Smart Business

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The first person I want to thank, of course, is Jack Ma. I am deeply grateful for his invitation to join Alibaba on its wonderful journey and for all his guidance and support over the last eighteen years. He has greatly influenced my thinking about the future and strategy. Many concepts presented in this book, such as customer-to-business (C2B) and network coordination, coalesced in the endless discussions we had.

I have benefited enormously from the interaction with thousands of colleagues across Alibaba’s many businesses, from Yahoo! to e-commerce, from cloud to finance. Almost everything I know about the internet is because of the education they have given me. I cannot name all these colleagues individually, but I am eternally ...