Good morning.
In 2013, Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma stepped down as CEO of the Chinese e-commerce giant at 48, arguing that he was too old for the job. (As Ma wrote in a letter: “Alibaba’s young people have better, more brilliant, dreams than mine.”) The same year, René Obermann, then 49, told me he was stepping down as CEO of Germany’s Deutsche Telekom because he felt too young to stay in a big company. He wanted to be more entrepreneurial. Ma was steering an $8.4 billion-a-year startup in the world’s hottest major economy; Obermann, transforming an $80 billion-a-year former state monopoly on a continent mired in recession.
I thought of these two because Alibaba.com, the B2B platform that launched Alibaba as a company in 1999, invested in European platform operator Visable last year and will today announce a partnership at the Paris Olympics to help former athletes become entrepreneurs. I can’t say more about that—the launch event is after this newsletter goes out and I agreed to keep it vague—but this gave me an opportunity to speak with Alibaba.com President Kuo Zhang about navigating a tough climate.
