Nine rabbits on the ground, and why to chase one

Ma usually tells this with a second half. Tactics can change as often as needed, he says, but the rabbit should not, and the first one goes in the pocket before the chase for the others begins. The picture is of a hunter surrounded by game who goes home with nothing because he kept switching targets.

Alibaba’s early years show what he meant. The company started in 1999 with one aim: a marketplace connecting small Chinese manufacturers with buyers abroad. Plenty of other openings existed in Chinese internet business at the time, from portals to online games, and money flowed to many of them. Alibaba stayed with its marketplace, experimented with how it charged and sold its services, and reached profitability in the early 2000s. Only then did it start Taobao, a consumer marketplace built to take on eBay in China, and later Alipay to handle payments. The rabbits came one at a time.

For a startup the lesson applies to markets and customers more than to daily tasks. A young company can usually see several good markets for what it builds, and each comes with a plausible story. Spreading a small team across them means none gets the attention needed to win. Choosing one, and staying with it through the early disappointments, gives the team a chance to learn that market well enough to lead it. The permission to change tactics is the practical part. The product and the pricing can both change, as long as the goal holds still.

The difficulty is knowing when the rabbit is the wrong one. Some targets cannot be caught, and a founder who treats every setback as a tactical problem can spend years on a market that will never pay. The saying offers no way to tell persistence from stubbornness. A workable test is whether each change of tactics brings the team closer, measured in customers or revenue. If the distance stays the same after several honest tries, the rabbit may be the problem.

There is a timing risk in the other direction as well. Markets sometimes open briefly, and a company too disciplined to look up from its first target can miss a second one that will not wait. Taobao itself was partly a response to such a moment, launched while eBay was still establishing itself in China. Ma’s own record reads less like a ban on chasing more than one rabbit and more like a rule about sequence: secure the first, then move.