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You can't operate a business running at a loss, and particularly if you're doing it by paying yourselves. It just doesn't fly.

What goes around comes around in business, and it's better to help people out rather than bill them every time you speak to them.

In the beginning I just wanted to survive. For the first three years, we made zero revenue. I remember many times when I was trying to pay up, the restaurant owner would say, 'Your bill was paid.' And there would be a note saying, 'Mr. Ma, I'm your customer on the Alibaba platform. I made a lot of money, and I know you don't, so I paid the bill.'

I don't fault my former law firm for running their business like a business or expecting their new hire to be worth the obscene rate she was billed out at, but fun it was not.

I had been working for eight years and all I had to show for it was this horrible debt. At one point we had the bailiff at the door.

It's like you work with people, and based on the size of the budget, you sometimes can't pay them what they deserve.

In this business, if you don't pay your debts you're finished.

My mother was being hounded by a debt collector over a debt that she didn't owe, and she eventually just paid it because she wanted the calls to stop. I was very surprised. It sounded so strange. I started poking around on the Internet and found this was extremely common.

I'd heard stories about business managers who lost their client's money. My feeling was that if I made any money, I wanted to lose it myself, to be the author of my own demise.

What I feel I am doing now is giving to the people exactly what they paid for but never actually heard before.