The Alibaba story touches on a bunch of interesting things. 1st, there is somethingto do with the definition of "startups" as used on this site, techcrunch etc

The Alibaba story touches on a bunch of interesting things. 1st, there is somethingto do with the definition of "startups" as used on this site, techcrunch etc. Al lot of it is cultural-superficial. Soylent, is creating a new product that one might find at a pharmacy. It's startupiness is mostly it's cultural context: Kickstarter, Andreesson-Horowtiz, change-the-world ambition, SV brashness. A similar company & product coming out of Europe and selling in pharmacies and supplement stores probably wouldn't register as a "startup" to most people. I don't really know how to articulate this, so I suppose my thoughts are not all that cohesive. I think there's something here. A completely unrelated 2nd, are the "problems" Alibaba is solving. About 10 years, just out of college I was wring in ecommerce. I learning about affiliate marketing & drop shipping. I talked to someone with an ecommerce "store" where all items were being drop shipped and the site was being populated by a feed. He wanted affiliates to drive all traffic to the site. Joel Spolsky (2001)- Indeed during the recent dotcom mania a bunch of quack business writers suggested that the company of the future would be totally virtual -- just a trendy couple sipping Chardonnay in their living room outsourcing everything. - I was one of the quacks. I knew that between the factory door and a consumer was where most of the cost (value add) is. Things got bought, sold, shipped, exported, warehoused again, warehoused, wholesaled, retailed... It seemed that these virtual businesses were part of an unstoppable economic change where the internet would automate and eliminate most of the work between the consumer and the manufacturer. I thought everything between manufacturers and consumers would melt into a very thin layer of technology, RSS mostly. I mustn'd have been the only one because a lot of the dark ages startups (2002-2005) seemed to be building parts of this upcoming world. Product search engines, for example were considered important. It didn't happen, but it still might. A lot of the dotcom ideas were poorly executed 10 years too early but ultimately decent ideas. Maybe this one was 30 years to early. Alibaba is focused further down the manufacturing chain, where stuff actually gets made. We know that all our stuff is made in China. We kind of assumed that was a solved problem, trivial. Try to buy something on Alibaba and you will find that international commerce is still a lot closer Marco Polo's days than you might think. Amazon has been working on the retail side of things for 20 years. Product research, discovery, shipping, customer service. Every aspect of that has turned out to be a bigger and more difficult problem that I would have anticipated in 1999. Alibaba is innovating mostly below the point that Amazon starts. I think Alibaba is a big deal.