SAN FRANCISCO — It was a scene straight out of Silicon Valley — only it took place across the Pacific.
In 1999, Jack Ma gathered his wife and 17 friends in his small apartment in China's eastern city of Hangzhou, about 100 miles from Shanghai.
They had pooled $60,000 to found Alibaba, a website for businesses to sell one another goods.
The dial-up connection was so slow that Ma took more than three hours to load half a Web page.
Undaunted, Ma roused friends with the first of many now iconic speeches, exhorting them to turn Alibaba into a global website that could take on Silicon Valley.
"All of our brains are just as good as theirs," he said.
That year, Beijing-based technology consultant Duncan Clark visited Hangzhou and found a dozen or so people crammed into the apartment, "as I could tell by the number of toothbrushes jammed into a mug in the bathroom and the unmistakable atmosphere of a start-up where people lived and worked on the project 24/7," he said.
Fifteen years later, Alibaba is on the verge of an IPO that clinches its breathtaking rise from scrappy start-up to global powerhouse.
Fueled by the growing Chinese middle class, Alibaba dominates e-commerce in China, positioning the company at the center of the world stage and hogging the spotlight from Silicon Valley.
"The biggest IPO in America is going to be a Chinese company that is rising on the promise of the Chinese economy," said Max Wolff, chief economist at Manhattan Venture Partners.
IPO CENTRAL: Forget Alibaba! 10 IPOs doubled your money
Ma, 49, the executive chairman of Alibaba, has even greater ambitions.
"In the past decade, we measured ourselves by how much we changed China," he wrote in a letter to investors last week. "In the future, we will be judged by how much progress we bring to the world."
THE EVERYTHING COMPANY
If Amazon.com is the everything store, Alibaba wants to be the everything company.
The Chinese technology giant is investing in a dizzying array of digital enterprises from online video to cloud services to mobile search.
But for the first time, Alibaba is looking over its shoulder.
It's playing catch-up on commerce on mobile devices in the world's largest smartphone market. The most critical task Alibaba faces: reaching the 500 million Chinese consumers who shop, chat, play games and basically run their entire digital lives on smartphones.
Alibaba is buying stakes in companies in China and the USA, mostly in mobile and e-commerce.
In the process, it's encroaching on its giant competitors, Baidu and Tencent in China — and potentially on the home turf of Amazon and eBay.
