Porter Erisman, former head of comms for Alibaba, talks China Speed

Hello and welcome to the Rich Robinson Show. I'm your host, Rich Robinson. Over the past 25 years, I've been an entrepreneur, investor, advisor, and professor here in Asia. After nearly a quarter of a century in China, I'm now based here in Bali, Indonesia, the island of the gods. Asia is my home now. 60% of the world's population also lives here, but I would contend 80% of the world's dynamism and opportunity is right here in the region. On the show, you'll hear candid and fun conversations with some of my friends and colleagues, people I've met along my journey, entrepreneurs, operators, experts that will help you unlock actionable insights around the Asia region and the entrepreneurial agility that actually defines it. This first season, season 1 of The Rich Robinson Show, is titled At the Speed of China. Like, wait for it, at the speed of light. Things happen fast in China, and in this season 1, we're gonna take a deeper look at that. The rapid economic development over the past few decades, as well as the speed and cycles of innovation taking place All day, every day, right now. Let's go. Jai Ho! Welcome to the pod, Porter Arisman, ladies and gentlemen. Kaboomtown dialing in from Tokyo, Japan. Welcome, my friend.

Hey, Rich. Good to see you.

You as well, man. I always enjoy chatting with you and I really look forward. It's funny because even though we haven't spoken face-to-face that much over the years, I've used your documentary film in some of my teachings or clips from it. And I feel this sort of asymmetrical intimacy, so to speak, because I've heard your voice and seen your face there. So yeah, I'd love to talk about that documentary film that you did about Jack Ma and your books and What you're up to. But before we do that, let's go back to the origin story of the very uniquely named Porter Harrisman. It's almost like a comic book hero name.

Well, it's my mother's maiden name is Porter. So there was not much innovation in my name.

Well, the combination is very, very innovative. It's a very memorable name. And you're all about memorable stuff because you're a world-renowned expert in international communications. So let's dig into how You ended up being channeler for one of the best international communicators in China, Jack Ma. Let's go back to being bitten by a radioactive PR spider back in the day.

Yeah, happy to. So would you like me to start with just how I got to China real quick and then how it led me to meeting up with Jack?

I would love that. All the way from the very beginning, like whatever sort of pieces of popcorn along the way to lead you.

Sure.

There to Middle Kingdom?

Yeah. So I'll make it, I'll try to condense 51 years into 51 seconds, but basically, yeah, you know, I grew up in Denver and spent most of my time there. And we always learned about living out on the frontier and in Colorado, it's kind of the West and the pioneers who were digging for gold out there. And I don't know, there was something in that upbringing that made me want to Try to find where the frontier is someday, and my mother took us on a trip to Asia when I was in high school, and I think she regretted it ever since because I ended up coming back and getting stuck here. But in it was about 1986, we went to Thailand, Hong Kong, and into the mainland for a day, and then Japan. And at that time, not that many people were doing Asia. Trips with their kids. And I got fascinated. And finally, when I graduated from college, I really had a big regret, which is I'd never learned a language. So I was going to learn Japanese. I'm here in Japan now. But at the last moment, I decided to go to China in 1994 and study Mandarin because I had friends trickling back from China talking about all the change that had gone on there. And I studied in Berlin in college and was really interested in seeing what it would be like in a communist country making the transition to a market economy, and China was even bigger than Germany or Eastern Europe. And so I just felt I'll go to China, study Chinese for a year, and just see if I like it, and then go back to the US, go to law school, and that would be it for my international adventures. But I, like everyone else, like you I assume too, I got hooked on China because it was this frontier. It was so exciting to see How much things were changing every day. And I've never really considered myself even a business person, to be honest. But after this experience, like in 1994, first as a student, and then I worked as a host of some travel show on Chinese TV for 6 months going around. Whoa.

Tell us about that.

Yes. I had a friend who was working at the Washington Post and he got offered the chance to go host this TV show on Hainan Island. And you know, if he's working at the Washington Post, the Hawaii of China, the Hawaii of China, which now some people are trying to position as the Silicon Valley of China or something. But he couldn't do it because he was working at the Washington Post. And I said, I'll do it. So I went to Hainan Island and I met this team and the show was traveling around China, talking about investment opportunities and travel. And so my goal at that time was to write a book about it. I wanted to do sort of behind the scenes of the Chinese TV station. And I didn't end up writing the book, but I did get a really unique insight just from traveling embedded with this Chinese team of journalists and immersing myself in China that way. And I quit because they wanted me to get into politics. I didn't want to work for the Chinese TV station and do that. So I went to business school in the US. Just to get basically some backpacking money to go backpacking around. So I went to business school. I thought I'd work for 2 years and then pay off my student loans and just backpack around the world for a while. So my first job out of business school was working at a consumer products company launching this children's candy into China, but it wasn't a good fit for me. And then I ended up at Ogilvy& Mather.

Was that intentional? Like you wanted to do something that bridged into China or was that sort of serendipitous?

So I was the guy at business school who was like a China maniac. So I went to business school in 1996, Kellogg and Northwestern.

Excellent. And how was that received then? Like people were like, what, what are you talking about?

Yeah, exactly. The year before me, I think there were 2 people from China who went to Kellogg. And then my year there were like 14. China was just getting on the radar of business people. And so I did things like I started the Chinese corner where you're supposed to sit at the table and speak only Chinese. During lunch. It didn't last that long, but I was obsessed. I was just obsessed. And I basically said, no matter what, my dream is to get back to China. But no one was hiring really back to China except the one company. Ironically, before I went to business school, I said, my worst nightmare is coming out and working selling Kraft singles to the China market. And then I ended up working for Kraft Foods right after, right? Some people don't name names. I don't mind. Work for Kraft Foods on this children's candy.

This company will remain Kraft.

Yeah. This will remain unnamed until I say it's Kraft, but it was just, I got in and I think I saw that it was like a finishing school to business school to get this traditional consumer marketing, brand management background. And then the goal was to do something entrepreneurial, but to get that nuts and bolts. Practice, but I was eaten alive. Let me put it this way: I don't know if craft was the problem; I was the problem because I went into this company that was mostly China operations. I had zero business experience, and I was eaten alive by like all kinds of every mistake you could possibly make as a foreigner in a Chinese company. I probably made it, and luckily I made it all in about eight months and just left with my tail between my legs and. Said, I gotta start over. This is not working.

Like, can you give an example of some of the things that, you know—

Sure.

Should not, you would not have done in hindsight?

Well, for example, they had just moved the headquarters from Hong Kong to Beijing. So there was a lot of concern about politics, like who's gonna survive, who's gonna get laid off. And I was just naive. I went to a business school where it was like hold hands and sing about rainbows, right? And I get there and everyone's fighting for their jobs and For example, the teams— like, I spoke Mandarin, but I didn't speak Cantonese. And the sales team would speak Cantonese around me, and I felt it was to kind of cut me out of the conversation. It wasn't just using it. And so once in a company meeting, the big boss of the company at the time there in China put me on the spot and said, Porter, why don't you know this? Why don't you do it? And I made the mistake of saying, You know, everyone was talking Cantonese and not Mandarin. So I just didn't understand what they were talking about then. And all the sales team stared at me with these just deadly eyes.

Yeah.

And what I didn't realize was they had a company policy that you were supposed to only speak Mandarin. And I had betrayed them by in front of the boss saying that they had all broken the rules. I mean, there was just one step after another. I think I was the foreigner who It was kind of the worst-case scenario, a foreigner with a fancy title and a fancy MBA, but no practical experience. That's pretty much the worst thing you can imagine in China. And so I'd never experienced this before, but the team, this Hong Kong team that had moved to Beijing, they just did everything they could to cut me out. And it was the most difficult situation.

But could you blame them in a way, right? It's almost like the people that have been fighting in the front lines, and then some guy comes out of the military academy And he's like, okay, we're gonna go marching today. And they're like throwing a grenade in his tent. Like, you know, whoops.

So I can't blame them for being skeptical, but it was, the company was run. We're not here just to talk about this, but it is an example of a mistake that you make. It was run like just this old school, top-down, very strict management. And they had just no sense of putting the company objectives sort of over their own personal objectives. And so I can blame them for the tactics. And basically the lesson I learned from that was it got so bad, I even asked my friend who was working at Ogilvy& Mather, I said, hey Jake, I got a question. Do people laugh in your office? I mean, there was no laughter in this office. And so he left to go to business school. So I took his job and moved to Ogilvy& Mather. And there I found everything I'd wanted— fun, creative, supportive— and I realized I could enjoy business. The other job I was going to look for at that time was working in Tibet on a microfinance nonprofit. So I said, I'll give business one more chance. So it's taken 50 years of explanation.

No, that's great. And I want to hear much more about your Ogilvy time, but I remember meeting with you once, it must've been maybe 10 years ago in Beijing. And We were exchanging notes as foreigners working in China, both loving it there. And I said something like, well, we're like a bridge. And you were like, uh-uh. And I was like, okay, maybe you have a better metaphor. And he's like, you're like, a bridge is like strong and stable and smooth. And like, we're cartilage. We're getting crunched between international expectations and local realities. And sometimes the bones come together and like turn the cartilage to just dust. And I was like, oh yes, thank you. You're right. I think I experienced some of that as well too. That sort of transition between the power base in Hong Kong moving, the corporate power base moving to the mainland and kind of near the, even though it's both China, there's like such radical, it's like Greece and Norway or something. Right. And it was like, you were just, so when I said, yeah, I don't blame them. I meant more like you weren't, there was no way you're going to win. Like you're going to get crunched in between there.

And the common thread of all this tension as mainland managers— when I got to Beijing, the only requirement for getting some amazing job in 1994 at some multinational was speaking Chinese, basically. They could say, what was your experience? Oh, I studied like oracle bone Chinese character writing. But then there was a tension because one of the amazing things that I witnessed, and you witnessed too, is that the local employees went so quickly from looking up to and admiring Hong Kong managers or the foreign managers to learning and then overtaking them and doing it better. And I think to me that is a great thing. This is what I saw at Alibaba. I was teaching a seminar one day on how to do marketing, and then a year later everyone was doing it better than me. I'd played golf in high school. My colleagues at Alibaba learned it and were beating me at golf within a year. And so when you talk about the cartilage, just to talk about that, like what it really means is like I thought coming out of business school that, oh, isn't this great? We hold hands and build this bridge by understanding both cultures. And I think what I tell people now, obviously I loved my job at Alibaba, I loved my job at Ogilvy, but you come between, especially we're talking about speed, you come between the rate of entrepreneurship in the US and the rate of entrepreneurship in China, China is so much faster and US, I would argue, is still slower than China that it's this tension rather than this bridge that if you're a foreigner in between China and the West or you're Chinese in between China and the West, you're going to feel this pain because you're at that Point. But that is what you get paid for, and that's your value, is bridging it. And so—

Well said.

Yeah, you're like the cartilage between the bones that would otherwise destroy each other. But to be honest, if you know that, and that's the tough thing, and that's why you get paid, then you can have a little bit of distance and understand, hey, that's what I'm here for.

Well, like, there's good data that shows I'm on the wrong side of 50 as well too. It's like It's better to move. Your cartilage gets stronger. Your tendons get stronger if you're actually moving, right? As long as you're not straining them to the point of injury, right? So you actually can, if you're flexible and you move well, then it's all good, whatever the metaphor is. So let's go to Ogilvy. You worked in the PR department there. Is that right?

Yeah, just one year. I joined when there was this telecom group and Nokia was the only client. And then Yahoo was this company that was maybe coming to China. And in that just 12 months, we worked on the launch of Yahoo China, which really was a big moment in China. We had suddenly after 12 months, 10 internet clients, it was booming. And I had always had this dream of joining a startup. And so suddenly I had all these clients having all this fun and traveling around the world. So I heard about this English teacher, actually Duncan Clark introduced me and went to Shanghai, met Jack Ma and Here was an English teacher trying to build a global company from China, and the job would be based in China, but then traveling all around the US and Europe.

But this wasn't business development for Ogilvy. This is you like, I'm gonna find a kick-ass startup and entrepreneur and go work for them.

Yeah, so I was at Ogilvy. I loved it. Worked with Scott Kronick, who I think you've talked to, and Scott and Duncan both been on the pod.

Yeah. Love those guys.

Yeah. But I was just too tempted to join a startup and wow.

And you picked Jack Ma back then. That's pretty fantastic that you were able to.

It's going back to that original experience of getting burned up in my first job. Cause I interviewed, I'm not going to name names, but it was the VP of marketing at Sohu at the time. And I interviewed with this guy cause I was looking. to join a company. And I told him, look, I would love to be a part of the senior management team helping craft the vision that we— and he said, no, I set the vision, you execute it. And so I said, you know what, this is too familiar to me from my first job where it was this top-down old-school management. And then I met Jack Ma and he was fun. He was a Chinese entrepreneur who had been curious about the West. And I was a Westerner curious about China, and there was this middle ground that I had with all of his staff. And another thing, I could see that I would actually have a value in there because I could just see that the role of a foreigner in a foreign company localizing would not last long. So I thought better to be in a Chinese company going global where I had something that could really offer.

Well spotted. That was really opposite of what I think most people would think, right? And like you were able to cycle through. some experiences around that. And then also you're right, like fun, like it really makes a difference who you work with at that stage in your career. Like if you can really work with somebody and you can learn instead of earn, then it's huge. And I remember I knew you and then I was like, Hangzhou, like Hangzhou back then was, it was like going back in time. It was like you pretty much disappeared off the face of the planet. Hangzhou is an incredible, dynamic, beautiful city now, but back then. Holy shit, like there was like there be dragons.

Yeah, that was one where it was a nice pleasant surprise to find out how amazing Hangzhou is. It was not a logical place at the time for an e-commerce startup really, and we even moved our headquarters to Shanghai. That lasted about one week. So talking about speed, Jack Ma called me up. I was hired and worked in Hong Kong. Jack Ma called me said, Porter, we're gonna make Shanghai the headquarters. Do you want to move to Shanghai? I did. And I moved everything, got in my apartment. Jack came for like one week and said, I don't think Shanghai is really where we're going to be. And so they want us to move to Hangzhou. So it was a tough and kind of lonely place at times in those days because there weren't that many other startup folks around.

Wow. And that was what year that you moved there?

So I joined Alibaba in 2000, in April 2000. And then that's right when basically the bubble burst of the internet. And then I was going to Hangzhou all the time. And then I lived in Hangzhou 2003, 2004 full-time.

And tell us out in podcast land about your day-to-day role there. What was Alibaba like then? How many employees and what was the focus of the company and what were you tasked to do?

So when I joined the company was, I think when I interviewed, they were still in Jack Ma's apartment. They had the 40 or 50 people in these 2 apartments. And then by the time I joined. A month later, I think they'd hired another 100 people, and I joined and just moved into an office.

So that was April 2000, you said?

Yeah, April 2000. Yeah.

So that was like the dot-com. It was like April 14th, 2000 was when everything completely— So you sure? All right. It's like double fours.

So I interviewed in March, signed my contract, and then I went to the Philippines. On a week vacation to celebrate that I was going to join this internet company and just hang out on the beach. And I didn't go on the beach because the whole time I'm watching CNBC, the dot-com bubble bursting. And by the time I showed up, I said, hey, to my boss who hired me, I said, what's up with the IPO plan? Because we're supposed to have IPO in 3 months. And he said, yeah, I don't think that's gonna happen anytime soon. And so I realized that we're in for the long haul.

Wow, the long haul in Hangzhou. So there's some dues paying.

Yeah.

Going on there.

Yeah.

Wow.

Exactly. And I was thinking about it and when I joined, the internet bubble had just burst and I was jogging my memory of some of these speed-related references because I know you're interested in the topic of speed. And one of the first things I heard Jack Ma say was, in the internet era, you have to be as fast as a rabbit and patient as a turtle. Have you ever seen this quote of his?

No, but that's going in the book. Thank you very much.

I mean, I think if there's anything that sums up—

Attribute it to Jack and you.

Well, that's all Jack Ma. And I think if anything sums up his approach to balancing speed and long-term view, it's that. He says it much more interesting than I would've said it. It's like, because that's something that Jack Ma really understood is that on the internet, yeah, fast as a rabbit. I mean, you have to move with incredible speed. day to day doing what you're doing. You just can't hesitate. But I think some entrepreneurs do that and they're like a chicken with their head cut off, just running around. They never accomplish anything, or they're impatient, just trying to chase the dollar. But you have to act with that speed every day. But what he had that a lot of other people only have is this long-term view that you have to be patient as a turtle. So when I joined Alibaba, he was saying Alibaba should be a company that lasts 80 years, like the length of a human life. And then I think he thought it was too short, so he changed it to 102 years because he said, we want to span 3 centuries. We're founded in '99. And then I think that's a big difference.

Excellent.

There are some people who have only that long-term view, but they don't get anything done in the present. And some people have that short-term view and never actually accomplish anything in the long run because they're just running around. Jack balanced it. So we would have to move like sprint every day, but be patient and thinking about every decision we made should be in the interest of building a 102-year company. And so you make very different decisions when you're thinking like that than if you're thinking we want to IPO in 3 months.

Fascinating. So I met Jack that next month. The first time was May of 2000 through David Oliver.

Oh yeah.

Who was a early employee from New Zealand there. And I had started this organization called I&I, Internet and Information. It was like a networking group with this guy, John Hakim, and a few other people. And it started really small, just a networking drinks night. And then we started having speakers and eventually grew to 20,000 people across 15 cities and around Asia with people getting together. South China Morning Post wrote that it was a great place for people to meet dot-com millionaire spouses. But, you know, so Jack came to this thing and I'd heard about him, but, you know, I met him and immediately you just feel his magnetism and his energy. And he looks like a cartoon character in a way. Right. And I mean that in the most respectful way. He looks unique, right? He captures your imagination immediately, just the way he looks and the way he animates himself. And then also like most Chinese people that I knew. They didn't have the storytelling ability even in Chinese and never mind to be able to do it in English and then do it in a way that was like so compelling. Like he was just extraordinary. And he told a story or said something that's going to go into my introduction to the book, which was there was a guy from South China Morning Post who asked him a question. There was probably 300 or 400 people in the audience at the Farama Hotel in Hong Kong. And he said, what about revenue? And Jack looked at him. He was like right next to him in this group. A lot of people were standing and he said, revenue. And then he ran all the way to the other side of the room, pointed back at the guy and looked at everybody else. And he's like, revenue. And then he scurried all the way back right in front of the guy. And he goes, we're running too fast for revenue. And the place went kind of crazy, right? It was like he worked the crowd. like George Carlin or something. Right. And this guy that I brought in, he was like an ad exec. He was probably in his late 50s, early 60s. And he was like, bah humbug internet. Like it was 2000 and he slammed his drink down and he was like charlatan and he stormed out. And I was, wow.

So Rich, it's funny because the story you're telling is one of the stories I have been planning to talk about. And this is where our stories and lives totally converge. Because when I joined Alibaba, I joined right after the internet bubble had burst. And this was the very first event I went to with Jack Ma was your event. I was there and I was quietly sitting in the back of the room watching my new boss address the crowd.

Am I recalling this correctly? Because I don't even know what's real anymore because I've told that story so many times.

Luckily it's absolutely real.

Okay, good.

But it's so funny how this left a bold impression on both of our minds. And so from different sort of camera angles, this was my first time to see Jack speak and the internet bubble had just burst. And I was the new PR guy and here he was telling these wild stories.

Good luck with that.

But, you know, the funny thing is this is another one. I love Hong Kong, but this is another example of the difference of the internet entrepreneurs in Hong Kong. at the time versus in mainland China. And when I got to Hong Kong in that event, I remember when you think about all the people, a lot of the entrepreneurs who were there, they were maybe from really wealthy families who had existing conglomerate businesses. And they had all just announced this major funding. And there was this sense that people thought they could, through the connections and the wealth and the power. create an internet startup. And here comes Jack and Jack brought with him that mainland kind of real scrappiness and idealism and the really just a grittiness. And so when I watched him speak, I thought, wow, this guy's great. And he totally gets it. And I love what he's saying. And then when he said the line about running too fast for revenues, I mean, that I'll never forget that line because The reaction in the room in the internet bubble was sort of, if he'd said that 2 months earlier, people might've gone along with it and said, yeah, okay. But in Hong Kong, where it's a very practical and a finance audience, and here's this guy speaking sort of nonsense, the reaction I remembered was just, this guy is like a con man and I'm not falling for it.

The guy that I invited left like charlatan and then he stormed out and I felt bad because I was like, oh, don't go. I respect you. And of course, Jack became the richest man in China. So who's laughing now? But back then, like, who knew?

And so that's the thing. That room was packed. I think that was your biggest event ever. Probably was peak.

Indeed.

Because they had just announced a lot of funding.

They got $10 million from Goldman.

And so Stephen Schwenker wrote this article. It was like running too fast for revenues. And that was the headline. And The general response when I got back to the office on Monday, we had a lot of international managers who'd left investment banks or McKinsey Consulting or whatever. And they pulled me aside and said, we cannot have our CEO saying this kind of nonsense, running too fast for revenues. And I was getting pressure all the time to pull him off the stage.

Oh man.

Yeah.

Wow.

I mean, here you had these Western managers. I actually had someone tell me, Porter, Jack is a great founder and his co-founders were great founders. They all are going to have to step aside and let the professional.

Back then it was like, okay, you replace the founder with an experienced CEO.

It was sort of the Jerry Yang approach. Like, well, Jerry Yang founded and then got all these Tim Cook.

Of course, that was the wrong approach.

It was the wrong approach. And so I was dealing with internally people saying, oh, Jack's running too fast for revenues and investors in Alibaba would make little snide comments on the side to me. And I kind of was thinking, well, what do I do here? But it was very clear to me that I liked Jack. I liked his approach. He had that idealism from the mainland. And I thought, is that's pretty strange that these managers are telling me that the guy who just hired him needs to get out of the spotlight. And so right after that, I went on a trip with Jack and he was going to give a speech in Switzerland. He said, what should I say here? And I said, just be yourself. That's what got you here this far, because I really believe that he should just be himself and let's just have fun here. Let's not take it too seriously. But the insight when he said running too fast for revenues turned out to be absolutely the right approach for a lot of reasons.

He was right, actually, as painful as it He's like, let's build this. Let's grow this thing. Right. And he wasn't even saying, let's just get eyeballs. Like it was the right approach in Facebook early days and so many other companies, people didn't see it.

And before you had this sort of freemium model, I mean, before that was a known strategy. I mean, that was his theory. We're just going to move quick. We're going to try new things, experiment, and every day something new, see what sticks. And then once our Users make money, we can make money, but we're going to first let them make money. But at the same time, he said, we don't plan. So I got in a lot of trouble because people said, Porter, you can't have Jack Ma going out there saying we don't plan. But this is very much like a China internet entrepreneur's approach is, well, Western managers, at least in those days, really planned like way in advance. You would have a business plan, like an actual business plan. We did.

Yes. As if you're really running a company and not a startup, right?

Right.

And it's just not the right fit.

And I think that's a key insight. When I went to business school, we all had a business plan project. When I went back for my reunion, I said, it's interesting in China, we didn't do business plans. And they said, well, you know what? That's now how we're teaching entrepreneurs in Kellogg. Before you put anything on paper, go out and talk to possible customers and just get some texture. Like, what do people really think when you even talk about this? What are their needs? Um, so I think Jack, he saw that. And then another thing I was in preparing for this discussion, I thought to myself, I'm always trying to ask like, why are Chinese entrepreneurs this way? Not just are they. And I think that when the internet hit. China was totally new to capitalism, basically. I mean, after being frozen in this communist system, the economy was unleashed. So there's no legacy of how things should be done. But when the internet and all this startup culture really took hold in the West, it had to move away from this idea of the legacy of like hundreds and hundreds of years of capitalism. Where if you were going to make a business decision before the internet era, you had factories to think about, assets to think about. So you did focus groups and you had physical products that you had to invest in and do packaging on and very expensive staff and employees. When your product's a digital product like Alibaba's websites, you can change it in 1 second. So. There's no point in investing in research when you can just try it. And if it doesn't work, you just change it the next day. And so China really came from this great opportunity where it didn't have the burden of a legacy of the way capitalism had developed. It, it was just tabula rasa where people said, let's do whatever works. And that's why you see Chinese entrepreneurs just doing whatever works. Or trying a million things.

That's, that's great. And I've been to the headquarters of Amazon. Jeff Bezos just stepped down as CEO, but he's one of my favorite entrepreneurs. And the headquarters in Amazon is called Day One. And they have it in the prospectus, right? He's like, Day One, you have to show up every day as if like it's the very first day and there's no sunk costs and there's no preconceived notions. And Day Two, if you start showing up like it's Day Two or Day Three, then he said, then you start this excruciating, just the tailspin into just a sure death. Right. And I think China really gets that. But speaking of mindsets, I want to extract something about you, like really followed your gut in a way, like in high school, like, oh wow, I really love Asia. Like I need a taste of Asia. And then you're like, I love China as well too. I need to go back to China and I need to go there after grad school and I'm going to follow that. And then I think you were really good at like feeling your way out. Like you experimented with a few things and you're like, you know what? I'm not going to go into Sohu because I feel a little bit constricted. And then you go into Alibaba and like, you're getting all of this feedback from all these other senior people that are like, you should not let him, your job is to not let him do that. That's what your job is. And then you go to Switzerland and then you're like, let it rip, Jack, let it rip. And there's no way you probably could have made it inside Alibaba had you been trying to like put reins on him the whole time. But you gave yourself, like, not only were you not scared by it and be like, all right, I'm out. I can't do this. And then you also said, have fun. I saw this great TV series I just love by a Scorsese with Fran Lebowitz. It's called Pretend It's a City, which I really can recommend. She's in her 70s and she's this humorist. And she talks about like, one of the things I just don't see people doing enough is like, why are you doing this? And people always have some reason. She's like, I just want to have fun with something. If something's fun, then I'm going to be energized and enthusiastic and I'm going to pull other people in. And like, Jack's a fun guy and he really leveraged that ability to have fun. And like you were directing that a little bit, but just shine your fun and energy on people. And then it'll all kind of come out in the wash. I think that's, I love that.

Well, I think where it comes from is it's basically you. So when I came to China after college, I worked at a nonprofit and hardly made any money, but that was by choice. It wasn't like I was forced into it.

I've been part of a lot of nonprofits, but not by choice. Yes.

Yeah.

Well, I was part of one at Alibaba until it finally made a profit. But, you know, I worked at a nonprofit. I came to China with like $3,500 savings and spent that. That was my whole budget for a year in 1994 as a student. And after graduating, I lived in this little shanty. It was really hard as a foreigner to get cheap housing in Beijing. So I rented a place on the black market. It used to be construction worker quarters at the Beijing Film Institute.

You have to wipe your feet on the way out.

Well, what I didn't realize, I got in there the first night and I'm like, okay, now I got to go to the restroom. And I realized I didn't have a bathroom in my room. I had to walk outside to get to it. But those were really happy days, right? Just the adventure and just living. And it taught me what basically anyone in Jack Ma's era knows. It's like, You can be really happy if you just have a roof over your head and something that keeps you engaged. And I would sit up there at night studying like Chinese characters on cards and just having the adventure of a lifetime. And when you talk to Jack Ma, when you see interviews, if he talks about his happiest time at Alibaba, it's usually about those first days where they had nothing and they're just playing cards in the apartment. Dreaming of the possibilities. And I think the skill of being able to have fun in a startup is realizing all you really need is a roof over your head and some food.

Yeah, it's about the journey.

And when you live in China at that time, most of the world lives like that. The world is living like that already. So people can find happiness. So that was it is I had the attitude, whatever happens. Even if this fails, I just want it to be an exciting journey. And I think Jack Ma, that's exactly his approach. He's like Forrest Gump running around the world, having fun. And it's the people who, you know, when you get the fancy degree, so I had a, you know, a fancy college degree. The hardest decision is to give up all that opportunity and just say, you know what, I'm going to do something that I'm theoretically overqualified for. Or then I had got an MBA.

Because your peers are in that race and you see them real time, like moving ahead. And you're like taking 15 steps backwards according to those rules. Right?

Right. It's like first world problems. And so I think the key is just exactly what you said, having fun, enjoying it, and just knowing if you can put a roof over your head, you can have fun. And that's the attitude. Jack Ma had. That's why he had fun with it. And I just took that approach.

So one of the things that I have fun with is I produce comedy shows as a labor of love on the side. And one of my favorite comics, a guy named Russell Peters, Indian heritage from Canada. And he is one of my favorite comics on stage, but offstage, he was awesome too. He was really a terrific guy. And it seems to me that Jack must've been fun to just hang out with too. Like, was there Can you share some anecdotes? Am I right there? Was he like secretly like a two-faced villain? I don't think so. I think he was actually like a pretty fun coworker.

Yeah.

I mean, our meetings were like comedy shows. Now he really had a sense of purpose and over time he became a much tougher manager, but in the good way. I mean, he was do everything he could to motivate you by carrot. And if that didn't work. That's kind of all, like he was not much motivation by fear at all, but he was fun. Our meetings, just laughing all the time. And the people who took themselves too seriously, people who came in with their MBAs or gave up consulting jobs or whatever, they just didn't enjoy it because it ended up the people who really did well at the company over the long run were just like Jack, like, let's have fun. And we would laugh. I mean, it was like our meetings were just filled with laughter and jokes. But also Jack just also had this amazing ability. If he could meet someone for 5 minutes in a meeting, he would be able to understand this person so well, just 5 minutes of looking in their eyes, hearing their voice, talking to them. And so he always knew how to turn up the volume on something, or if he could feel that the staff was getting disgruntled, he'd find ways to cheer people up. I mean, like a conductor kind of conducting the orchestra a little bit.

Yeah, it seems like people describe Steve Jobs as that too. It's like a kind of a maestro. But I think as an aside, there's another, you talked about Sohu, the founder there, Charles Zhang, Zhang Chaoyang. He was also a guy who came and spoke at I&I in the early days. And so I got to know him a little bit then, not well, but the impression that he made on me was as profound as the impression that Jack made on me. Which was this guy's a little like, he's actually kind of a tough guy, right? And like in that he's not really like that easy to connect with and he's kind of not very happy or friendly. And indeed, like both of those guys, you got to meet them in the early stages. They're both now multi-billionaires. And Zhang Chaoyang was publicly quoted in a magazine article that he's miserable. Like he's just like, I'm miserable. Like I never got married. I can't trust anybody. By the way, you were miserable when you were broke and now you're miserable as a billionaire. Right. And I think it's just an interesting insight because the cash is not going to necessarily change things if you don't have the right kind of attitude.

Right.

And I should say my story earlier was about a VP that he'd hired who didn't stay very long. Not about Charles Zhang himself, but Jack is just someone who would just had a positive view and he had amnesia. It's so hard when you make a mistake. to move on and Jack wouldn't just move on. He'd just forget about it. Like he, I would be dwelling on some mistake that we made for a long time. And Jack would say, oh, what? I don't remember this. He would just forget the mistakes because he didn't view them as mistakes. They were just kind of—

Because they're not. It's feedback and like, don't do that again. And then next shot you go.

Yeah. It's just part of the process. And Jack even told me once, I think I moved pretty quickly when we're talking about speed. I moved pretty quickly. For a Western-trained MBA, but not as quickly as he wanted. And so he would tell me, Porter, I will not punish you or scold you for making mistakes, but I will if you do nothing. I was taking too long. I was being too methodical and he was always pushing me to do it. And I think, I hate to say it, but I think that Western managers within Alibaba, generally among the co-founders of the company, generally had a reputation as being a little bit lazy. Okay. So it was, we were seen as slow, even lazy. And when you compare that, like this 996 work ethic, actually, I never heard that when I was there. I never worked 996 at Alibaba. Maybe that's why we had a reputation as lazy.

Yeah. And I think it's a little bit of a newer thing as well too. I don't know if it was really the case back in the dot-com boom.

Believe me, I put my life into it. And, but we worked to do whatever needed to be done. We didn't think 996.

Yeah. And I think there's some pushback on that and there's like negative aspects, like the whole speed thing, of course, is going to be, it's going to sometimes compromise quality and more mistakes. Right. But then at the end of the day, Elon Musk says it. Pace of innovation is all that matters, right? And I think it's like, that's really the ultimate sort of ruler. The way to kind of, you know, measure is like the pace of innovation. How quickly are you innovating? And then what does innovating actually mean? And what are the cycles within that? And like, it's okay to make more mistakes. It's not about reducing the amount of mistakes. It's about increasing the learnings and being able to evolve and move faster and get to that point where you actually are innovating and I think it's really tough in some ways for some more established markets and cultures to accept that level of mistakes.

Yeah.

And I think this 996 actually gets it the wrong way. I think what Jack Ma would articulate is that when you love what you're working on as much as you hope to, you don't notice the time going and you end up spending that much time on it, but you don't separate your life from your work because they're intertwined and you find ways to bring the two together. And when you start talking about 996, it makes me think of here in Japan where it's sort of, you're expected to face time, like you should be in the office and set. It's more about how much time you put in than the results. So when I joined Alibaba, there was a room full of bunk beds. And I walked through the office. I was taking a journalist through the office and it was an office building. It was, and everything looked like a normal office building. And then you get to a room at the end of the floor, you open it and it was just dark and bunk beds and engineers. Yeah, just horrible. I mean, engineers who had been sleeping there around the clock. And eventually when we hired a new COO, he actually said, We need to get rid of this. This is not sustainable. It's like people were so dedicated to what they were doing. It wasn't that you had to ask them to do 996. They just wanted to do it. And they said, look, you guys need to have families, some balance. So we're getting rid of the bunk beds.

And now you can see there's a real pushback around this whole 996 culture. And I think that's one of the things you have to go to the mattresses as the godfather, right? You have to like. Everybody has to be all in and do some kind of sprint, literally and figuratively, some sort of software sprint to get to the deadline. And I think all startups around the world kind of go through that, right? But I think that's too trite and simplified explanation of the whole speed of China, right? It's not just about everybody working around the clock. There's so many other elements and mindsets and practices around that as well too. So take us to your documentary that you made about your time at Alibaba. It's Kind of amazing that there was footage from like day one. Jack had the foresight to be able to do that.

Yeah. Well, here's what's interesting about that. So the story of that is in 2002, wait, 2000. Yeah. At the end of 2001, I sat down to start writing a book about Alibaba, but literally I wrote one page and I said, Wait a second. What's the point? This company might go out of business pretty soon here. It really looked like we were running out of revenues, not running too fast for revenues. And there was a good question of whether or not we'd survive. And so I only wrote one page and I think it said something like, whether we succeed or fail, it'll be an interesting story. And then of course the company survived and thrived. And then as I was leaving the company in 2008, I sat down with Jack Ma and I said, hey, I want to write a book telling the perspective I've had as a foreigner working in Alibaba. Are you okay with it? And he said, sure, you're in the best position. You've seen both sides of the story. And I said, but Jack, you do realize that I'm going to tell the good and the bad, the successes and the mistakes. And I think because he was a teacher, he said, look, we have a responsibility to share our story with people. And I think you could tell it the most fairly. So that was really nice. So I wrote a book proposal and pitched it, got a great agent in New York. So I thought, but when she didn't get an immediate home run at a major publisher, the feedback seemed to be saying, this is a big company, but it's not. household name yet. She just sort of disappeared on me, my agent, and wasn't interested in the book anymore. But I had this thing, I had to tell the story because I had seen this thing I thought was so inspiring. I mean, honestly, try to find a more sort of rags to riches story about an entrepreneur who has such an influence and impact who came from being a schoolteacher. I mean, that's crazy.

Or he even tells a story about being rejected going to work at KFC.

Yeah.

So he's like rejected at KFC. He probably thought, wow, this big global company, I'm going to work for them. Right. And they didn't. So I had to tell the story. It was just like, no matter what, I have to tell it. And then what happened was before I left Alibaba, I had gathered all the footage I could because I wanted to write the book. From like actual speeches and quotes. And it turned out I had about 200 hours of footage. And it's not even just the early days of Alibaba. The footage goes back to like 1994, '95 when Jack started a translation company in Hangzhou. And he started what most people think is China's first internet company, China Pages. So basically I had all this archival footage, some of it the company had filmed. Other documentarians had filmed because here was this interesting looking guy doing crazy things. And so he was like a magnet for video cameras. And I also had all the news reports. And so I said, okay, if I can't tell the story in a book form, I have to tell the story somehow. And so I decided to make a documentary. And so I went to, this is an example of. Starting from scratch when you're like giving up. I gave up a great job at Alibaba and started from scratch. I went to New York and did this New York Film Academy for a month, learned film editing cuz I knew this was really just an editing project. And then I went around the world with my little video camera filming B-roll of outside of buildings to kind of capture places that we'd visited. And then I stitched it all together into this documentary. And my goal was just show it at like 3 film festivals and put it on YouTube and then show it to some universities. Like that was just it. I just wanted to tell a story. So I made the film, but I hid from the company for 3 years. I didn't want them getting their fingers on it or hands on it, or because it's a scary thing when a former employee goes to make a film. And I should say Jack Ma, on my last day, I Said, hey, maybe I'm, don't write a book. I'll write it, make a film. And he said, that's fine. So I just took that as a yes. That's what Jack Ma would have done. Take it as a yes and then go.

Forgiveness rather than permission.

Yeah. So I thought I'm going to do it. And then after 3 years, I contacted Jack and said, hey, do you remember we mentioned this film? Well, I've actually made it now. I didn't interview anyone for it. I just made it in a way I didn't even have to contact the company. But it turned into this great adventure because I just started showing it and it was like I was living the experience all over again. I went with Jack to Berlin and he gave a talk to a room full of 1,000 seats, but there are only like 3 people sitting in the seats. And when I showed my film, it was the same thing. I went to Hollywood, showed it at Mann's Chinese Theater. There's 500 seats, like 3 people came to see my film at this festival.

No, it's such a good film. I so enjoy it. And I make all my foreign students watch it. It's like such an excellent example of the zeitgeist and everything else.

Well, thank you for saying that, but I would have given up long right at that moment, but the inspiration I'd gotten from my experience at Alibaba had taught me not to give up. And so I said, I believe in this. I don't really care if people don't know about it. This is the process. And I started showing it and crowds got bigger and I started figuring out what I was doing. And then Alibaba's IPO came in 2014. And of course everyone said, well, who can we talk to about this? And well, what about this guy who made a film? And then it just led to this really fun adventure where I finally realized the goal. I wanted to share it with entrepreneurs around the world. And I ended up taking it all around the world, meeting, showing it. To the co-founders of Tokopedia before they were a big deal in Indonesia and went to Nigeria and showed it to the Nigerian startup community in Lagos, which was just getting started. And it reminded me just like I&I back in 2000 and go to Berlin. So basically what you could see was that same thing that happened in China was beginning to take off. In other countries. And China was the test case. China proved that the emerging market style of entrepreneurship could build companies that were even more valuable than the ones from developed countries. And so it was fun to go around and share the story and talk about these issues, like how entrepreneurs in China operate, because when you go to India or Nigeria, Colombia, the entrepreneurs there are so similar to the entrepreneurs in China.

Yeah, there is a tribe. There is like a self-select group who are peeps and a lot of commonalities. Yes. Yeah.

You have a common language. Like you can go to a conference in Bogotá on startups and immediately we could all have a lot to talk about with people.

Right. Wow.

That's great. Excellent. Thanks for sharing that.

Yeah.

It's funny because I started the first chapter of the Entrepreneur Entrepreneurs Organization, EO, which is the world's largest entrepreneur. And in '07, my buddy Jim James and I went to Dubai on their dime because they were trying to talk us into starting the Beijing chapter. And it was like 100 entrepreneurs from around the world, all in Dubai. And there's this great movie called, a fun movie called Over the Rainbow. And it's based on this true story of when they made Wizard of Oz, they brought together all these dwarves and little people, right? And statistically, it's such a low likelihood of being a dwarf that probably never met another one. And then there's hundreds of them all together, just partying and fighting and hooking up. Right. And just being like, and these are my peeps. And like, it was awesome. And that's how I kind of felt at EO. Right. And to be able to go around the world and like talk to those tribes everywhere else. Right. And that's what I hope to do with this book as well, too, about the speed of China is to talk to entrepreneurial communities around the world and what can be extracted and learned From this Chinese startup ecosystem and just pace and pulse.

It's so relevant to them.

So then you actually took it up even another notch and wrote this incredible book. You finally got past that first page.

Well, it's like I was living all these things I learned from Jack Ma. It goes back to when I was at Alibaba, I felt like I would describe what it was like working there. I'd say, yeah, I don't know why I've survived here and other Western managers haven't. I said, When you first get here, you're flailing around like in the water, splashing around, trying to stay up on the wave. And then over time, it's this intuitive sense. When you relax in the ocean, it's much easier. And I was always thinking this, and then I started asking myself, what was it about Alibaba? And then I realized it's like almost a Taoist belief of just sort of going with the flow and Even though they may not know it, like Jack Ma is really into Tai Chi and he's influenced by all this. And that was his approach to entrepreneurship. It's just, you don't have a plan, you go with it. And as new opportunities present themselves, you don't try to force it. You just go with the flow of the river. And that's what I did. So I didn't get my book deal when I was really rigidly trying to get it. And then suddenly when the Alibaba IPO was about to happen, I got an email from a publisher and they said, have you ever thought of writing a book about your time at Alibaba? And I said, funny you should ask. I have a proposal from 8 years ago and I'll send it to you, which is the exact opposite of how you think it would happen.

Yes. No, it actually is the exact opposite. You're supposed to send that out to 135 publishers and they're all supposed to say no.

Right. That's the story. And that was my story. But then, uh, just the more I was going with the flow and just following my film around like a bouncing ball and not trying to force things. So then I got that. And so I wrote the book. I wrote it in 2 months cuz it was just all in my head, all fresh. I didn't have to research cuz I knew it all. And then when I went to New York to promote that. Then I also pitched my second book to them, which is about 6 billion. It's called 6 Billion Shoppers about e-commerce in emerging markets, which is kind of like the sequel. So my first book was about China and Alibaba. And my second book was about e-commerce in other emerging markets. And so just all kind of led and you could see e-commerce entrepreneurship spreading around the world at that time. And it was fun.

Wow.

Fantastic. I did not know that you were able to write that book within 2 months. That's an extraordinary achievement. Nicely done.

Well, I had 3 sample chapters already and that's the fact that I had to write it. To be honest, I was going to give up on it. I was getting ready to write the publisher and then I realized they were already selling it on Amazon. And so I said, oh crap, but it's just much better to write something when you have to do it than when you have forever.

No, you're right. And I got a coach last year when I was kind of in Pandemic refugee in Bali. And I'm like, I need to shift gears in what I'm doing next. And he's like, this is what I do. I write the book till it's 80% done. And if I don't self-edit, there's 4 things, there's maybe 3 or there's maybe 6. He's like, I just do it. Right. And I've had other authors on the podcast and Sean Ryan was like, nobody really reads it anyway. I think people actually did read your book, but I think it doesn't matter. You're like, oh, bestseller. Like it's making art. There's not going to be so many Mona Lisas or bestsellers. It's really about Sharing your thoughts with the audience so that there is a select group that will self-select?

Well, the challenge with business books about technology or like e-commerce in emerging markets is that it changes so quickly. Like a normal public publisher's timeline will be, so I think that's a key to making it evergreen as much as possible, but at the same time, it gets dusty. quickly, but I think the story of speed in China, I mean, this is something that can be distilled into some pretty evergreen themes.

Indeed. I think there are evergreen themes. And I think there's also like a revision of the book in a year or two that can show what's changed. And I think it's going to be a constant theme for quite a while, right? I mean, of course, as things scale and mature, then speed does diminish, but I think there's going to be amazing examples of China speed in other markets around the world. So Porter, I really appreciate you taking the time, my friend. What's next for you? What makes you excited besides your beautiful family in Tokyo?

Well, that's what's so funny is that it's like, I'm always, by the time I'm like wrapping up for the last year or so at Alibaba, I was thinking I got to move on to something new. Actually, the party was great, but I wanted to move on to something new. And actually now I'm just trying to once again pick those things that I'm passionate about for whatever reason. It's like you can't really force it. And I have an idea for a novel. It's kind of startup related that I'm pursuing. And then I have some, I want to get back a little to sort of adventure travel as much as it can allow. But you know, the beauty of having the chance we've all had to kind of reconsider our careers is that for better or for worse, certain things have dried up. Or in other cases, like my expertise is in e-commerce. Well, the things I predicted would happen in 5 years have all now happened because it accelerated it. And so I have some, I just want to do creative projects that have meaning and fun and let me spend time with family. I know there's so many serial entrepreneurs out there and I can totally understand that. Just the joy of building startups, but somehow I'm not a serial entrepreneur in a dot-com phase.

Well, as a serial entrepreneur and a guy who's worked with serial entrepreneurs, it's actually much more of a mental illness where you have to suspend all disbelief and go into eating, chewing glass while staring into the abyss. But I'm really getting much more involved into like blockchain and NFTs. Not just because, you know, NFTs are a hot thing. It's really about like, I think there's this gigantic shift, paradigm shift on disk to online to now on chain. And I think every time it's a 10x multiple in valuation. And I think everything has been just a kind of like a bootcamp or just kind of a prep for what's going to really happen when everything is on blockchain. Around the world. So I think there's some incredible things that are going to be unlocked around that. But anyway, here I am turning, like I asked you what's next for you. And then what I really want to do is talk about what's next for me. But anyway, enough about you. Let's talk more about me. No, I'm just kidding.

No, no, no. Let me tell you, my uncle has the best joke on this topic. First, I'm happy to have this discussion with you, but my uncle at a party, he'll turn to someone and say like, you know what? I'm tired of talking about myself. Why don't you talk about me for a while?

That's why I have a podcast.

Tired of talking about me.

Yes, indeed.

Well, it's fun. The thing that's amazing, when I left Alibaba, I started going to film festivals and I realized the filmmaking community is just as passionate and driven about filmmaking as we all are about dot-com. So every now and then I like to pick myself and drop myself in a Totally new world and try to catch that passion and see what else is out there.

Beautiful. Love it. Excellent. Hey, maybe I'll see you here in Bali for a little travel adventure with the fam and all the best, my friend. And thank you once again.

All right. Enjoy the Bali dream down there. We all want to join you.

Thanks, Troy.

All right.

See ya. That's a wrap. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Rich Robinson Show, season one at the speed of China. Visit therichrobinson.com/show to smash that subscribe button. Please also go to iTunes or whatever platform of choice, rate and comment. And until next time, thank you very much.再见。 See ya.