Alibaba's World

Erisman joined Alibaba in 2000 as an early Western employee and served as a vice president through 2008, working in international marketing and corporate affairs. He wrote a participant's account of the company's first decade.

The business content covers the sequence of Alibaba's businesses. The original Alibaba.com connected Chinese manufacturers to overseas buyers, monetising through membership and verification fees rather than transactions. Taobao was launched in 2003 to compete with eBay's Chinese operation, and Erisman describes the decision to charge sellers nothing, which eBay could not match without destroying its own model, and the addition of the Wangwang instant messaging tool that let buyers and sellers negotiate directly. Alipay was created because Chinese buyers would not send money to strangers, and it worked by holding funds in escrow until the buyer confirmed receipt. Erisman argues that this escrow function, rather than payment processing, was the innovation that made Chinese e-commerce possible.

He also covers the relationship with Yahoo, the SARS epidemic and the company quarantine during which Taobao was built, Jack Ma's management style and use of company culture, and the way the company handled counterfeit goods.

The book is an insider memoir, written by someone loyal to the company, and it does not examine the harder questions: the variable interest entity structure, the Alipay transfer out of the joint venture that Yahoo and SoftBank disputed, counterfeiting at scale, or Alibaba's relationship with the Chinese state. It ends before the 2014 listing and before the regulatory intervention of 2020 onward. Read it for the competitive decisions of the early period, which are well described, and go elsewhere for the corporate governance.