A short Chinese man seems to be the tallest in the world right now. Jack Ma(Ma Yun),50, is executive chairman of Alibaba Group, a business-to-business online platform. On Sept.19, Alibaba went public   on the New York Stock Exchange  , raising $25 billion through an IPO , the biggest in US history. Ma, a former English teacher, has become the richest man on the Chinese mainland. Born in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, Ma grew up as a happy kid. At the age of 12, he wanted to learn English. Every morning, he woke up at 5 a.m, cycled 40 minutes to a hotel near the West Lake where he could chat to foreign tourists. He did it for nine years, rain or shine. The experience made him a fluent English speaker and also opened his eyes to the wider world. In a 1995 trip to the US, Ma was showed the Internet for the first time. He searched Yahoo using the word "Beer", and found that there was nothing in there about China. Seeing the chance, Ma returned to China and set up a website called China Pages without even knowing much about computers. Four years later, 18 people including Ma, his wife and his friends founded Alibaba in Hangzhou. He believed in the Internet business potential  when few other Chinese did. People called him "Crazy Jack Ma". But 15 years later, Alibaba has developed into the world's largest e-commerce company, owning popular shopping websites like Taobao and Tmall. It makes more profit online than Amazon and e-Bay combined. No one thinks he's mad now. Ma's favorite line has been printed on Alibaba's souvenir T-shirts. It reads: "Everybody should have a dream. What if that dream comes true?" Ma cycled to a hotel near the West Lake  _  .
to do morning exercises to work as a guide to chat with foreigners to work part time