America has Jeff Bezos. China has Jack Mah. Most people in technology know of Amazon’s Wall Street defying CEO. But save for the nerdiest e-commerce geeks, not many will have heard of the latter, the man who founded Alibaba, the world’s largest ecommerce operation.
A lot of the action in Nigeria’s startup space has been around ecommerce, with some ginormous raises in recent times. The more I read up on ecommerce, the more I am confronted with Chinese parallels. Specifically in the rise of Alibaba’s B2B marketplace and its C2C subsidiary, Taobao that would eventually run eBay out of China.
The story of Alibaba and Jack Mah, english teacher turned Chinese internetpreneur pioneer is so epic that someone made a movie about it. Porter Erisman, who worked at Alibaba for 11 years has made a documentary about his time at the company that has been screened in 11 locations around the world. Konga is collaborating with Porter to bring the 12th screening of Crocodile In The Yangtze to Lagos next week at Ozone Cinemas, Yaba.
Tuesday the 14th is the day. Tickets cost N500 and are sold on Konga. If decide to go see it, not only will you get to learn about the rise of Chinese internet and ecommerce, you will also be doing good. Konga is donating all the monies raised from ticket sales to providing internet access to the Yaba Police Station.
