I first came to China actually when I was in middle school. I was born and raised in the United States, third generation Chinese. And I accompanied my father for a medical conference. He was a doctor at the time. This is in southern China.

So I was lucky enough to accompany him to the conference, but also we stopped to see our ancestral village. So that made a big impact on me in terms of understanding that there was this whole other world there in China that I wasn't that familiar with. And I said to myself that at some point I need to come back and really understand this world.

This is Brian Wang, vice president at Alibaba and one of the first employees to join the company back in 1999. But it was a good time to come to China, right? It was definitely... It was different around that time. As we head into our meeting with Brian, we can't help but feel excited. He's been in the business for almost 20 years and is without a doubt one of our most seasoned guests so far.

This is a guy who, in the midst of the growing IT craze, turned down companies like Google, Yahoo, and eBay to move to Hangzhou and work for a small, unknown startup called Alibaba. I actually invited Jack to speak at my business school. And I had to beg people to come because no one thought it was worth coming to hear, you know, this guy Jack Ma speak at a business school. But at the heart of today's story is a different narrative, a tale of two completely different markets, one in the East and one in the West.

slowly learning to understand each other through innovation. China's started to pave its own road in terms of the innovation. And so suddenly people are saying, hey, I don't need to follow that Silicon Valley model any longer. There's actually things I can learn from China. Welcome to Digitally China, a podcast about the fascinating Chinese tech industry created together with Radii. I'm Eva. I'm Jacob. And I'm Tom. Our story begins at Brian's hometown of Palo Alto at the heart of Silicon Valley.

I was a weird kid. Like, you know, most Chinese American kids growing up in the States probably wanted to figure out how to fit in with their local peers. So kind of de-emphasize the Chinese side. I remember my parents, when I was young, sent me to Chinese school. I hated it. But then my second year in high school, I decided to go back to Chinese school on my own. Without them forcing me to do it, I was just like, I need to learn Chinese.

And I tried. I mean, it was kind of like a bi-weekly thing. You know, it's usually on Friday night when you have the dances at your high school. So you had to make decisions on that. But it was that trip that really changed my perspective and made me realize how little I knew about my culture. I know this might be a sensitive question because now we're talking about your age, but around what year was this? You're going to call me out here. All right. So yeah, my first trip was 1985. But then

When I came back during college years, it was 1994, and then I came to grad school in 1996. To be honest, my career track since a young age was I thought I would go into medicine. I thought I'd be a doctor because my father is a doctor and

I was very impressed by the things he did as a physician. So I said my career track would be to get a medical degree and then get a health policy degree and then eventually take those two degrees and go to some emerging market and do health policy. That was my plan, so to speak. Everyone always has a plan, right? But I did the year in Nanjing, and my thesis was on health care policy in China.

But I realized that in that time, health care and medicine was not the only way to help people in a country in China's development stage that it was. You know, prior to that, I thought business was all evil. I thought, you know, it was nothing but greed and, you know. Yeah.

But I saw how companies like Kentucky Fried Chicken were changing the hygiene standards of restaurants, right? You know, they provided places to wash your hands at a restaurant and it was, everything was standardized and it was clean. I said, wow, there's actually ways to raise the quality of people's lives besides just being a doctor. You can do business. And so-

That's what convinced me to stay in China and work, actually worked in business. I was a management consultant for a year and a half, flying around trying to help multinational companies enter the China market. Essentially, what I realized is if I want to help the greatest number of people in the most positive way, I have a whole number of career options ahead of me. And so after realizing that and staying in China and working for a short time, I

the financial crisis hit. So I got sent back to the United States with my consulting firm. But, you know, consulting in China or an emerging market is a lot different from consulting in, say, San Francisco, you know. In an emerging market, you're on the back of a motorcycle trying to ride to a factory to understand kind of the whole value chain of the air conditioning industry, right? And advising that foreign company on how to enter that market.

In San Francisco, you're sitting in an office till 1 a.m. doing PowerPoint slides, and you're lucky if you get to present that to the client. And that's pretty much your life is, you know, sitting in an office doing PowerPoints.

So I decided that I would try and do something else. And what else could be meaningful and helpful to society? I decided to try public service. So I went into government, actually. So from the consulting firm in San Francisco, I ended up taking a job in San Francisco as the mayor's special assistant. They needed someone who can manage everything.

the yuppies, kind of the rich people in San Francisco, and also handle the Chinese immigrants. So it just so happens I grew up in Palo Alto and I just came back from China. So they hired me. And so I spent about a year working as the special assistant to the mayor of San Francisco, just trying to help solve issues in the city. And it was very rewarding, actually. It was a very strange job in some ways. You saw all kinds of things that maybe in your normal life you're not going to see. But that's when I met Jack.

who, obviously the founder of Alibaba in 1999, but he was coming to Silicon Valley to raise money. Brian gets wind of a new tech company from Hangzhou, and he gets in touch with the founder through a friend. Shortly after, they arranged to meet in San Francisco. I think it was at the St. Francis Hotel in Union Square.

There at the table is Joe Tsai, who would later go on to be CFO and vice chairman of Alibaba. And of course, Jack Ma. Brian instantly falls for the founder's bright and enthusiastic personality. I remember the meeting and I remember talking to the two of them, thinking, wow, this is really exciting. But also just the energy that Jack had in terms of his

passion for what he was doing and he clearly believed what he was doing was going to be big and you know Joe is more of a reserved individual kind of

He's someone who doesn't make decisions lightly. My assessment is if Joe is willing to join this company, he's definitely thought it through because he gave up a lot. He was at a private equity firm and someone who had a very sterling sort of career track, if you look at it. I mean, the best law firms, the best private equity firms, the best schooling. And he's kind of like a big brother, right? I said, well, if Joe is going to do it, there's definitely something here that he's seen. ♪

What a great combination. Internet plus emerging market and China, which is culturally a very relevant aspect of my own personal interest, all combined into one. During this time, Alibaba was out trying to raise money and it became evident to Brian how small the global tech scene actually was.

At about the same time, I met up with my high school classmate who happened to be working at Goldman Sachs. And I met up with him in Palo Alto one weekend and I was saying, you know, hey, I'm just going to leave San Francisco and go join this startup in China called Alibaba. He's like, really? Really?

we're actually just about to invest in Alibaba. And I said, you're kidding me. So two classmates from Palo Alto that are both, well, one's joining and one's going to invest in the same company. It's just serendipitous. And I said, well, if they're going to invest, then that's also a great sign of confidence. But even those factors are not a guarantee of success, right? There were so many players in that space, I came to realize once

I got on board and the competition was formidable. They had backing of big private equity firms and very experienced people. Lots of ridicule of Alibaba as a company. One individual used to refer to Alibaba as vaporware. And, uh,

You know, the analysts at that time, they're very critical. They think they can predict the future. And a lot of people criticized Jack and what he was saying because they said there's no basis for this. Like, how can this guy be expecting to create a company like he's saying when he's only an English teacher? But a lot of people don't realize that Alibaba was actually Jack's third company, depending on how you count it.

He started the first commercial internet company in China in 1995 called China Pages. And then he set up the Moftek e-commerce division for the government in 1997, 1997, 1998.

And there was disagreement on the direction of what they wanted that to become in the government. So he decided to leave Beijing and start his own company, Alibaba. So that was essentially his third internet-related company. He's not coming straight out of teaching English and then starting Alibaba. He's tried a lot of things. He knows a lot of people. He knows who the local players are. But...

The problem was the contrast to him were all those highway that came back from MIT, from all these fancy schools that were setting up Sina, Sohu, and all these other companies. And so everyone's like, well, how is an English teacher who's never left China going to compete with a PhD from MIT or Stanford or wherever? So that's why everyone was so skeptical. But what they didn't realize is...

You know, Jack is the guy on the ground who actually knows China the best, better than anyone else. And that's why he was able to create something that truly served the market need. As Brian prepares to leave the U.S. for the second time, Silicon Valley explodes with a whole new generation of radical tech companies. Imagine you're in California during the 1840s gold rush. Instead of investing in a Sheldon strainer, you buy a ticket to leave the country.

Some of my friends who were in medical school would tell me about their internship they were preparing to take, and it was with a company called Google. And I said, why is a medical student going and working at an Internet company? I mean, I kept hearing all these strange stories about this company, Google, which also happened to have been started in my high school journalism teacher's family's garage. It was just like a strange number of connections. And a lot of friends were working at Yahoo and eBay, but they were not working at Google.

Look, for me, the other exciting thing was China. So there weren't a lot of internet companies in the valley doing stuff related to China. And for me, because of that time I spent studying there, I felt like the really exciting adventure would be to figure out how to apply the Silicon Valley thinking and the technology to a market that really needed help in terms of development and just know

know-how. And I thought that that would be a fun adventure. And really the calculus was, what's two years of your life in your early 20s to go and try something?

And then you could always come back and you'd still be valuable to a Silicon Valley company that eventually would probably be looking at China as a market. Yeah, sure. It sounds right when you say it now, right? Yeah. But at that moment, in that environment, everyone's going to Google and whatnot. You're the crazy guy. You know, and it's like, hell yeah, I'll go to China. Like, why do you think that happened? When...

you meet a leader of, you know, of a company who has a vision and it resonates, then it triggers sort of an irrational side of you that says, hey, I'm willing to kind of jump, take that chance and take that leap of faith. But,

Yeah. I remember coming back during summers or seeing friends in Palo Alto, and I had to deal with a lot of ridicule or questions. I mean, first of all, it's like, why didn't you go to medical school? Because back then, we know medical school in the 90s was the place where all the supposed smart people were supposed to go. It seemed like a great career, and maybe I just wasn't smart enough. But

No, they would always say, well, what happened to your pre-med plans, right? And then the second question would be, oh, so you're not going to medical school. You're going to go to an internet company. Well, you know, they expect a Yahoo or eBay or maybe Google. And I'd say Alibaba. And they just kind of this awkward silence, right? And then you knew they were thinking, what the hell are you doing? So...

So for many years, I had that kind of conversation with people every time I'd come back. Well, we have plenty of other stories I can tell you. I went to business school in between my tenure at Alibaba. I actually invited Jack to speak at my business school. This was 2002. And I had to beg people to come sit in his talk because no one thought it was worth coming to hear this guy Jack Ma speak at a business school.

The lesson from all of this is you will never know if the decision is right or not when you make it and you try and project out whatever 10, 20 years. But you need to go with an intuition and instinct. And, you know, you kind of have to have your own sort of rationale and believe that it's the right thing to do. Otherwise, you're going to be guessing the whole way and you can't be trying to live somebody else's sort of expectation.

After defying the expectations of everyone around him, Brian heads back to Hangzhou once more. While Hangzhou today is a more futuristic city, at the end of the 90s, both Hangzhou and Alibaba were just the opposite of that. I remember the day I arrived. It was a rainy day. You landed at the Hangzhou airport. And back then it was like one building and it was all dark and dark.

I remember when we landed and then we started coming off the plane, they start turning on the lights and it was just this little like shack of a building. And then I took a taxi to the office and I remember by the time I got to the office, it was already like, I don't know, eight or nine. And it was like buzzing, it was crowded. Yeah, it definitely had an energy to it, but I'm like, man, this is chaotic.

And so we were basically trying to create something that we thought would be really useful for the international audiences. It was all in English. We had a team in Hong Kong that was, you know, a bunch of McKinsey consultants. And the thinking and the strategic stuff is supposed to come from Hong Kong, and then we implement it in Hangzhou. But what you started to realize is a lot of the fancy ideas...

We're not really transferring well to the Hangzhou team, either because we didn't really know what they were trying to do in the end. I mean, it sounded good, but it was very hard to implement. Or we just couldn't do it because we were not a sophisticated tech team either. Like, you got to keep in mind, in 99, there wasn't a lot of technical talent, even though we were a startup. All the talent was probably, like, in Palo Alto or something, not in Hangzhou. And maybe Beijing, right? But nobody would join us, like,

Who's going to leave Zhongguancun to go to Hangzhou? So there was also a lot of trial and error. And it was tough because you ask yourself, why am I doing this? Why am I slaving away here? Like we'd sleep at the company. They have these bunk beds in the back. And you do a product launch. You got to stay there until whatever, 2 a.m. So you can launch at U.S. time.

And so you got to wake up in the middle of the night and you got to launch it and make sure everything goes well without the technology blowing up or whatever. I was just a lot of hours into something you weren't sure if it was going anywhere because of the stop and starts. And I think that was probably the most difficult thing. And I felt kind of isolated because...

You didn't have a lot of other international staff there at the time. And it was hard to kind of relate ideas to the local team because they didn't really understand the context. So I think that's the big challenge. And it remains a challenge if you fast forward 19 years later. There's still cultural differences. And you have more expatriates working in, whether it's Ali or other Chinese companies. But the question really is this.

How do you bridge the truly local and the truly international to find a good sort of integration of those ideas? You know, whether it was then or now, some of the challenges remain the same.

I think people saw what was happening in the U.S. and everyone was anxious to kind of get on the IPO bandwagon. So whether it was our company or any of the competitors, everyone was trying to get the company listed because once you raise that capital, then you can really kind of be dominant in your space. So there was definitely that sentiment. And a lot of those companies at the time were sort of these Silicon Valley type clones because the corollaries everyone was looking at were in Silicon Valley. Mm-hmm.

So I'd say there was the excitement and the anticipation. And that's also what drove a lot of these professionals in Hong Kong to leave their fancy corporate jobs and go and do a startup, you know, or join a startup. And, you know, we definitely had a number of those individuals at Alley in the early days. But you realize that

And there's a fallacy if you're only shooting for the short-term kind of result and trying to pump it up to get to that IPO. And the conception was that everyone was like, once you get to the IPO, you've kind of reached it and you're going to be really rich. That's a totally flawed approach because everyone was doing things with a short-term mentality. And very few of those companies lasted. Yeah.

And one thing I'd say, credit to Jack and the leadership, is they were always thinking kind of long-term what they were trying to build that would last because focus on the customer versus, say, just pumping the numbers up. It's just a much more solid approach to how you want to build a business. And I think that that rationality was something that Jack and the management team really recognized as an important thing early on.

The team was in high spirits. With new money from SoftBank and the hype of the tech bubble behind them, they considered themselves unstoppable. Everybody was just like, "Hey, this is a big party." There were a lot of these dot-com parties in the bubble time, right? So it just seemed like a big party. Everyone was having a good time.

As we on this side of history already know, the bubble was about to burst. When the ball drops on the year 2000, it will be a momentous event for the world and for the U.S. economy, which is closing in on its longest expansion ever. The decade has been marked by strong growth, the lowest unemployment in a generation, and yet remarkably little inflation. And the party, as Brian described it, well, it turned out to be pretty short-lived.

I think that's where you separate the men from the boys or the wheat from the chaff. There was a lot of pain and suffering at that point. A lot of staff got cut because they were too expensive. A lot of people decided to go do other things because they just felt like that hard road ahead was not for them. And I'm guilty of that. So that's my first tenure at Alley.

I actually ended up leaving after about a year and a half, two years. I went back to business school because they asked me to stay but to reduce my salary in half. And they said they'd double the stock options. But...

really smart me, said, I don't want stock options, I want cash. So I took the cash severance and I went back to business school. That's the highest tuition fee I've ever paid for any schooling. So you had that, right? And then the rest of the team that stayed was very, very committed to seeing it through. And I have a lot of respect for them

They went through the hard times of 2002, 2003. There was not only – they were four months from actually going bankrupt because they had that four-month runway. And then they also ran into SARS. And most people would say, well, SARS hits – how do you operate a company? And then they launched a new company, Taobao. So I cannot take any credit for being part of that nor –

sticking that one through. But at the same time, when I came back in 05, I recognized that there had been a lot of change. You know, that hardship

had created a resilience in the organization that said, "Hey, we got through this so we can get through anything." And so for the next 14 years after that and up till today, it's given the team and the culture this real belief and confidence that there isn't any challenge that's too great that you can't get through as long as you all come together.

So after the tech scene imploded, Brian went back to the U.S., finished his studies, and got a job at a more traditional company in New York. But leaving the freewheeling startup world for a suit and tie, office politics, and hierarchies, turned out to be a much harder transition than he had imagined. The problem with traditional businesses that are going through disruption is they are always worried about cannibalizing their business. So they were not able to change at the rate they need to to stay competitive.

Whereas these new upstarts, and Ali was still considered an upstart in 2005, can just build things from scratch. You're in the middle of everything happening around the entire society. We can talk about leapfrogging, and China is a crazy leapfrogging case, right? Yes.

When you got to New York and you see that it wasn't as fast as in China or as crazy as in China, did you feel that need to get back? Absolutely. I got stir crazy. Whether it was New York or even San Francisco, nothing seemed to be comparable to the excitement that was happening in China.

because of the rate of change, because of the scale of opportunity, and also just the mentality. I feel like the young people in China are very open to the possibilities, and they're willing to embrace new things on a level that is much bigger than in the West, because I think

To some extent, and I tell my friends this, I feel like maybe Silicon Valley and Wall Street, they feel like they have it figured out. And so they believe the way that they're going to do it is the best way. But the thing about China is because there was nothing there, they try all kinds of crazy things. So I made the decision in 2005 after two years at this company to go back to Alibaba after I left.

met and talked to Jack and the team, they happened to come through New York. And I said, it is another one of those serendipitous moments. Somebody called me up from their group, said, hey, we're going to dinner in New York. You want to meet up? And it happened to be this Hangzhou Chinese restaurant in New York City. I didn't even know they had those in New York. And so we had dinner and

I remember asking Jack, like, how do I, you know, maintain my entrepreneurial sort of spirit, you know, as I'm working at this company? And he's like, well, the best way to do it is just come back to Alibaba.

So Brian was once again back in the saddle at Alibaba, and he found that during the years he had been gone, a lot had changed. The company was larger. I mean, I think it was about 1,200 people compared to the time when I joined the first time, it was 52. And I think it was about 1,200 people compared to the time when I joined the first time, it was 52.

So I felt like a real company. We always had a vision. It was like China to the world, then the world to China, and then the world to the world. But we still had many challenges because trying to do that all from Hangzhou presented the challenge of, you know, do you have the right international talent? Does your local team understand the international markets sufficiently?

So I think while it was better in terms of our approach, we still had lots of issues. Keep in mind, when Ali was started in 1999, there were 8.8 million internet users. And today there are over 800 million. So there was definitely a trajectory of growth. People felt, hey, there's something here.

So if you look at the trajectory of Alibaba's development, you might say, well, how did you guys decide to go from B2B to B2C and then payment and then you did cloud and then you did logistics? Like, you know, what's the rationale behind that? A lot of it was as we moved forward, we realized that there were problems that needed to be solved. So we created companies to solve those problems.

So if you talk about Alipay, you know, as a side business, it was actually created to address the lack of trust within the B2C market. Taobao, we had a marketplace, but people were not transacting because they didn't trust each other. If you look at Cai Niao, created in 2013, it was actually created because in 2012, on Singles Day, we actually crashed the China postal system because 50 million packages were too much for the China postal system to handle.

So we had to actually create a data platform to help delivery companies work smarter. And today we do – last singles day we did over a billion in –

parcels or packages generated that were all delivered within seven to ten days after a single stay without crashing the system because of that data platform. Ally Cloud in 2009 was created because we realized that our computing capacity requirements were going to be so large that we could not afford to pay all the third-party licenses for all the software and buy the hardware using a traditional method. We had to create a cloud computing system to cover that. And so we

All of these businesses were actually created because we recognized that there was a need to do it. Because if you didn't do it, then the existing business would not be able to grow. So I think...

A lot of companies in China are built off the fact that there's just this societal need. And because there's no existing system, then you've got to build something to address that. So it was an exciting time for Alibaba. And in 2014, the day came for the Chinese e-commerce giant to prove itself on the international stage, namely the New York Stock Exchange. And you know what happens next.

In fact, now this day has come. Is Alibaba the biggest of all time? Alibaba's IPO is the largest in U.S. history. Orange everywhere. Orange on the front of the New York Stock Exchange. Tons of people down here. Everyone wants to get a look at this company. With a market capitalization of around $168 billion...

Alibaba is now in the company of tech giants such as Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook. So it's Amazon and eBay combined when you look at their $250 billion in annual transactions.

That was a very interesting experience because Alibaba as a company really had a coming of age where we were put in the global stage in a way that we had never been before, like the kind of attention we got. So it's like suddenly you have to not only be a great company, but you also have to learn to speak like one. You have to know what to say, go on CNBC and Bloomberg and actually speak in a way that will make sure that you're representing the company properly. So

Jack obviously is an amazing individual who really is able to step up to the challenge, but that's also like the entire senior management needed to do that. Also, we need to figure out what's our new role in the world as we become so large and high profile. So that was 2014, and it was an amazing time, but it was also the time when we said, okay, what is our vision for this company moving forward? Like,

we're raising all this money, but we have a responsibility. But also, what does this mean for China in terms of its image and what are we representing as a company, but also as an embodiment of kind of this new China that's emerging?

So I have a thesis on kind of how China's development is affecting the rest of the world. You know, in the early days, it was always a clone or a corollary to Silicon Valley was being created in China's tech sector. But in the last, you know, whatever, 10, 15 years, the Chinese internet sector has grown so quickly and matured so fast that

We're creating original, unique China innovation to the extent that we know that even Facebook is looking at companies like WeChat functionality.

But China's started to pave its own road in terms of the innovation that is actually more relevant to the emerging markets in the world. So we've reached a point where China is innovating not only for China in a unique way, but innovating for the emerging market economies because the needs that are being addressed and solved in China are much more similar to that in India, in Vietnam, in

Africa, South America. And so suddenly people are saying, hey, I don't need to follow that Silicon Valley model any longer. There's actually things I can learn from China, whether it's in terms of its mobile payment system, whether it's e-commerce approach, whether it's even its messaging platforms.

These are actually more relevant to the way I do my day-to-day business. That, I think, is quite significant. And when you talk about leapfrogging, it becomes a very attractive alternative because why go backwards and try and build up your credit card penetration within the financial sector and then do mobile payments when you can go straight into mobile payments?

And so a lot of those technologies that enable access to Internet, e-commerce and all these different digital sort of services are going to be ones that we're able to provide that to China or in China, you know, prior. And then they can share that with the rest of the world.

One question we get asked frequently at Digitally China is whether it's possible to study the digital evolution in China and apply the insights to other markets, sort of like a digital blueprint. And the answer is, well, both yes and no. The work I do now is part of an effort to really share everything we've learned in the last 20 years with the rest of the world.

It's part of the Alibaba Business School, which, you know, Alibaba, the company, has helped to create in partnership with the Hangzhou Teachers College, which was Jack's alma mater. But the vision for this program or the programs that I and my team run is really to share this, what we call the digital economy paradigm.

with governments, with other entrepreneurs, and with universities and students at the universities in mainly emerging markets. So,

We do that by running workshops and showing here in Hangzhou government officials, ministers will come and visit sites where you see the impact of digital technology on communities like not only in the urban areas but also in rural areas. How e-commerce has changed village life for the better, created jobs and prosperity.

You see how cashless societies operate in urban areas and how easy it is to not only transact but take public transportation, to do a lot of things all using digital and mobile payments. Second is really what's the role that the entrepreneur plays in creating a digital economy? So the infrastructure builders in China have been private sector companies, whether it's payment, logistics, e-commerce.

big data. These are all private sector led. And so really the question is, how do we share our knowledge with entrepreneurs in Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, even Rwanda, South Africa, Kenya, so that these entrepreneurs will have some foresight into what they're building and how it can be applied to larger society.

A lot of the entrepreneurs you find have the desire to build and create these things for their local communities, but they don't really have a roadmap. So what we try and provide is at least an example of what's possible, and then they pick and choose what they want.

So the third area we talked about is really universities and educational institutions. There is a major shortage of digital talent all over the world. Even in the United States, there's over 600,000 jobs that are not filled in the technology space because of a lack of digital talent. So if you want to

transform an economy into a digital economy, you need to educate the young people. So what we try and do is share our curriculum with local universities in the emerging markets so that they can utilize that to train the future generations that can then power the digital economies in their countries. It sounds and looks like maybe it's kind of a charitable activity, but what we believe is that when you share this knowledge, you actually grow the pie of

by increasing the network effects of your ecosystem. So maybe in the short term, you're not making money off the participants of these programs, but in the long run, you're creating an awareness and a mindset. And so it's a long-term investment. What we're going through now in the world is a huge investment

seismic shift in terms of the economic model that's emerging. So we're moving into what everyone calls the fourth industrial revolution, but that's really characterized by a networked sort of system and the advent of all this new technology that's coming out, whether it's the internet, IoT, AI, biotechnology, robotics. All these things being connected are then creating a whole new way of doing business. And

If we want to step back even further, you can say that in the industrial revolutions of the past, you had agrarian society, then you had kind of the factory, and then you had the corporation. And the new business model of the digital economy is called the platform. And the platform is all about empowering the players or the participants to

And so education becomes a very critical part of building a vibrant platform system. And that's essentially what we're doing. I would love to hear your views about the globalization of Chinese talent going abroad. Because so far in the world, it's been the other way around. The globalization of US talent, right? You go to MIT, you go out in the world. Make sense? So are we seeing any trends like that happening right now?

Well, I think for the first time in modern history, China is suddenly becoming a critical factor in young people's career development. Like in the past, no one would have thought of coming to China to enhance your career opportunities. But now China now is such a large market, 400 million middle class people expected to double in five to seven years.

If any company is thinking in terms of a global strategy, they must include China. So suddenly China becomes relevant to a young person's career trajectory if they think that they want to do something global. So when I started the Alibaba Leadership Academy, the whole goal was to bring international young talent to China to help them understand technology.

the new economy and help them to understand the China cultural context. And so it's amazing the kind of talent that we're able to attract. I mean, one class of 30, we had like 7,000 applicants. It's harder to get into the program than it is to get into Harvard, you know. And that shows the interest from the world about, you know, understanding and working in China. But the reality is, is once they arrive, it's a lot more difficult than they expect.

Because when you join a Chinese company, the problem is that you have to not only understand the business complexities, but also understand the cultural differences. And-

A Chinese truly global business to date, I think, is very hard to find any example of that. But I think that we're on the cusp of that happening. The question is, will they be able to attract the right global talent that can work and thrive in that corporate environment? And so you have not only international talent coming to work at these Chinese companies, but also the Chinese employees themselves trying to go lead that global expansion.

And I think it's really a question of how that will look, you know, in the next, say, three to five to ten years.

We've had recent global ups and downs, you could say, from Chinese companies, right? We've had companies like Ofomo Bike. We've had companies like ByteDance having huge success in a very hard target group. And so we're definitely seeing the first generation of that. But when I have met these companies, I see mostly just a bunch of Chinese people, super smart, right?

taking these companies abroad. Do you think that will change? I think what you're seeing is young people that are coming to China that speak amazing Chinese, that they're very open-minded to Chinese culture, which means that these individuals will be able to not only communicate internally to the Chinese management or senior management, but also convince and persuade people

them in a way that previous sort of generations have not been able to because of linguistic and cultural barriers. At the same time, I see the Chinese management becoming more open-minded. I don't want to say westernized, but it's more western-aware.

but maintaining Chinese characteristics. Look, I think that there's going to have to be major changes in how Chinese companies operate domestically versus they operate internationally because the rules are different, the environments are different, and the customers are different. And to date, I don't think...

We, meaning Chinese companies, have been that successful at doing that. They actually commit the same mistakes as Western companies coming to China. They take a Chinese model and try and put it in a Western market. And that doesn't work from West to East and doesn't work from East to West. So I think that's where the growing pains are going to have to happen. But at the same time, I'm optimistic that the young generations are more adaptable to

Before we tie things up, we'd like to return to what drew us to Brian's story in the first place. A couple of years ago, he co-founded a new media platform, independent from Alibaba, and aimed at sharing stories about everything from the Chinese hip-hop scene to the feminist movement to the Chinese tech sector. The kinds of stories that usually end up on the periphery.

You know, I think that the East and the West have a lot to learn from each other and that the stories that are happening in China now need to be shared on a broader, wider basis. And

On top of that, it's very important that the East understands the West and the West understands the East because technology can be used for a massive good in the world if we all come together and align ourselves and try and focus the efforts on that.

Not, you know, who has the bigger trade surplus or, you know, whose technology is more advanced than the other. I mean, I know these are practical and real issues that we have to be aware of, but we shouldn't let that cloud the bigger issue. If climate change is not addressed, then no one will have –

sufficient air to breathe or we won't have clean enough water. And this is, again, about the purpose of radii to try and build more channels of understanding so that even if I'm an American, I don't go to China to study radii.

If I read enough media or see enough in the way of videos and programming that shows a full sort of perspective on China as a country, I will feel more comfortable in dealing with China and doing business or engaging executives or people from that country.

And look, if I ever decide to leave Ally, I think Radii would be a very meaningful endeavor to commit my time to.

I think that we need to all spend time to understand each other better and given that China and the West and especially United States are probably the two most influential sort of societies in the world today, for them to understand one another is critical. It sounds like a very grand and high-level statement but I truly believe that we need to get that relationship right.

Digitally China is produced by me, Jacob Levin, Eva Xiao and Tom Chong. For full disclosure, Brian Wong is the founder of Radii, our media partner for this podcast. However, Radii was in no way involved in our editorial process. Thank you for listening.