Joseph Tsai, the chairman of Alibaba Group, used a public appearance at Stanford Business School to recount an early, formative moment: after joining the then-unregistered startup in 1999, he was briefly made chief operating officer and then "fired" by Jack Ma — reassigned as chief financial officer after three months because, Ma told him, he "didn't know how to run operations." Tsai said he had decided to join Alibaba after only an hour-long conversation with Ma, struck by Ma's leadership and ability to make and hold a team together when the company had little more than a domain name and a nascent website.
The anecdote was more than nostalgia. Tsai recalled the company's early resilience — roughly 15 roadshows in the United States that failed to attract investment — and a founding belief that the team should "do what it believed in, not what investors wanted." He also revisited the 2014 decision to list in New York rather than Hong Kong, saying the choice was driven by market liquidity and the desire for broad global investor coverage.
Tsai charted his own path inside Alibaba: he left the CFO role after the IPO to become vice-chairman and returned in 2023 as chairman to take a more hands-on position. Speaking candidly about strategy, he said the new management team has decided to concentrate on Alibaba's core e-commerce business while doubling down on cloud computing and artificial intelligence. He described AI as the engine that will drive future demand for cloud GPU capacity even as much of Alibaba's current business remains CPU-based.
The chairman was explicit about priorities and trade-offs. Non-core assets, he said, will receive lower emphasis, though he acknowledged some holdings retain "strategic value." He cited food-delivery platform Ele.me as an example: not central to Alibaba's core mission, but strategically meaningful, especially given its roughly 20 percent market share against rivals that command about 70 percent.
Tsai also offered his view of what he called the "Ali flavour" — a corporate culture built on mutual trust and candid feedback. He argued that excessive emphasis on not hurting employees can be a mistake for companies that must deliver results, and that leaders should be clear with staff if they cannot contribute to corporate objectives. The remark underscored a managerial pragmatism that Tsai suggests underpins Alibaba's recent strategic tightening.
For global readers, the episode serves as both human interest and a signal from one of China's biggest technology companies. Tsai's story about being relieved of an early operating role by Jack Ma humanizes internal power dynamics, while his strategic comments illuminate Alibaba's contemporary priorities: focus, AI-driven cloud investment and a willingness to prune peripheral assets in an environment that has demanded clearer governance and more disciplined capital allocation from Chinese tech groups.