China. Jack Ma (Ma Yun is his real name) is hired as an interpreter by a Chinese-American consortium. During a trip to the United States, the two sides argue furiously, and he is kidnapped and threatened with a gun. Freed and penniless, he travels to Las Vegas, where he wins $600 at the casino and spends it on a flight to a friend’s house in Seattle. At his friend’s house, he is put in touch with Amazon, a fledgling company. A quick browse of the site reveals that China isn’t covered. Jack Ma returns to China, drops out of college, and founds a startup: China Pages, which later becomes Alibaba in 1999, with participation from Yahoo! and the Japanese financial company SoftBank.
