Alibaba

In the autumn of 2014, a fifty-year-old man who had once been the only candidate of twenty-four rejected by a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Hangzhou walked onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and rang the bell on the largest stock market flotation in history. Alibaba raised twenty-five billion dollars in a single day. The shares jumped twenty-five percent before lunch. By the end of the week, Jack Ma was the richest person in Asia, his company was worth more than Amazon and eBay combined, and a man who still cheerfully tells audiences that he doesn't understand how coding works was being toasted by the chairman of JPMorgan Chase, the chief executive of Coca-Cola, and a sitting American president who would soon volunteer to moderate his question-and-answer session in Manila.

Duncan Clark's book is the story of how that happened. But it is more useful than a billionaire biography. Clark first met Jack Ma in the summer of 1999, when Alibaba was eighteen people working out of a third-floor apartment in Hangzhou and you could count the cofounders by the toothbrushes jammed into the mugs by the sink. He turned down the chance to buy a few hundred thousand shares at thirty cents each, a decision he calculates has cost him about thirty million dollars. He spent the next two decades watching, from unusually close range, as Jack built a platform that now handles nearly two-thirds of every parcel delivered in China and reaches more than four hundred million buyers a year. What follows is the story of that company. But it is also a field guide to how modern China actually works, and a master class in the strange, specific skills you need to build something colossal in a market that everyone else keeps getting wrong.