Ma Yun became one of the richest men in China when his company Alibaba went on the stock（股票)market last year with a value of around 140 billion-the largest public offering in history. Here are some stories about him on the way to success.

Ma made his first trip to the a US in 1995 and used the Internet for the first time. After searching for "beer", he saw that no results came up about China. Then he searched for "China" and still saw no results. He decided to set up a Chinese website--the seed for Alibaba was sown(播种).

Ma said he was refused many times in his life. He failed the College Entrance Examination in China three times and few companies offered him jobs, including one at KFC. And he was refused by the famous Harvard University 10 times.

It was difficult to learn English when Ma was a teenager because of limited resources. However, he found that he could learn English well by giving tourists free guides around his hometown Hangzhou. And he kept it for nine years. Ma said that tourists opened up a new world for him because everything they said and did was so different from what he had been taught at school and by his parents.

Ma's hero is Forrest Gump who never gives up. When he made a speech about his success at Davos(达沃斯论坛)in 2015,Ma said, "Life is like a box of chocolates because you never know what you are going to get.”