Jack Ma would start with the KFC story. He always starts with the KFC story.
“Twenty-four people applied for a job at KFC in Hangzhou. Twenty-three were hired. I was the only one rejected.” He’d pause. The pause is practiced but the disbelief is still genuine — thirty years later, the man who built the largest e-commerce company in Asia still sounds personally offended by Kentucky Fried Chicken’s hiring criteria.
The story would take eight minutes. It would include the college entrance exam he failed twice, the thirty jobs he applied for and didn’t get, the time he applied to be a police officer and was told he was too short, the time he applied to Harvard and was rejected (ten times, he says, though the actual number is probably two). By minute six, you’d realize the rejections aren’t background. They’re the architecture.
The Digression
He’d detour into tai chi. He always detours into tai chi. “Business is like tai chi. Slow is fast. You wait, you watch, you feel the opponent’s energy, then you move.” The metaphor sounds like motivational poster material until he applies it to the founding of Alibaba, and then it sounds like military strategy.
He started Alibaba in his apartment in Hangzhou in 1999. He didn’t know how to code. He’d never run a business. He was an English teacher who had learned the language by offering free tours to foreign tourists at West Lake as a teenager — approaching strangers, practicing vocabulary, getting corrected, coming back the next day. He applied the same method to the internet.
“I know nothing about technology,” he’d tell you, high-pitched voice rising with the admission. “I know nothing about management. I know nothing about anything.” Then he’d grin — the grin of a man who has turned not-knowing into a competitive advantage. Because Ma didn’t build Alibaba for engineers. He built it for the small-business owners in Hangzhou who also knew nothing about technology. He understood them because he was one of them.
The Return
The KFC story circles back. It always circles back. But by the time it does, it’s not a story about KFC anymore. It’s a story about the relationship between rejection and identity — the idea that being told “no” enough times either destroys you or becomes the thing you build on. Ma chose the second option with a compulsiveness that borders on religion.
“Today is hard. Tomorrow will be worse. But the day after tomorrow will be sunshine.” He says this in every speech. The construction is so simple it sounds like a fortune cookie. But the middle sentence — “tomorrow will be worse” — is where the honesty lives. Most motivational speakers skip the worse part. Ma includes it because he’s been there, and pretending you can skip from hard to sunshine without passing through worse is a lie he refuses to tell.
He’d tell you three more stories. Each one about failure. Each one structured identically: the setup (ambition), the rejection (specific, named, dated), the pivot (what he learned), the result (Alibaba). The stories are well-rehearsed. They’re also true. And the truth is in the details he includes that a purely strategic storyteller would omit — the squeak of genuine hurt when he describes being rejected, the self-correction when he inflates a number (“ten times — I mean, actually, maybe twice”), the laugh that arrives before the punchline because Ma finds his own stories funnier than anyone else does.
The Story He Stopped Telling
He challenged Elon Musk to a public debate about artificial intelligence. Musk talked about neural networks and existential risk. Ma talked about how AI should serve small businesses. Musk won on technical substance. Ma won on charm. Neither of them changed the other’s mind.
Then Ma criticized Chinese financial regulators. The Ant Group IPO — $37 billion, the largest in history — was cancelled. Ma disappeared from public view for three months. When he reappeared, he was visiting rural schools, talking about education, saying nothing about technology or regulation or the system that had made him the richest man in China and then reminded him who was actually in charge.
He doesn’t tell this story. Not yet. The gap in the narrative — the three months, the silence, the schools — is where the tai chi metaphor stops being a metaphor. Slow is fast. Wait. Watch. Feel the opponent’s energy. Then move.
Twenty-four applied for KFC. Twenty-three got the job. He was the only one rejected. He’s been telling that story for thirty years and it still works. Because the rejection isn’t the point. What he did the next morning is.
Talk to Jack Ma — bring a failure. He’s got a better one. And he’ll make you feel like the failure was the beginning, not the end.