书城外语那些来自华尔街的赚钱经
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第26章 The Empire of Starbucks (3)

是指企业为了保留和激励员工,采用的非现金形式的报酬。福利的形式包括保险、实物、股票期权、培训、带薪假等。

翻译行不行

It was a memory that Schultz would carry with him into adulthood.

Starbucks’ first major venture outside of the northwestern part of the nation was Chicago,where mail-order sales were strong.

As part of his ongoing efforts,Starbucks teamed up with baseball stars to promote an adult literacy campaign.

第一章 How I Did It: The Unlikely Rise of China’s

Hottest Internet Tycoon

我是如何做到的——马云谈创业

“I rode my bike for 40 minutes every morning to a hotel with a lot of foreign tourists. I showed them around and practiced my English. Those eight years deeply changed me.”

Jack Ma hit pay dirt when his Chinese business-to-business Stavt-up,Alibaba.com,went public,in November,2007. The offering raised more than 1.5 billion and gave the company a valuation of 26 billion. Ma,43,grew up during China’s Cultural Revolution. He taught himself English,then caught the Internet wave as China’s economy opened in the l990s.Today,Alibaba is China’s largest B2B site and a favorite among American and European companies that are buying from Chinese suppliers. The site earned 39 million on revenues of l29 million in the first half of 2007. Ma has also taken Alibaba into search,engines through a joint venture with Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO),and his Taobao online auction site has become bigger than eBay(NASDAQ:EBAY) in China.

When I was 12 years old,I got interested in learning English. I rode my bike for 40 minutes every morning,rain or snow,for eight years to a hotel near the city of Hangzhou’s West Lake district,about 100 miles southwest of Shanghai. China was opening up,and a lot of foreign tourists went there. I showed them around as a free guide and practiced my English. Those eight years deeply changed me. l started to become more globalized than most Chinese. What I learned from my teachers and books was different from what the foreign visitors told me.

The other event that fundamentally changed me was in l979,when I met a family with two kids from Australia. We met and spent three days together and played Frisbee. We became pen pals. In 1985 they invited me to go to Australia for a summer vacation. I went in July,and those 3l days changed my life. Since then,I started to think differently.

l flunked my exam for university twice before I was accepted by what was considered my city’s worst university,Hangzhou Normal University. I was studying to be a high school English teacher. In my university,I was elected student chairman and later became chairman of the city’s Students Federation.

When I graduated,I was the only one of 500 students assigned to teach at a university. My pay was 100 to 120 yuan(RMB),which is like 12 to 15 per month. I always had a dream that when I finished my five years,I would join a business—a hotel or whatever. I just wanted to go and do something. In l992,the business environment started improving. I applied for a lot of jobs,but nobody wanted me! I was turned down for secretary to the general manager of a Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Then,in 1995,I went to Seattle as an interpreter for a trade delegation. A friend showed me the Internet there for the first time. We searched the word“beer”on Yahoo and discovered that there was no data about China. We decided to launch a website and registered the name“China Pages”.

I borrowed 2,000 to set up the company. I knew nothing about personal computers or e-mails. I had never touched a keyboard before that. That’s why I call myself“blind man riding on the back of a blind tiger.”

We competed with China Telecom for about a year. The general manager of China Telecom offered to investl85,000 to do a joint venture. It was the most money I had ever seen in my life. But unfortunately,China Telecom got five seats on the board. I got two seats on the board. Everything we suggested,they turned us down. It was like an elephant and an ant. I resigned. Then,I got an offer to come to Beijing and run a new government group to promote e-commerce.

My dream was to set up my own e-commerce company. In l999,I gathered l8 people in my apartment and spoke to them for two hours about my vision. Everyone put their money on the table and that got us60,000 to start Alibaba. I wanted to have a global company,so I chose a global name. Alibaba is easy to spell and people everywhere associate that with“Open,Sesame,”the command that Ali Baba used to open doors to hidden treasures in One Thousand and One Nights,the book of Middle Eastern folktales.

There were three reasons why we survived. We had no money,we had no technology,and we had no plan. Every dollar,we used very carefully. The office opened in my apartment. We expanded when we raised money from Goldman Sachs in l999 and then Softbank Corporation in 2000.

We’re in China today because I believe in one thing: global vision,local win. We designed the business model ourselves. Our focus is on helping small and medium-size companies make money. We never copied a model from the U.S.,like a lot of Chinese Internet entrepreneurs did. We focused on product quality. It has to be“click and get it.”If l can’t get it,then it’s rubbish.