Jack Ma founded Alibaba in 1999 after being rejected from 30 jobs and raising $20,000 with his wife and friend. Alibaba is now one of the largest companies in China, providing e-commerce and cloud services. It has operations in over 200 countries and orchestrates China's Singles' Day shopping event which generated over $25 billion in sales in 2017, surpassing Walmart as the world's largest retailer. Alibaba also invests in other companies and has seen triple-digit revenue growth in its public cloud business.