PEOPLE love to gossip about hometown hero Jack Ma in Hangzhou at the best of times. But people really started bending the ears of others after his company Alibaba busted records with its New York Stock Exchange listing last month.

Many stories are about his appearance like how he was mocked in school because of his big head, or when KFC turned him down for a job because of his looks, or the one about the woman who described a blind date with him as “hell.”

Ma takes it all in stride and even makes jokes about his appearance. He has famously said he looks like “ET” from the Steven Spielberg movie and “a man’s IQ is inversely proportional to his appearance.”

Ma is back in the news due to Alibaba’s initial public offering on September 19. It was the biggest ever IPO at US$25 billion, surpassing Facebook’s. Alibaba’s share price closed at US$93.89 on its debut, making it the world’s second biggest Internet company following Google based on market capitalization.

Ma has been in the glare of the media spotlight as Alibaba’s IPO approached and he has been quoted as saying: “Everybody needs to have a dream. What if it comes true?”

Looking at Ma’s life, there are several recurring themes that have helped shape him into the successful entrepreneur he is today.

Wuxia dream

Alibaba’s culture features a wuxia spirit. Wuxia is a genre of Chinese fiction detailing the adventures of martial artists.

The company’s top executives are nicknamed after wuxia heroes and many offices in the Alibaba building are named after locations that appear in kung fu novels by Jin Yong, real name Louis Cha Leung-yung, Ma’s idol. Some of the company’s big projects are even named after kung fu moves.

Born in 1964, Ma, like most boys, liked kung fu films and novels. He even fought a lot at school. He ended up with 13 stitches on his head after one fight. However, he recalled that all the fights were for “friends” or for “brotherhood.”

In his early 20s, Ma started studying tai chi, a slow moving kung fu that requires patience and philosophical understanding more than power and speed. He once wrote he thought tai chi was just for seniors until he saw his teacher, an old woman, throw a very strong man several meters with a little push.

When Ma became an entrepreneur, he asked his assistant to find the best tai chi teacher in the country as the woman, his original instructor, had died. In 2009, he officially became the disciple of Wang Xi’an, one of the most celebrated tai chi practitioners in the country.

“The more I studied tai chi, the more I found I followed its principals in running the company, whether it was staff management or handling clients,” he once said.

In 2011, Ma and kung fu star-actor Jet Li established Taijizen International Culture Co. In 2013, the duo cofounded Taijizen Pavilion in Xixi Wetland, Hangzhou, which provides tai chi courses. Alibaba offers tai chi classes to its employees.

English dream

Few 50-year-old Chinese men speak English as well as Ma. And it was English that opened doors for the entrepreneur.

According to Ma’s middle school classmate, “Ma did not do very well in school. He was poor at math but very good at English.” He even famously scored 1 out of 100 on one math test while trying to enter college.

But Ma showed courage that his peers did not have in adolescence. At the age of 13, he wandered around star hotels introducing himself to foreign tourists. Ma offered to be a tour guide for free. His goal was to practice oral English.

He studied English at Hangzhou Teachers Institute, now Hangzhou Normal University, and earned a degree.

After graduation, Ma taught English in college for five years. In 1992 he founded his own translation agency and worked with some of the first American companies doing business in China.

“Intellectual Jack Ma,” a documentary made by CCTV in 2004, details how he got his start.

In 1995, he traveled to the United States for the first time as an interpreter for one such venture. He contacted a friend who was living in Seattle that he had once given a tour around Hangzhou. That stint as a house guest gave him his first contact with a personal computer and the Internet — his friend’s son-in-law was an executive of VBN, an Internet service provider.

“I was scared, computers were considered very high tech and expensive,” Ma said in the documentary. He carefully typed “beer” and then clicked search. Loads of information popped up. Then he typed “China” and there turned out to be “no data.”

He smelled business. Ma asked his friend to help him put up a website for his translation business. Within three hours he received six e-mails looking for cooperation.

Internet dream

Ma carried a computer back to China. He called some friends and told them: “I am going to start my own company, and its name is Internet,” he told CCTV. He explained what the Internet was but nobody understood.

It didn’t stop him. He collected 20,000 yuan (US$3,266) and started China Yellow Page Co, which designed and made web pages for companies.

Ma told everybody he met: “From this web page, anyone with an Internet connection can read your information.” Many times he was considered “crazy,” or worse, a “swindler.”

As many entrepreneurs understand, starting a business is difficult and numerous challenges await. Ma also experienced some tough times, but he never gave up.

“Beijing won’t treat me like this years later. Years later, I won’t be such an underdog,” he famously said when things weren’t going so well.

A month ago during a Bloomberg interview, minutes before Alibaba’s IPO, he said: “I believed 15 years ago that the Internet was going to change China. Whether I succeeded or not, I knew someone would succeed.”

By 1998, a portal website in China was attracting more than 400,000 hits a day, prompting Ma to start up a new business.

On February 21, 1999, Ma secured 500,000 yuan from friends to launch alibaba.com, a B2B website aiming to “make it easy to do business anywhere.”

It quickly emerged as a successful new player and received US$25 million in financing when big names showed interest. Among them were the Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs and Japanese Internet entrepreneur Masayoshi Son.

Alibaba.com had 1 million users by 2002, and finally began turning a profit later that year as Ma had promised investors.

Ma himself reiterated in a video released before the IPO that “15 years ago, 18 founders in my apartment had a dream that someday we could build a company that serves millions of businesses.

“Today, it remains our mission.”

In 2003, Ma stepped into the consumer online auction marketplace with taobao.com, which means “searching for treasure.” It quickly emerged as a serious rival to eBay, which withdrew from the China market in 2006.

In 2005, Alibaba took over the operation of China Yahoo!. In 2007 alibaba.com successfully listed on the Hong Kong stock market and he invested 2 billion yuan in Taobao in 2008. Alibaba was listed on the New York Stock Exchange last month.

His career matches another of his famous quotes: “If it is not you, then who? If it is not now, then when?”