Jack Ma and Alibaba, Part 1: The Teacher from Hangzhou

In 1999 eighteen people tried to start an international business from an apartment in Hangzhou. This first part follows Jack Ma to that apartment: the boy who practised English with tourists at West Lake, the entrance examination he sat three times, the Australian family from Newcastle, the teacher's job, a first look at the internet in Seattle, China Pages and the years in Beijing, and the return home to found Alibaba with Joe Tsai, money from Goldman Sachs and, next, Masayoshi Son. 0:00 The apartment 1:45 West Lake 3:15 The entrance examination 4:47 A visitor from Newcastle 6:18 A teacher's work 7:47 China opens for business 9:25 Seattle 9:32 Vanilla Brain 9:57 Seattle (continued) 11:19 A page about a business 12:51 Selling the unfamiliar 15:04 A small network 16:34 The first attempt changes hands 18:02 Beijing 19:57 Vanilla Brain 20:22 Beijing (continued) 20:47 Back to Hangzhou 22:18 Eighteen founders 23:45 Joe Tsai's choice 25:02 The customer on the other side 26:25 A name that could travel 27:51 Money from outside 29:40 What the apartment had started 31:08 The next visitor Parts 2 and 3 follow on this channel. Maps drawn for this film from Natural Earth (public domain) and Terrain Tiles elevation and sea depth (SRTM, GMTED, ETOPO1). Music: slow movements from string quartets by Antonín Dvořák, Ludwig van Beethoven, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Felix Mendelssohn and Johannes Brahms, played on piano from CC0 scores of the OpenScore String Quartets 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 9:32 and 19:57 are for it.