The Alibaba programmer Jack Ma asked to build Taobao, now a partner and a yuan billionaire – who is China’s Cai Jingxian?
Affectionately nicknamed Doron, after a naively passionate and kind character featured in acclaimed writer Jin Yong’s martial arts novels, Cai Jingxian is reputed to be one of the top programming legends at Alibaba – the Chinese e-commerce giant and owner of the South China Morning Post.
As a student at Zhejiang Cangnan Middle School, in Wenzhou, southern Zhejiang province, Cai struggled with languages but aced his maths and science classes. His teachers regarded him as a shy student, who nevertheless approached them brimming with questions. Cai was later accepted into Hangzhou Normal University, where he furthered his interest in mathematics.
Upon graduation, Cai stayed in Hangzhou and joined Alibaba, where today he is senior researcher at Alibaba Cloud, the largest cloud computing company in China.
Though his colleagues at Alibaba regard him as a quiet and reserved individual, Cai is renowned for his programming skills and willingness to help his colleagues with their coding problems. His love of programming is obvious as he is frequently seen with his laptop, working on projects on the go, and is quick to offer elegant solutions to stumped coworkers within short time frames.
Three years after joining the company, Cai was invited to join a “secret project” initiated by Jack Ma.
Together with two other programmers, he built the beta version of Taobao Marketplace from scratch in a month – building a website that is now the tenth most-visited shopping site in the world.
For nearly five years after that, Cai was solely responsible for all the search engine functions on the busy website, in addition to his other duties at Alibaba.
Taobao Marketplace became mainland China’s undisputed market leader within two years, its market share surging from eight per cent to 59 per cent between 2003 and 2005 as it out-competed eBay China, whose own share plunged from 79 per cent to 36 per cent.
In 2014, Cai was named an Alibaba partner and today his company shares bring his current net worth to 2.6 billion yuan (US$383 million).
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The Chinese programming prodigy was part of the 3-man team that developed the mainland’s leading internet marketplace – now Cai works for an Alibaba subsidiary that is the country’s biggest cloud computing company, and has a cool US$380 million in the bank