Meet Jack Ma, the former English teacher now the richest man in Asia!

This fascinating Bloomberg video profile tells the story of how Ma started as a poor child in China's countryside, learned English, got rejected from a job at KFC but then went on to found Alibaba, the world’s largest e-commerce site.

Alibaba was formed with $80,000 of investment. By 2000 the business had raised a further $25million of investment, despite having no formal business plan.

By 2014 Alibaba had listed its shares in New York, raising $25 billion - the world’s biggest flotation at the time.

Subsequently, Alibaba has adopted a strategy of diversification away from e-commerce, including buying a newspaper and investing in movie production, retailing and sports management.

Now the business is worth around $500 billion. Not a bad rate of return on that initial $80k investment.