Jack Ma and Alibaba, Part 2: The Crocodile in the Yangtze

On 19 September 2014 eight of Alibaba's customers rang the opening bell in New York. This second part goes back to how the company got there: money from Goldman Sachs and SoftBank, the dot-com crash, the Gold Supplier sales force, the SARS quarantine and Taobao built in secret, the fight with eBay, Alipay holding the buyer's money, the Yahoo deal of 2005, the listing in Hong Kong, fraud among its own suppliers, the quarrel over who owned Alipay, buying back Yahoo's shares, and the return to New York. 0:00 The opening bell 2:04 Money from outside 3:51 After the boom 5:41 The Gold Suppliers 7:08 Back to the apartment 8:31 The office goes home 9:36 Vanilla Brain 10:01 The office goes home (continued) 10:17 A shark and a crocodile 11:55 Holding the money 13:17 Yahoo's bargain 14:46 Free for three more years 15:58 eBay steps back 17:23 A listing in Hong Kong 18:50 Brands and machines 20:01 Vanilla Brain 20:26 Brands and machines (continued) 20:30 Twenty-seven merchants 21:53 The suppliers behind the badge 23:12 Who owned Alipay 24:42 Buying back Yahoo 26:16 A new chief executive 27:53 The partnership and the phone 29:12 Return to New York Part 1:    • Jack Ma and Alibaba, Part 1: The Teacher f...   Part 3 follows on this channel. Maps drawn for this film from Natural Earth (public domain) and Terrain Tiles elevation and sea depth (SRTM, GMTED, ETOPO1). Music: songs by Josephine Lang, Robert Franz, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann and Gustav Mahler, played on piano from CC0 scores of the OpenScore Lieder corpus. Made with AI: the narration is a synthetic voice, and the paintings in the film and the channel's opening and closing pictures were made with AI; they are drawings of the events, not photographs of them. The maps were not. #JackMa #Alibaba #TechHistory Vanilla Brain (vanillabrain.ai) gives AI agents a memory. It keeps what your Claude and Codex agents learn - your projects, your preferences, the way you like things done, even their own mistakes - links it together the way a mind does, and brings back the right piece at the moment it is needed. The more it holds, the better it recalls, so your agents ask less and get more done on their own. It is easy to set up, and your data stays private. Vanilla Brain is made by the people behind this channel; the short breaks at 9:36 and 20:01 are for it.