The multibillion-dollar house that Jack built

Tian Hou, chief analyst with T. H. Capital LLC, a research and investment adviser in Beijing, who has followed the development of Alibaba for more than a decade, says that unlike Bill Gates, whose background was technical, and who knew how to take his company's products to the next level, the way Jack Ma builds Alibaba is based purely on his vision.

"Ma has built an entire virtual society, based on the e-commerce economy. There have been no benchmarks or guidelines for him to do this; all he has had to rely on is vision."

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Alibaba's looming IPO has raised the company's profile among Wall Street investors, she says.

"For them, Alibaba is not just a leading e-commerce company in China anymore. The IPO is going to help it become one of the top companies in the world."

Alibaba's regulatory filing to the US Securities Exchange Commission gave a $1 billion placeholder value for the offering, but the real amount is expected to be far higher, possibly exceeding $20 billion, topping a $19.65 billion offering by Visa Inc in 2008, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Alibaba has not specified how many shares it will offer, their price, or a proposed IPO date, and it has not revealed whether it will be on the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq.

But analysts say the IPO is likely to value Alibaba between $150 billion and $250 billion, which means it would be valued as low as the social media site Facebook or as high as the global retail giant Wal-Mart.

Porter Erisman, who worked as a vice-president at Alibaba.com and Alibaba Group between 2000 and 2008, says that when he first joined the company there was little hint that Alibaba would become as successful as it has.

"When I joined Alibaba back in 2000, Ma and his team had just moved out of the apartment. I was attracted by the unique dream the team had to build a global Internet company from China."

It seemed like a unique challenge, "and I couldn't resist being a part of it", says Erisman, who later turned his experience at Alibaba into an award-winning documentary, Crocodile in the Yangtze.

Erisman, who at various times led the company's international website operations, international marketing and corporate affairs, says Alibaba was not a team of all-stars.

"But Jack's great talent is in bringing together ordinary people to achieve extraordinary things. So in many ways he was more like a coach than a traditional boss.