In the fall of 1996, at a gathering of a non-profit Chinese organization called CNetwork in Silicon Valley, I ran into a person who happened to sit next to me.  Short, dark and very thin, he did not look particularly handsome or impressive.  He was excited when he learned that I was going to Stanford Business School.  He told me that he was running a Web-based company, called China Yellow Pages, the very first of its kind in China.  He asked me whether I was interested in working with him to set up a company to use the Internet to send fax for free.  “It will revolutionize the entire fax industry!”  He was very enthusiastic and articulate.

When I learned that he had only been an English teacher prior to China Yellow Pages and that he had never lived outside of China, I was not particularly interested in his proposal.  “What does he know about business?” I asked myself.  Being a first year MBA student, I was still pretty arrogant at that time.  I politely got his business card but did not keep in touch and soon forgot him. 

Yet this person went ahead to set up his Web-based businesses.  One of his ventures went IPO in November, 2007, with a market cap of $26 billion.  The person is Jack Ma and the company is Alibaba.

I often ask myself, was there some clue which I could have picked up in my brief interaction with Jack Ma to identify him as a future Internet tycoon in China?  There were many clues:  his passion for creating businesses although he had only been an English teacher, his courage to embrace the Internet although he had not computer expertise, and his ability to think globally although he had never lived outside of China.  I missed all these clues because my eyes were closed.  I shut off my mind as soon as I learned he was merely visiting the US from China and that he had never done business before.

One of the most telling pieces of information for predicting a person’s future success is how he reacts to a difficult situation.  Jack Ma learned English from foreign tourists in Hongzhou by acting as a free guide for eight years.  His first venture, China Yellow Pages failed but then he started Alibaba with $60,000.  He calls Alibaba “1001 mistakes” since it also almost died in 2002 due to the burst of the Internet bubble.

Being a venture capitalist, as I search for talents, I have become more and more humble.  I have realized that, to find talents, one needs to first open his heart for talents and develop tremendous interest in other people.  One should assume that anyone is talented in some way so that he can open his eyes to see talents.