We Need to Talk About How Badass Jack Ma Is

Jack Ma is the founder of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba with a net worth of $22.4 billion.

While we know him now for all his major successes, Ma’s life has actually been riddled with failure.

He failed his exit exams multiple times in elementary and middle school.

When he was applying for college, he failed his entrance exams three times. He scored 1 ou1 of 120 on the math portion of his college entrance exam.

He even applied to Harvard TEN TIMES!

…But was rejected after every single attempt.

After three years in college, he tried applying for 30 jobs and got rejected by all of them.

When he applied to KFC, he was among 24 applicants. Every applicant got in — except him.

“When KFC came to China, 24 people went for the job. Twenty-three people were accepted. I was the only guy who wasn’t,” he told BLOOMBERG.

When he applied to work in the police force, he was the only one that was rejected out of five applicants. He was told, “No, you’re no good.”

Ma allegedly started two business ventures, that ultimately failed. But that didn’t stop him from continuing to try.

Ma went on to create Alibaba in 1999 with a group of friends, but failed to find funding in Silicon Valley. He was told that it was an unprofitable business model.

For the first three years, we made zero revenue. I remember many times when I was trying to pay up, the restaurant owner would say, “your bill was paid.” And there would be a note saying, “Mr. Ma, I’m your customer on Alibaba platform. I made a lot of money, and I know you don’t, so I paid the bill.'”

In September 2014, Alibaba went public at $92.70 per share, making it the biggest US IPO in history. It currently has a market cap of roughly $237 Billion.

What’s your excuse?

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