When I started Alibaba, banks were skeptical about our payment system, claiming it would never work, but I knew that without a payment solution, e-commerce would not succeed.

Many people thought my idea for Alipay was foolish, but I believed that as long as people used it, it would succeed. Now, we have 800 million users, proving that the idea was not stupid.

After attending a leadership discussion at Davos, I decided to launch our payment system immediately, understanding the importance of building trust for the future of e-commerce in China and globally.

We prefer to build products in-house but decided to acquire X1 to quickly enter the credit card space and offer a competitive product.

As we studied the delivery needs of various merchants, we realized there was a broader demand beyond just one type of business.

We were patient in the first three years, focusing on creating a strong business model to support small to medium-sized merchants rather than copying models from Amazon or eBay.

We realized that businesses were increasingly building complicated transaction-oriented services, which is where Stripe's tools and APIs come into play.

We got our first customer by leveraging LinkedIn to connect and understand their needs better.

When entering China, we partnered with a local company, but it didn't align with our values, leading us to buy them out and operate company-owned stores instead.