我們提供反饋。告訴我們競爭對手的動向，不僅是中國國內的競爭對手，還有全球範圍內的競爭對手，對吧。我們身處一個全球競爭的行業，特別是談到AI，雲端運算，你知道那是全球性業務，所以你能從全球投資者那裡獲得很好的視角。但當然在我們決定的時候，當阿里巴巴2014年進行IPO時，我們原本計畫在香港上市，但最終沒有這麼做，我們去了紐約。這其中有很多需要考慮的因素。我想告訴你，你知道，原本有些複雜的原因，我們分析了所有因素。但簡單的原因是紐約證券交易所你知道很有名，而且市場流動性很高。我認為今天大多數全球投資者仍然是美國人或者有美國血統，所以這對我們來說很自然某種程度上是進入了資本市場在美國。主持人傑裡米：ipo後，你辭去了首席財務官的職務，擔任副董事長。阿里巴巴經歷了你之前討論過的10年，這是10年挑戰中創新性較低的一段。2023年，你以董事長的身份回歸。你談到了快速決策。那麼，你能向我們介紹一下你作為主席回來時做出的快速決定嗎？Joseph Tsai（蔡崇信）：第一，我不會說是我做的決定。我們作為一個新的管理團隊，包括我們的CEO。我們決定了要專注的方向。我們將專注於電子商務這一核心業務，我們將把重點放在人工智慧和雲上，我們要加大投入力度。但它屬於基於CPU的計算業務，我們決定AI將成為推動未來基於雲GPU的雲端運算業務需求的關鍵。我們選擇了這兩條賽道，我們要做到極致優秀的領域，我們將具備極強的競爭力，至於其他資產或業務對我們而言就沒那麼重要了。你必須明確什麼是重點，什麼不是。所以明確重點就是首要決策。第二個決策是關於賽道的選擇。我們要在這些領域做到極致，我們需要什麼樣的資源，不論是資金還是人力都要投入最優質的資源進去。第三個決策是關於其他事務。要麼出售要麼徹底退出或者通過某種方式管理，以免分散管理團隊的注意力。這非常重要，管理團隊精力有限。你一天只有24小時。你不會同時照看八家不同的企業。我們以前去找投資人時，會說阿里巴巴有六個不同的事業部。這個業務類股，那個業務類股，這太蠢了！但你知道，如果我是投資者，開始聽一個傢伙說話，然後他說我有六個生意，那麼他們會說，你到底要專注於什麼？你知道，完全沒有重點。所以，我們我們實際上精簡了很多。我們出售了一些不重要的資產或非戰略性資產。但也有一些業務處於灰色地帶。它們並非核心中的核心。然而，它們具有戰略價值。一個例子是我們的水果配送業務。這是一家名為餓了麼的企業。我們被競爭對手打得落花流水。我們當時只有大約20%的市場份額。我們的競爭對手佔了約70%的市場份額。每個投資者都在問，你們什麼時候退出外賣業務，直接放棄食品配送？我告訴人們，我們就是你們說的那個食品配送本身。我們可能並不想單純做外賣業務，但整個配送基礎設施將會對電子商務非常重要，因為它是即時商業配送基礎設施。如果你想買東西，你點餐，30分鐘內就能送到，甚至更快。但如果未來人們想買衣服，行李箱、手機任何東西，他們都希望30分鐘內送達。如果我賣掉那家公司，我就會失去快速配送的基礎設施。儘管這項業務本身並非我們的核心業務，但它具有戰略意義。所以我們不得不在灰色地帶做出抉擇，該如何處理這些業務？當時存在大量業務，其中許多灰色地帶業務的管理團隊都主動來找我們，聲稱自己具有戰略重要性，我們就像我和你一樣，然後我就覺得，我才不像你那樣。主持人傑裡米：我不想成為那種人！Joseph Tsai（蔡崇信）：但之後你必須稍微直接一點，你必須說，對不起。我知道你工作很努力，做得很好，但你不會成為我們業務的核心。我們得想辦法，要麼為你找到一個合作夥伴，要麼承擔風險，要麼做一些不同的事情。主持人傑裡米：是的，在過去的幾年裡，對戰略的清晰和關注對你很有幫助。你和團隊。你提到了加倍投入雲端運算和人工智慧，所以我想談談人工智慧真的是世界上最大的兩個經濟體——美國和中國——之間競爭的最新舞台。你如何看待比賽的進行？Joseph Tsai（蔡崇信）：我認為AI是公司之間的競賽，但AI不應該是國家之間的競賽。這是一種技術，這是電力。我把ai描述為，擁有AI如同擁有水和空氣。你能想像如果一個國家拒絕另一個國家獲取某種生命必需之物嗎?所以我不認為這是一場兩國之間的競賽。我認為人們可以在很多領域進行合作。並為世界帶來福祉。如今人工智慧在醫療領域已取得諸多成就。我們已經能夠通過AI可以檢測胰腺癌的早期階段。你知道的，很多這些積極效益應該讓每個人都能享受到。所以，我並不認同這種觀點。網友提問廢話比較多，筆者就精選了一條關於阿里職場的問題翻譯給大家！網友提問：我想問你一個關於阿里巴巴文化的問題。人們經常將阿里巴巴文化描述為具有很強的阿里味，阿里巴巴在中文中有自己的語言、制度和期望。這有助於提高性能。這也可能造成壓力和官僚主義。你如何看待在保持強大的企業文化和確保開放性、包容性之間的權衡，Joseph Tsai（蔡崇信）：就像我說的，你必須喜歡和你一起工作的人。所以，如果我要定義阿里味的本質是什麼？那就是下班後你想和同事喝杯啤酒，或者甚至不是下班後，因為這也是工作的一部分，因為因為你正在與同事共度時光。嗯，我認為這很重要，就像那種文化氛圍。如何避免官僚主義？你必須明確界定那些重要那些不重要，並敢於告訴員工他們的部門並不重要。你必須要有勇氣直言不諱，我認為很多公司犯錯就是因為他們不想傷害員工。我是說用"包容性'這個詞，很抱歉，我們是在經營企業。我們無法讓每個人都參與進來。如果他們無法為你的目標做出貢獻，你就必須讓他們知道。https://singjupost.com/joe-tsai-co-founder-and-chairman-alibaba-find-your-people-transcript/TRANSCRIPT:JEREMY TEPPER: Joe, welcome to View from the Top.JOE TSAI: Thank you, Jeremy. Very happy to be here.JEREMY TEPPER: Well, it’s an honor to have you here. And as I was preparing for this interview and trying to wrap my head around just how massive and global Alibaba has become, what really struck me is how you have navigated across cultures throughout your career. East and west, law and business and sports and tech. So I actually want to start with your first cross-cultural major experience. You were born and raised in Taiwan and you moved to the US at age 13 to attend the Lawrenceville school in New Jersey. What was that like for you?Navigating a New CultureJOE TSAI: It was scary. My first, well, first before I went, I never went to seventh grade. I was in elementary school in Taiwan. And then my mother said, “Joe, I’m going to send you to school overseas, but you have to learn how to speak English.” And I didn’t know how to speak English, so I went to an English cram school for one year and skipped seventh grade. So I went into Lawrenceville in the eighth grade.During that cram school year, I basically memorized vocabulary, but I couldn’t put together a sentence in English. And that was sort of—so imagine you didn’t really know the language, you don’t know how to communicate, and then you’re in a completely new cultural environment. Just kind of just land, I mean literally like fresh off the boat, right. And landing in this very unique environment. Boarding school. It’s an all boys boarding school, so that has its own sort of pitfalls and you just have to fit in.I think I wanted to be one of the guys. I wanted to conform. I wanted to fit in. I look different, I dress different, I speak a different language. So it’s very important for me to feel like, get accepted by the rest of the guys. And then very quickly I went into sports. I got cut from the baseball team, unfortunately. Imagine a kid from Taiwan, Little League baseball. And I didn’t make the team, didn’t make the swimming team.But then I said, the hell with it. I’m going to try completely new things. I played football, American football, and then got into lacrosse because I couldn’t play baseball. It’s a spring sport, lacrosse, and baseball is spring sports. Couldn’t make the baseball team, so I went to play lacrosse.So the funny thing is, yesterday Jeremy and I, I think he was very worried, so he wanted to have like a prep session. We spent—so yesterday we spent an hour to prep for this talk. We talked nothing but sports.JEREMY TEPPER: Yeah, we both love sports. And I’m a huge Lakers fan. And obviously Joe is a big sports fan and a Nets fan and a Liberty fan.JOE TSAI: So we talked about that. Yeah, I won’t blame you for that. But anyway, the Lakers are doing better right now, so congratulations.JEREMY TEPPER: Thank you so much. Thank you.JOE TSAI: And then we found out that we were both football players in high school.JEREMY TEPPER: Yeah, undersized linebackers. Well, Joe, you found your footing. You kind of rebounded from those early sports challenges. You got into lacrosse. You went to Yale for undergrad and law school.JOE TSAI: Right.The Leap to AlibabaJEREMY TEPPER: You found yourself at a tax law firm and ultimately went into private equity. But just four years into Joe’s investing career, he came across a guy named Jack Ma, who was building a company alongside 17 other co-founders. It was an online marketplace. Zero revenue and a few thousand users very early. So what convinced you that was the time to make the leap?JOE TSAI: It was not only zero revenue, Jack didn’t even have a company. It wasn’t incorporated. And so Jack, all Jack had was a domain name and a fresh website. And I still remember the first time I went to see him. I climbed up the stairs of the second floor, second story apartment. There were a bunch of shoes outside. You take off your shoes, you go inside, and we talked for about an hour.And I thought Jack was fascinating. He had just charisma, that leadership quality. Jack used to be a teacher. And I think teachers make very good leaders because you have to communicate well. You also have to be able to identify good talent, good students, and develop them like what teachers do. So all those quality kind of came through. And that was what I was really, I found very appealing.I couldn’t understand the business plan because the Internet was new to everybody at the time. And he was talking about using the Internet to get all the companies in China that makes stuff and trade stuff to overseas and have foreign purchasers and buyers coming to the website to buy stuff from China. It’s a wholesale marketplace. So Alibaba’s first website was actually an English language because it was made for the rest of the world.So an hour into the conversation, I said, “Jack, let’s, you know, I need to have a bathroom break.” So I go into the bathroom and there were like 10 toothbrushes on the sink. So I realized people were just sleeping, living their sleeping bags all over the place.And they were—it was the early days of, you know, kind of the startup culture.JEREMY TEPPER: Yeah.JOE TSAI: And I decided, you know, I would say this to young people when you want to switch jobs or when you find a new job and you want to do something new. Find the people, the people that you want to partner with, the people that you want to follow, the mentors that you want to learn from. And to me, Jack is both a friend, a business partner, and also a mentor. He’s taught me a lot of things, and I felt like I could learn a lot from him.And also at the time, the Internet, if your business had a .com name in it, everybody thought that you were going to become a millionaire in six months. But for me, it was Jack. That personality, that leadership quality that actually came through from having been a teacher.Finding the Right Co-FoundersJEREMY TEPPER: Yeah, you clearly struck gold in that partnership with Jack. And a lot of our classmates here at Stanford are thinking about starting companies and looking for co-founders. So what’s the right formula? What should they be looking for in their co-founders?JOE TSAI: Well, first I think they should—it’s something that you can get along with, like, do you want to go out and have a beer with this person, you know, after work? I think that’s the first test.I think the next thing is complimentary, being complementary. So something that they’re good at, you’re not good at, and something you’re good at, they’re not good at. Having that complementary mentality, whatever that word is, being able to complement each other is really, really important so that the founders are not stepping on each other’s feet.Alibaba started with 18 founders, and I think we all complimented each other. Well, people brought different skill sets to things. And I think as you think about starting companies, it’s, you know, it’s not like you want to go out and find 18 people to found a company with, but I think only two or three founders sometimes is a problem because as you scale the business, your culture gets diluted and there’s no founder around to touch have touch points with employees.And having 18 founders, we had that advantage. You know, we were able to—each founder is able to touch more employees of the company, so I think that’s important. And then just people that you feel you want to spend 24/7 with and have a good time, because as a startup, you’re not going to go home very much or this work-life balance is not going to be something you should be focused on.JEREMY TEPPER: Yeah, I guess I should ask, did you have a toothbrush in the apartment as well?JOE TSAI: Yeah, I brought my toothbrush afterwards.JEREMY TEPPER: Oh, perfect.Bridging Cultural DividesJEREMY TEPPER: So I want to touch on this point of having this many co-founders, 18 in total. It’s very, very unique. And in joining them at Alibaba as CFO in 1999, you were really entering—JOE TSAI: By the way, I was for three months, and then Jack fired me because he said, “Joe, you have no clue how to do operations.” I was like, “All right, fine, I’ll be the CFO.”JEREMY TEPPER: Well, yet again, you rebounded from baseball to lacrosse, COO to CFO. Now, that group of co-founders had some connectivity to each other already, and you were kind of the new person coming in. You’re an American educated lawyer and investor. You’re from Taiwan. They were all Chinese mainlanders. How did you find a way to bridge that cultural—JOE TSAI: I think the first thing is—well, I’m usually more of a listener, and I approach the work just with humility. I’m there to learn. I didn’t know anything about the Internet. I had never worked with a company where it’s majority mainland Chinese in China, because all my prior work experience had been either in the United States or in Hong Kong.So for me, it wasn’t my place to come in and tell people what to do. So I listened a lot and just try to, again, that Lawrenceville experience, try to blend in, try to be one of the crowd, one of the person in the community. And I think that’s helped me a lot.I think you have to bring everything you do, you have to bring a sense of humility to the work, because there’s going to be people, you’re going to find your colleagues, your partners that are smarter than you are that can teach you a lot, and you need to approach your work with that kind of mindset.JEREMY TEPPER: Yeah. Going in and being a listener and being a humble one at that clearly served you well. Now, over time, Jack really became this larger than life figure, the face of the Chinese tech industry. And you were there for the entire journey, but largely behind the scenes. Why is that?JOE TSAI: Because he’s better at being in front on the stage.JEREMY TEPPER: I think you’re doing pretty great.JOE TSAI: He’s a better speaker. He’s a better inspirational leader. Right. I think it’s very, very important. I mean, I think I would like to think I’ve improved over the years in terms of communicating to people, but he’s a natural for him. Just getting on stage, have all the employees in the same room and just say, “Here’s our direction. This is why we’re doing it.” And he’s very persuasive. So he’s better at it.The Sand Hill Road ExperienceJEREMY TEPPER: Well, it’s another great example of finding somebody with a complementary skill set and working together toward the same mission. Now, your first step with Jack, as I understand it, was flying out here to Sand Hill Road, just a few minutes away to pitch investors and raise your seed round. How do you remember that trip?JOE TSAI: That didn’t go very well. I think we struck out. We had something like 15 meetings. We didn’t get a single investor interested in investing in our company. And that’s because I think at Stanford GSB you’re taught to show up with a PowerPoint or something, right? You have to show people something, a demo or something. We didn’t have anything. We came empty handed.And people are like, “Jack, what’s your business plan?” Jack says, “I don’t have a business plan.” He actually said, “I don’t have a business plan.” But the trends at the time in China was, I mean in hindsight you could have seen was the intersection of Internet technology and also China coming into the WTO, which meant trade between China and the rest of the world was going to explode.And today you go to China. China is a manufacturing powerhouse. Everything is made in China and they’re getting better and better, higher and higher quality, higher and higher tech technology. But the seeds were sown back then. That was just on the cusp of entering into the WTO and imagine getting all these manufacturers and trading companies bring all their products online for the rest of the world to see. That was the business idea.But Jack didn’t just talk about the business. He said, “My mission is to make it easy to do business anywhere.” That was our mission at the time. That’s what we told investors. And today that is still our mission. You can go on our website, Alibaba website says to make it easy to do business anywhere.JEREMY TEPPER: That’s incredible. So a mission first leader with no business plan. Did you guys come back from that trip, incorporate feedback from those investors?Lessons from Early FundraisingJOE TSAI: Not really, because the investors just looked very baffled. They didn’t give us a lot of feedback. They were kind of reticent. They were just, I think they just wanted to reject us outright. But that experience was important because we came back and we said we have to do what we believe in rather than have investors tell us what we should do. And I think that was a very important lesson.And then fortunately we were able to raise some capital. Some investors finally very skeptically bought in. I still remember our Series A round. We actually had Goldman Sachs come in. I mean you think, you know, you went to Sand Hill Road and you got Goldman Sachs. At the time, Goldman was investing like large private equity deals and then they had sort of a, you know, emerging technology investment business. And I happen to know, have a friend who is a partner who’s running that business.And then she calls me up and she said, “Joe, you know, I’ve got good news and bad news.” And at the time, you know, by then I was so, you know, disappointed with all the rejections. I was like I can’t stand any bad news. So tell me the good news first. And she said, “Well, we have our investment committee have approved the investment in Alibaba.” I was like that’s great. I was about to hang up. She said, “Wait, wait, you want to hear the bad news?” And I said, “Fine, what’s the bad news?” And she said, “Well, we also decided to back five other companies that’s very similar to your business model and we’re just going to see, let you guys compete.”JEREMY TEPPER: You guys did and you rose to the top. You guys raised the round from Goldman Sachs, then another round from Softbank and then it was really off to the races. Over the next 10 years you guys launched payments, messaging, a consumer to consumer marketplace, a business to consumer marketplace, advertising, and a cloud infrastructure offering which is now the fourth largest in the world and has 40% market share in China. So Alibaba became a super app.Now one of those major in-house wins was Taobao, Alibaba’s consumer to consumer marketplace. Can you take us back to the moment of launching Taobao against what was at the time a real monopoly from eBay China?The Secret Launch of TaobaoJOE TSAI: It was back in the early 2000s. eBay had acquired a company called EachNet. So immediately they had a large market share and at the highest point they had like 90% market share of consumer e-commerce. And we were the new player coming in.And so one day, well going back, I mean I think I was talking to the dean here and she mentioned someone, Jane Sun, who is the CEO of Ctrip, and her husband was the first CTO, John Wu, first CTO at Alibaba. He came from Yahoo. So sorry, this is a long-winded story.And when Jack decided to launch a consumer marketplace, Taobao, he was very excited. He had talked to Masa at Softbank and Masa was very supportive. And because it’s a big idea, Masa will support anything that’s big, anything that costs a lot of money he will support. And Jack’s very excited. He said, “I got the money from Masa, I’m going to do this.” And he goes to John Wu, our CTO, and John said, “No way in hell, over my dead body are we going to do this.”And that’s because John had worked on Yahoo Shopping and it was not successful. So he didn’t have a very positive view of us going into the consumer e-commerce space. But then obviously Jack overruled everybody and I was, I didn’t know strategically, I couldn’t make that judgment. But I decided that we were going to structure it so that financially we weren’t going to get totally hurt.So actually from day one, Taobao actually was a joint venture, 50/50 JV between Alibaba and SoftBank. And it wasn’t until like six, seven years later, when Yahoo invested in us, we took the opportunity to fold in the rest of Taobao into Alibaba to own 100%. And that was the big, the best decision we’ve ever made. Otherwise today, Taobao will still be half owned by SoftBank. Right? And we wouldn’t know where it would go.So, but when we started Taobao, it was a secret project. And if you guys know Alibaba a little bit, pretty much almost all the startup new businesses went through this apartment, the Jack original apartment, with the shoes and the toothbrushes. So we took away a team of seven people into this apartment. They all had to sign NDAs. They couldn’t tell their colleagues or spouses or anybody. So one day, you know, the person that you’re sitting next to, the cubicle next door, at the cubicle next door disappeared. And they, you know, people are like, where do they go?So the first seven people seeded the Taobao business. They went to the Jack, the Jack original apartment to, you know, do the work, create that marketplace. And then our first, when we launched it, the first items being sold on Taobao came from everybody’s closet. Everybody just went to their closet and said, “What do we have? What can we find to sell it on Taobao?” We seeded that marketplace with a lot of junk. That’s how this thing started.And I remember it was for almost a year, we kept it a secret project. I mean, the website was launched so people knew Taobao existed, but nobody knew it was connected to Alibaba.JEREMY TEPPER: It’s really quite remarkable when you think about how it combines what has made Alibaba so successful. The complementary skill sets between Jack the visionary, your CTO at the time, who had a more conservative mindset, and then you structuring the joint venture and then the focus that you guys applied to get this off the ground.You guys had a lot of success with Taobao. Obviously. Within two years, Alibaba took back the market, you guys took 60% market share. And eBay China ultimately closed down. Now today, Alibaba is one of the most successful and important companies in the world. One in six people on this planet interacts with Alibaba’s ecosystem regularly now. I think that’s right.JOE TSAI: I need to put that into our investor presentation.JEREMY TEPPER: Fact check me on that. Yeah. If you want me to join, I’m happy to hop in. So now you’re in a different position. You are the incumbent, like eBay once was, and you’re facing up and coming challengers.JOE TSAI: Yes.JEREMY TEPPER: So how do you guys continue to innovate from that incumbent position?The Challenge of Innovation at ScaleJOE TSAI: Well, we don’t always do it right. We’ve gone through periods where, when we stopped innovating and we suffer from it. As a large company, by definition, we have 120,000 employees. It’s very difficult to have people in such a large place. Everybody has their role. Right. It’s very difficult to get people to think about new things, about the future, innovate.Because when you have an established business, then you have to set business plan, you have to set established goals, you have revenue projection that you need to meet, and all those things get preoccupied and take you away from an innovative mindset. And then some people will say, “Well, why don’t you just set up a division called the innovation division to have those people innovate?” That doesn’t work either because those people tend to get lost. And also, you’re not going to allocate the best talent to that, you know, because the innovator’s dilemma basically, by definition means that what your core business is the most important thing and you’re going to allocate the most resources to it because it generates revenues and profits and value, enterprise value for the business.How do you address that? How do you deal with it? I think it’s always, there’s no perfect answer. But I think the one thing that you need to do is to instill in people some sense of ownership. They’re not just working for their boss. Everybody should work for their customers. And, you know, a lot of people want to make their boss happy. But I think the most important thing Jack would say is to make your customer happy. You are, if you’re the owner of the business, then you care about the customers, right?And then you have to, then if you care about the customers, then you start to worry, “All right, my customers are using, they’re used to using the product this way. But what if someone else comes in with something different?” Like you know, in our business, a different way to engage with the platform. You know, we started with a listing, then a search, now it’s short video. Like different ways of engaging with the platform. You have to start thinking about these things because your customer is not going to stay with you forever if you don’t innovate.So I think sense of ownership, worrying about what the customers will want in the future, and you have to be a step ahead. Almost like what Steve Jobs says, you need to just invent something and then tell the customers that’s what they need. I think that’s the mindset you need to have.The other thing is you have to make decisions very quick. And in our business, in a high growth technology business, you are always living with a deficiency of information that allows you to make the perfect decision. And so you have to be able to tolerate not having full information and then just making a decision and commit to it. And then if you find out you’re wrong, pivot fast in a different direction. So having that agility is also key to being innovative.Going Global: The 2014 IPOJEREMY TEPPER: Yeah, that agility, that sense of ownership has clearly worked for Alibaba. You guys went public in the US in 2014 in what was at the time the largest IPO in history. And it marked Alibaba’s arrival as a truly global company in line with Jack’s original vision. And this was a global company with access to now global investors. Why was that important, being global?JOE TSAI: Why is that important, access to global investors specifically?JEREMY TEPPER: Why is that important, access to global investors specifically?JOE TSAI: Well, I think having investors in your company and being a public company, they’re one of your constituencies. And you know, of course I started this talk by saying, you know, we do what we believe in, we don’t listen to investors. But now as a large company, we have very smart investors that give us feedback about the industry, about what our competitors are doing. Not just competitors in China, but competitors around the world. Right. We were in a globally competitive industry, especially talking about AI cloud. You know, that’s, you know, that’s a global business. So you get a very good perspective from global investors.But of course, at the time when we decided, when Alibaba went IPO in 2014, we were going to go list in Hong Kong, but we ended up not doing that. We went to New York. There were a lot of considerations that went into it. I would like to tell you there was some intricate reason and we analyze everything, but the simple reason was the New York Stock Exchange is, you know, well known, and there was a lot of market liquidity. Most global investors, I think still is today are American or have American roots. So it was natural for us to sort of tap into the capital markets in the United States.Returning as ChairmanJEREMY TEPPER: Well after the IPO you stepped down as CFO and stepped into the role of vice chairman. And Alibaba went through a 10 year period which you discussed earlier was on the less innovative side, a 10 year period of challenge. And you returned as chairman in 2023. You talked about quick decision making. So can you walk us through the quick decisions you made when you returned as chairman?Strategic Focus and Resource AllocationJOE TSAI: Number one, I wouldn’t say I made the decision. We collectively, as a new management team, including our CEO Eddie Wu, we decided what we were going to focus on. We were going to focus on our core business of e-commerce and we were going to focus on AI and cloud. We were doubling down. I mean we had a cloud business, but it’s a CPU-based compute business. We decided that AI is going to drive future need for cloud GPU-based cloud computing business.And so you pick those two lanes where we’re going to be extremely good at, we’re going to be extremely competitive and then the rest of the assets or businesses that we have are just less important. And you have to decide what’s important, what’s not. So deciding what’s important, first decision, the second decision is okay in the lanes that we want to be very good at, what kind of resources we want to allocate to, whether it’s capital or people, you want to put the best resources into it.The third decision is on the rest of the stuff. Let’s sell them or get rid of an exit or whatever. Somehow manage them in a way so that it’s not distracting to the management team. It’s very important. Management team has limited bandwidth. You only have 24 hours a day. You’re not going to be able to watch eight different businesses.I mean we used to go to investors and say Alibaba has six different divisions and this here, these segment and that segment, that’s stupid. You know, if I was an investor, start listening to a guy you know that says I have six businesses, then they’re going to say what are you going to really focus on? There’s no focus. So we actually streamlined a lot of that. We sold unimportant assets or non-strategic assets.But then there are some businesses that are in the gray area. They are not core core. However, they have strategic value. One example is our food delivery business. It’s a business called Element. We were getting killed by our competition. We had, you know, had like, only 20% market share, our competition, like 70% market share. And every investor is like, when are you going to exit this business? Just get out of food delivery.And I told people we are. You’re right. Food delivery itself, we may not want to be in the food delivery business per se, but the whole delivery infrastructure was going to be important for e-commerce because it’s an instant commerce delivery infrastructure. If you want to buy stuff, you order meals, they’ll come to you in 30 minutes or even shorter period of time. But what if in the future people want to buy clothing, luggage, their cell phones, whatever. They want it in 30 minutes.If I sold that business, I would have lost that quick delivery infrastructure. And so even though that business itself was not core to us, it has strategic importance. So we had to sort of decide in the gray area what to do with those. There were a lot of businesses where a lot of the management teams of those gray area businesses came to us and said, oh, we’re strategic and important. And we’re like, I’m like, you’re not.JEREMY TEPPER: I would hate to be one of those folks.JOE TSAI: But then you have to be a little bit direct. You have to say, I’m sorry, I know you’ve worked very hard, you’ve done a very good job, but you’re just not going to be core to our business. And we kind of have to find some way to either find a partner for you to take on the risk or do something different.The AI Race: Companies vs. CountriesJEREMY TEPPER: Yeah. That clarity and focus on the strategy has served you well over the last few years. You and the team you brought up doubling down on cloud computing and AI. So I want to talk about that. AI is really the newest arena for a race between the world’s two largest economies, the United States and China. How do you see the race playing out?JOE TSAI: I think AI is a race among companies. But AI shouldn’t be a race between countries. It’s a technology. It’s electricity. I described AI as having access to AI as having access to water and air. Can you imagine if a country denies another country something that’s essential to life?So I don’t see this race as a race between two countries. I think there is a lot of areas where people can cooperate and benefit the world. AI today has achieved a lot in the medical area. We’ve been able to have AI tools that could detect early stages of pancreatic cancer. And I mean, a lot of these positive benefits should be available to everybody.So I don’t subscribe to this view that there should be a race between two countries. I can understand that there’s a school of thought that says if the military gets a hold of AI, that whoever runs faster or develops AI faster for military use will have supremacy. But let’s just limit that to the military field and let AI capabilities proliferate around the world. And that’s the way to go, I think.JEREMY TEPPER: Yeah, I think most people today would agree that AI has this potential to be hugely transformative globally, but yet there are two very different strategies between Chinese companies and American companies. China, Chinese companies have access to very low cost of energy. They’re pursuing mass distribution open source, like Alibaba is. And American companies have a hardware semiconductor advantage. So maybe we don’t call it a race, but which approach do you think will win?JOE TSAI: We have to define what winning means. I think for me, winning means it gets proliferated. I hate the word diffusion. I wanted to say proliferation. But then people bring in kind of the analogy of nuclear weapons, whatever. So AI should be used by the most number of people and in whichever society where they have most people use AI and benefit from AI is going to be the winner.Building Qwen: Scaling AI Through ExperienceJEREMY TEPPER: Well, Alibaba has pursued that strategy. Qwen Alibaba’s model recently surpassed 700 million downloads globally. It’s the leading open source model in the world. How much of Qwen’s success, your success in building Qwen as a product comes from prior successes scaling other products like Taobao?JOE TSAI: A lot. If you think about these large scale Internet companies with hundreds of millions or even billions of users, the problems that we try to solve is the problem of scale, the problem of concurrent users coming in. So the problems of parallel computing. So having that experience really helped us in developing the right algorithms to, you know, ultimately that turned into AI.And our effort in, you know, the modern AI as we know it is based on the transformer architecture. So we had development efforts dating back to 2019. And remember, this is like three years before OpenAI publicly came out with ChatGPT. But we didn’t put enough resources into it. Right back then, people were still debating whether that’s the right technology path versus something different.But once back, you know, in 2022, when ChatGPT came out, I think everybody woke up and said, we need to double down, we need to put those investments in. But by then we would have, we had already, you know, years of three, at least three years of development, development in transformers, but also large scale computing.That’s all we had invested in our cloud infrastructure back 17 years ago. When we decided that our e-commerce business was getting so large in terms of users and also the data that we have to manage, we have to develop proprietary software to manage computing clusters. And basically my layman’s way of thinking about it is your software enables clusters of 50,000 computers, 100,000 computers, to work and think like one brain, even though they’re located in different data centers. Right.So that’s the technology that we develop, proprietary that formed the basis of our cloud computing business today. So we went into cloud computing out of necessity, not because it was a hot thing back 17 years ago. Nobody has heard about cloud computing. Nobody really thought it was a business. So, yeah. So basically we had a lot of good foundational work that’s done before sort of the current craze about the current version of AI.Sports Investments and Following Your PassionJEREMY TEPPER: Yeah. Well, it will be interesting to see how this competition plays out. I want to return to a lifelong passion of yours on this point of competition, sports. You acquired majority ownership of both the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets and the WNBA’s New York Liberty in 2019, and together they were recently valued at nearly double what you acquired them for. How did you know these were great investments and not just passion projects?JOE TSAI: I didn’t. I thought they were safe investments in the sense that the value was not going to go down. I think a few years ago I gave the analogy of if you live in New York City, you see a, you know, rooftop apartment, Park Avenue apartment, that’s. You buy into it, you’re not going to lose money because it’s in a good location. It’s a prize asset that everybody wants.So I thought the downside was going to be protected. But I did not anticipate how much value the valuation of these professional sports teams have increased over the last few years. There are two leagues in the United States, the NFL and the NBA, where there’s tremendous amount of value being created. And that’s because of the media rights, meaning broadcast rights, streamers and TV networks pay a lot for these media rights to be able to broadcast your games. And that’s supported the increase in valuation.JEREMY TEPPER: Yeah, you applied that investor mindset, assessing risk in becoming an investor in these two amazing franchises. Now, you turned a true passion sports into an investment strategy and business school. Advice on passion is somewhat mixed. Some say avoid turning it into a career, and others say you got to do what you love. Where do you stand?JOE TSAI: I can’t imagine if you woke up every morning, you went to work and you hated your job. That’s, you know, that’s not a recipe for success, but you don’t, you know, you could be passionate about a lot of things, but at least you have to be interested in what you do and you want to do it better. Whether you call it passion or something different or dedication or interest, you know, there’s gradations.You know, if one of you says, “I’m passionate about cooking” and then you go out and try to open up a restaurant, that’s great. But that’s probably not why you went to Stanford Business School for, you know. So my advice is find the people first. Find the people that you want to spend time with. And then obviously the mission of the company and the stuff that you do is something that you have an inherent interest in. Whether you call that passion or not. You should be passionate about your colleagues, about your co-workers. That’s what I call passion.Q&A: Capital Allocation and Business StructuringJEREMY TEPPER: Well, with that, Joe, I’d like to turn it over to a few of my classmates who have prepared questions for you. Hi Joe, thank you so much for coming over and speaking with us today. My name is Katherine. I’m a current MBA 2 student and before GSB I actually spent 3 years working at JP Morgan Hong Kong as a coverage banker for Alibaba Group, working across many business units and then ecosystem players such as Alicloud, Huma, Alipicture, Ali Health, et cetera.What really amazed me is Alibaba’s capability of pioneering very sophisticated business structuring and capital allocation. Looking back, what are some decisions that you’ve made or the group have made are misunderstood by the market, but it’s really critical for the growth of the company?JOE TSAI: Well, I would like to think we’re very sophisticated in technology, in products, this and this. You know, I mean I think we do a pretty decent job in terms of managing the capital markets and, and I guess so-called financial engineering. I’m sorry, your question is what is…JEREMY TEPPER: Yeah, what are some decisions on business structuring and capital allocation that are potentially misunderstood by the market yet to be very critical for Alibaba’s growth today?The AI Investment ChallengeJOE TSAI: Yeah, yeah, look, I think today everybody is worried about the amount of capital that’s being allocated to AI. Different at the different layers. Right. In our company, AI means a full stack of things. You know, how much money we put into developing our LLM, how much CapEx we make into our cloud infrastructure. So there’s, and also we have, in order to sort of test how good your AI is, you have a consumer application. Right.So we now have the Chengwen app which is our consumer app. So how much money do you allocate to promoting marketing, to promote the consumer application? So along the full stack you have to allocate capital. And I think every company that’s serious about AI is doing all these things and perhaps that’s the part that investors are trying to figure out whether you’re allocating correctly to different parts of the stack.I don’t think there is the right, I don’t even have the right answer for you, but I do think that these three things that I’ve mentioned, a consumer AI application, the large language model that’s backing up, that’s supporting the application, and also the infrastructure that’s supporting everything, those are equally important. And you kind of have to anticipate that. You just have to believe that there’s going to be demand like infrastructure, you know, the infrastructure investments.You have to be very forward looking, securing data center capacity, securing the energy, buying the equipment. There is a lead time to it. But I think that your judgment of whether there’s going to be demand should be based on what ultimately the users, the enterprises that are going to need a demand as opposed to some philosophical pursuit of AGI. There is a lot of philosophical pursuit of AGI right now that’s driving the demand. But then at the end of the day, you need to kind of look at what the market can bear.Maintaining Alibaba’s CultureJEREMY TEPPER: Hi Joe, my name is Hong, I’m MBA1 currently at GSB. I was also a coverage banker at Credit Suisse in Hong Kong. And I wanted to ask you a question on Alibaba’s culture. People often describe Alibaba’s culture as having a very strong Ali flavor, AKA Alibur in Chinese, with its own language systems and expectations. While this has helped drive performance, it can potentially also create pressure and bureaucracy. How do you think about the trade off between maintaining a strong corporate culture and ensuring openness, inclusiveness and innovation as Alibaba continues to mature in the future?JOE TSAI: Like I said, you have to like the people you work with. So I think if I were to define what is the essence of Ali, it is, you want to have a beer with your coworker after work or it’s not even after work because it’s also part of work because you’re spending time with your coworkers and I think that’s important.And you know, the culture. How do you avoid bureaucracy? Right. Well, you have to define what’s important, what is not, and be able to tell people that their division is not important. You have to have the guts to tell them. I think a lot of companies make mistakes because they don’t want to hurt the people. I mean use the word inclusive. I’m sorry, we’re running a business. We can’t include everybody in the enterprise. If they’re not going to be contributing to where you want to go, you have to let them know.The Most Challenging Step in AI TransformationJEREMY TEPPER: Thanks Joe for all the great sharing. So I’m Musea, second year MBA. Sadly I’m now coverage banker for Alibaba, but I actually work as a product manager in China and also build partnership with Alibaba cloud and broader ecosystem. So I was wondering since Alibaba’s ecosystem and also full stack AI strategy as you mentioned, really fascinated me. So from your perspective, what has been the most challenging and most difficult step to made but is really crucial for the company in terms of AI transformation?JOE TSAI: I think what is difficult is every part of the stack that I mentioned that we have to invest in costs a lot of money and then you invariably people ask, what’s the ROI? But like I said, you have to have a certain belief that it is strategically important and you’re not going to focus today on ROI.And the other thing is it’s not like we came to this with a well designed grand plan that these are layers of the AI stack that we have to. They all come sort of in different moments and if they didn’t have their own individual success at their layer, then they wouldn’t have gotten attention. Right. So it was a very bottoms up process. Then when you look back in hindsight, you think, well that’s kind of haphazard because there was no grand design to begin with.What if your LLM development was unsuccessful? Then you would not have put any more resources into it. And it turns out that having a really good large language model, a large foundational model is really, really important in the AI race. I’m not talking about race between countries, I’m talking about race among companies. So those are some of the difficulties and in a way there’s a little bit of luck involved. But then at the end of the day I go back to the people you have to work, you know, identify the right people to work on these projects.Rapid Fire RoundJEREMY TEPPER: Thank you, Joe. And thank you to my classmates for those thoughtful questions. Joe, before we wrap up, we’re going to do a View from the Top tradition, the Rapid Fire segment. Are you ready?JOE TSAI: Yeah.JEREMY TEPPER: All right, let’s do it. City that feels most like home to you.JOE TSAI: Taipei. That’s where I was born.JEREMY TEPPER: Favorite sports arena food.JOE TSAI: Barclays center for sure.JEREMY TEPPER: Ok, but what item at Barkley Center?JOE TSAI: I can know for some reason. I’m thinking of the Vietnamese Banh Mi pork sandwich.JEREMY TEPPER: All right. Yeah, I’m a hot dog guy, but yeah, that’s great, too. Best purchase you’ve ever made through Taobao.JOE TSAI: Oh, a pair of gym shorts. Under Armour. Nice. I think I bought them 10 years ago. I’m still wearing them when I exercise.JEREMY TEPPER: It’s a great endorsement for Under Armour, the app on your phone that you use most.JOE TSAI: I have two apps that use a lot most. One is a Quinn app because that’s now it’s an assistant for me when I do research, you know, whatever. I want to know something, I go to the Quinn app. The other one is Twitter. I get all my news. If I want to know what’s going on in the world, I can get it instantaneously from serving. I mean, now the algorithm is so good, so they know what I’m looking for. It’s basically subjects on AI and sports. Those are the two things.JEREMY TEPPER: Well, last rapid fire question on sports. Would you rather win an NBA title with the Brooklyn Nets or become a professional lacrosse player?JOE TSAI: Oh, that’s a tough one. Both have low probability, but I’ll take the NBA title.JEREMY TEPPER: All right.JOE TSAI: NBA title it is.Final Advice: Win Locally FirstJEREMY TEPPER: And to close one final question, and this one isn’t rapid fire. What’s your best piece of advice for those in the crowd today hoping to build a global company?JOE TSAI: I don’t think you should think about global. Building a global company from day one, because you have to win local. It’s if you have a grand plan. I mean, the world is a large place. To build a global company, you have to have a lot of infrastructure that starts with small pieces. So you have to win. Have small wins. So think about small wins and win locally where you start. You have to win the market where you started.And then you can think about going overseas, going global, because with those winning local battles, you’re training your team, you’re developing talent that enables you to be a global player. So you got to start somewhere.JEREMY TEPPER: Ladies and gentlemen, Joe Tsai. Thanks, Joe.JOE TSAI: Thank you. (瑞恩資本RyanbenCapital)
