"The wind is clear and the gas is positive" lost to "Pony", and Ali lost to Tencent after all.

The person who founded Alibaba with Ma Yun is the "eighteen arhats" of the lakeside garden. They can get together in a room, which is not the result of Ma Yun's choice, but as long as someone is willing to work with Ma Yun and take 600 yuan a month, they can sit in that room. So this group of people can basically be regarded as a mob.

When Ma Yun got $25 million from Goldman Sachs and Masayoshi Son, Ma Yun believed that to be an international company, there must be an international talent team. So when he got so much money, he said to the remaining seventeen "arhats":

"We want to be a great enterprise. Some of you can be the monitor, some can be the platoon leader, and some can be the company commander or head at most. If you want to become an army, you must go outside and find a teacher and a commander. "

This is an idea of Ma Yun from 2000 to 200 1.

Ma Yun has been looking for some global talents to enter Alibaba for a long time. In 2006, Alibaba came to the threshold of listing in Hong Kong. Ma Yun felt that Alibaba's demand for international talents was more and more urgent.

So around 2006, Ma Yun introduced a group of international talents from outside, including Wei Zhe (CEO of B&Q China), Wu Weilun (CFO of PepsiCo China), Ceng Ming (Professor cheung kong graduate school of business), Xie Wen (CEO of Hexun.com), Cui Renfu (Senior Vice President of Wal-Mart Department Store Group), Huang Ruo (CEO of Lotus in Yichu) and Wei Wu (partner of KPMG Huazhen).

This is a group of outstanding young talents, who have two characteristics: first, most of them come from the world's top 500; Second, none of them belong to Internet companies.

These two points show that one of Ma Yun's major demands in recruiting these talents is that, first, he needs senior international talents from the world's top 500 to help him. Second, he believes that there are no international talents in the Internet field in both the United States and Japan, so the talents of other mature international companies in the world's top 500 should be used to transform Internet companies and Alibaba.

This idea sounds excellent, but it is actually another mistake made by Ma Yun.

Most of these people have left Alibaba. Among them, Wei Zhe, former executive vice president of Alibaba Group and president of B2B business of Alibaba, made a sensation when he resigned. The rest, except Ceng Ming, have left Alibaba.

Among these people, Xie Wen is the most interesting. He is the only person who is not from a Fortune 500 company, but he is the earliest Internet talent in China. Ma Yun once watched Xie Wen's PPT speech in Beijing. After reading it, he felt very good. Two months later, he was appointed CEO of Yahoo China. Xie Wen announced his resignation one month after arriving at Yahoo China, which made Ma Yun very embarrassed at that time.

In other words, these excellent "airborne troops" will be "collectively killed" in Alibaba.

Then we can't help but discuss a question: Why are these international talents "collectively killed" in Alibaba?

I think one of the important reasons is cultural exclusion.

Alibaba has two very important cultures. The first one is called martial arts culture. As we all know, Ma Yun likes reading Jin Yong's martial arts novels very much, so when he arrives at his company, he will find that all the offices and conference rooms are hung with brands from Jin Yong's novels, such as Huashan on Sword or Xiaoyao Peak. Even more exaggerated is that every Alibaba executive has a flower name, and most of these flower names come from Jin Yong's novels.

For example, Ma Yun's nickname is Feng Qingyang, Lu Zhaoxi's name is Temujin (Genghis Khan), Zhang Yong's name is Xiaoyao, Changyu's name is Rosa, Wu Yongming's name is Dong Xie, and Zhang Jianfeng's name is Xing Dian ... Some people's names are swords-because all the names have been taken away, only some swords are left.

This shows that Alibaba has a strong martial arts culture. And these CEOs from multinational companies were dug up in a China company, but they were told that it might make him a little uncomfortable to suddenly take a name called "Xingdian".

Tencent, another internet company in China, also has its own unique culture, that is, taking English names. From the first day, Ma's company name was Xiaoma, Zhang Zhidong's name was Tony, Chen Yidan's name was Charles, and Xu's name was Daniel. Wu, who later became an e-commerce, is called Free, and Ren Yuxin, who is now the CEO of the Mutual Entertainment Department, is called Mark.

So when I entered Tencent, I heard what Pony said, what Tony said and what Mark said at most. What should I do when the second Tony shows up? If the surname is Zhang, it is Tony Zhang; ; Ma, if his last name is Ma. But what if another horse comes in? Then just change the English name. Everyone in Tencent has an English name. The founders of Tencent have never studied it, but it has an international culture.

Of course, these people in Alibaba have never studied, but they all have some names in Jin Yong's martial arts novels. Martial arts culture itself is bloody and gamified. This martial arts culture, which flouts all rules, is heresy for executives from the world's top 500 companies, so it is difficult for these people to accept it from the cultural level.