Alibaba’s Next Challenge: Managing Growth

After wresting control of his company’s boardroom in a battle with Yahoo Inc., the founder of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. says he is focused now on a bigger challenge: Managing runaway growth at the Chinese e-commerce giant.

“We don’t have any experience. We don’t know how to organize,” Jack Ma said in an interview.

The pace of growth threatens to overwhelm Alibaba, which Mr. Ma, a former English teacher, started in his apartment 13 years ago. Today, Hangzhou-based Alibaba has more than 23,000 employees. Taobao and Tmall, the company’s shopping Web sites, are expected to host a trillion yuan ($157 billion) in transactions this year, up 150 percent from 400 billion yuan in 2010. Taobao and Tmall are each less than 10 years old.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Must-Reads from other Websites

Panos Mourdoukoutas

Why Apple Should Buy China’s Xiaomi

Paul Graham

What I Didn’t Say

Benjamin Bratton

We Need to Talk About TED

Mat Honan

I, Glasshole: My Year With Google Glass

Chris Ware

All Together Now

Corey S. Powell and Laurie Gwen Shapiro

The Sculpture on the Moon

About Voices

Along with original content and posts from across the Dow Jones network, this section of AllThingsD includes Must-Reads From Other Websites — pieces we’ve read, discussions we’ve followed, stuff we like. Six posts from external sites are included here each weekday, but we only run the headlines. We link to the original sites for the rest. These posts are explicitly labeled, so it’s clear that the content comes from other websites, and for clarity’s sake, all outside posts run against a pink background.

We also solicit original full-length posts and accept some unsolicited submissions.

Read more »