Never Give Up

The collection, edited by Suk Lee and Bob Song, consists entirely of more than 200 quotes from Jack Ma, founder of the Alibaba Group. Ma speaks in his own words on competition, management and teamwork, on innovation and entrepreneurship, on business values and on life. Ma's own path was unlikely: a former English teacher who knew nothing about coding, he started his first internet company in 1999 with $20,000 borrowed from his family, at a time when few people in China knew what the internet was. He put that experience to work in Alibaba, a set of websites linking buyers and sellers while earning advertising revenue, and its 2014 initial public offering raised a record $25 billion.

Bountie.io chief performance officer Jose He read it while facing many problems in a first startup, and took from it that problems alone would not cause failure, but giving up would.