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"In the beginning I just wanted to survive. 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 the Alibaba platform. I made a lot of money, and I know you don't, so I paid the bill.'"
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Exlpore more Entrepreneurship quotes
"Your dreams can earn you money and provision when you don't only have fans, but customers."
"Start lifting your brand off the ground with an excelling mentality becoming best at what you do. You can't afford to be an average person although you may have begun from a level below average."
"Do not waste your life, in search for a job. Use your special gifts to create work for yourself."
"Do not waste your time and life, searching for a job. Utilize your special skills to begin your own work."
"Employment deprives you of innovations."
"Entrepreneurship is a scary city! NO water - dig wells, NO food - plant trees, NO family - build one, NO identity - prove yourself."
"If you keep your eye on the profit, you're going to skimp on the product. But if you focus on making really great products, then the profits will follow."
"Convert your fans into your customers by adding value to what you do."
"The one thing all entrepreneurs have in common is that they started. The one thing everyone else has in common is that they haven't."
"We are all not called to be entrepreneurs but we can all be enterprising in our chosen fields."
Explore more quotes by Jack Ma
"Help young people. Help small guys. Because small guys will be big. Young people will have the seeds you bury in their minds, and when they grow up, they will change the world."
"As a company, we have to be very transparent. We are in a business very related to finance, and I want this company to last long, and I want this company to be audited by everyone."
"I want to change history, do something important in my life, and influence individuals like we have with millions of small businesses on Alibaba. Then they love and respect you because you made their life important."
"When we started the e-commerce, nobody believed that China would have e-commerce because people believed in 'guang-shi,' face-to-face, and all kinds of network in traditional ways. There's no trust system in China."
"Trust the young people; trust this generation's innovation. They're making things, changing innovation every day. And all the consumers are the same: they want new things, they want cheap things, they want good things, they want unique things. If we can create these kind of things for consumers, they will come."
"We should keep on going along the path of globalization. Globalization is good... when trade stops, war comes."
"I call Alibaba '1,001 mistakes.' We expanded too fast, and then in the dot-com bubble, we had to have layoffs. By 2002, we had only enough cash to survive for 18 months. We had a lot of free members using our site, and we didn't know how we'd make money. So we developed a product for China exporters to meet U.S. buyers online. This model saved us."
"The most important thing is to make the technology inclusive - make the world change. Next, pay attention to those people who are 30 years old, because those are the internet generation. They will change the world; they are the builders of the world."
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