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websites in the West go after the big companies, the whales. But in Asia commerce is dominated by the shrimp. So we are going after the shrimp. It’s easy to
catch a shrimp. But if you try to catch a whale, you might get hurt.”
    The crowd laughed. A hand went up in the audience. It belonged to an analyst from a major investment bank.
    “That’s great, Jack, but what’s your revenue model?”
    “Well, there are a lot of ways we can make money someday. But right now our website is totally free, because we want toattract new members. Once our members make
money, we will make money.”
    “But you didn’t answer my question,” the analyst followed up. “How will you make money?”
    “If I told you, I’d have to kill you,” Jack joked. Both laughter and snickering followed his remark. Yes, Jack was funny. But he was trying to convince an audience full of
investors and bankers that they shouldn’t be thinking about making a profit at this point.
    “We will make lots of money someday,” Jack continued. “But right now we are running too fast for revenues.”
    The day after the event my colleagues in the Hong Kong office passed along an article that appeared on a leading industry news site, Internet.com: “Alibaba Running Too Fast for Revenues,
Says CEO Ma.” In an era when dot-coms were coming under increasing pressure to generate revenues, the highly critical article was not well received. And as the head of PR I was the first to
hear about it.
    “Porter, what is this?” one of the newly hired directors asked. She had just left a major investment bank and generous compensation package to join Alibaba and didn’t seem
amused by her new boss’ style. “We really need to move beyond the Jack Ma story. He was a great founder, but we really can’t have him talking the way he does. No one will ever
take us seriously. We’re supposed to be a business-to-business marketplace.”
    Another manager pulled me aside. “It’s really time for Alibaba to get Jack out of the spotlight and get the focus on our other, more seasoned, managers. Jack is totally
off-message.” There seemed to be a growing consensus among many of the newly hired Hong Kong executives that our own CEO was bad for ourimage. I thought it strange,
but not too surprising, that some of the expat staff wanted to take charge and have the management handed over to them sooner rather than later. They had always worked for multinationals and were
used to managing the local staff, not the other way around. But in this case people seemed to be forgetting who had hired whom.
    The comments from my colleagues were the second sign of a small fracture between the Hong Kong senior managers and the founding team in Hangzhou—a fracture that could easily become a
chasm. I decided I needed to get to the Hangzhou headquarters as soon as possible to meet the team in China. If the Alibaba iceberg began to calve off Hong Kong, I didn’t want to drift off to
sea.
    Later that week I received a fax that offered me the welcome excuse to travel to Hangzhou. It was an inquiry from Justin Doebele, a journalist for
Forbes
who had just been assigned a
story about Alibaba for an edition of the magazine set to focus on B2B websites. He wanted to travel to the company’s headquarters to meet Jack and the other founders and get a sense of the
company. So I invited him to travel with me to the mainland, where the company had organized a retreat for the Hangzhou-based staff. I prayed the situation on the mainland would be much less
dysfunctional than what I’d seen in Hong Kong so far.

ALIBABA’S CAVE
    B RIAN WONG AND I paced around the arrival area of the Shanghai airport, killing time as we waited for Justin Doebele’s plane to arrive.
    “Yo, Dawg, you’re lucky you joined the company when you did,” Brian said. “At least the Hangzhou team finally moved into a new office last month. I spent the whole winter
working in the Alibaba apartment. It was so cold