PEOPLE JACK MA AND JEFF BEZOS: E-COMMERCE GURUS Jack Ma Jack Ma was born in China in 1964. He got rejected by Harvard ten times, was rejected for a job in the police force and even by KFC, so in 1994 Ma started his first translation company, Haibo. In 1995, he travelled to the US where he had his first encounter with the Internet. He realised there was not a single website from China and, seeing the opportunity in this, with the help of a friend, he created a website that was a sort of directory service for businesses in China. China Pages was born. The company focused on creating websites for small and medium businesses in China and within three years the company had grown in value; however, because of the dot.com bubble it had to close down soon after in 1998. A year later Jack convinced some his friends to resources for a virtual marketplace idea since he believed the Internet was opening up many opportunities. This was the start of Alibaba. Its aim was to facilitate deals between small businesses. As the company got more visitors and recorded more sales, it caught the attention of tech investors, received financing and kept growing. Today, the company has greatly transformed and focuses on B2B, B2C, and C2C services through web portals, offers shopping search engines, cloud computing, and owns an electronic payment service. It has a total value of $245 billion and employs over 254,000 people. pool Jeff Bezos Jeffrey Bezos was born in New Mexico (US) in 1964. After university, he worked across different fields (on Wall Street, in the banking industry and for a hedge fund) before finally resigning in 1994 after Amazon’s business plan while on a road trip to Seattle. While researching new business opportunities, in fact, he had come across a report that was rapid growth of the Internet. The report said that web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. Bezos knew right then that he wanted to participate in the Internet which was going to be revolutionary. He set up Amazon and started selling books online from a garage. His early success defied many , since without advertisement, proper infrastructure, and relying on a few friends and a computer science degree, Amazon sold books across the US and 45 foreign countries. Within the first two months, sales shot up to more than $20,000 a week. Two years after its launch, Amazon went public in what most analysts called a bluff that would not last a year. But two years down the , Amazon not only kept growing, but its competitors. Today, Amazon has a cumulative net value of over $1363 billion and employs over 1.7 million people worldwide. Adapted from: drafting forecasting odds line outpaced https://businesschronicler.com/business-bios/ GLOSSARY : : : : : : to defy odds sfidare le probabilità down the line nel futuro to draft abbozzare to forecast predire to outpace lasciare indietro to pool mettere insieme