Why Alibaba's Jack Ma isn't scared of China's slowdown

China's richest man isn't scared of his country's slowing economy.

Jack Ma, the founder of ecommerce giant Alibaba (BABA), told Charlie Rose at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that he's not concerned about China's slowdown, noting that keeping up growth of 9 percent "is impossible."

The country's economy grew 7.4 percent last year, its weakest performance in almost 25 years, while growth is forecast to slow even further over the next few years. But for Ma, who built his ecommerce business by enabling the type of transactions that helped build China's economy into the world's second largest, that signifies a more sustainable pace, one that could allow the country to focus on issues such as environmental and product quality.

"Slowing down is much better than keeping it at 9 percent," Ma told Rose. Maintaining that rate of growth would signal "that there must be something wrong. You will never see the blue sky. China should pay attention to the quality of the economy."

China's rapid growth hasn't come without growing pains, with Ma's comment about never seeing a blue sky referring to the country's struggle with air pollution. Residents of Beijing often wear masks to protect themselves against smog, while pollution levels can be many times above what the World Health Organization considers safe.

Yet even as China's economy slows down, Alibaba is casting a wider net. Ma said its next step will be to focus on helping small businesses outside of China connect to each other and to Chinese consumers, with the goal of serving 2 billion consumers and help 10 million small businesses outside of China sell products via the Internet.

"What I'm thinking about is how we can make Alibaba a platform for global small business," he said. Recent examples of include connecting cherry farmers in Washington state and Alaska seafood sellers with Chinese consumers, he said. "The Internet can help small businesses sell things across nations," Ma added. "Why can't we help American and European small businesses connect to China's consumers? China needs that."

While that might seem like an enormous undertaking to some, Ma has repeatedly proven critics wrong. Take, for instance, the first time he came to the U.S. to raise $5 million in venture capital and was rejected. Ma said he vowed to return and "raise a little bit more." In 2005, he convinced Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang to invest $1 billion.

Ma also spoke about persisting in his goals despite repeated rejections: He was rejected from Chinese universities three times; rejected from Harvard 10 times; and rejected from 30 job applications.

"I even went to KFC, when KFC opened in China," Ma said. "Twenty-four people went for the jobs, and 23 people were accepted," all except him.

His philosophy, he said, can be summed up by "Forrest Gump," a movie that he said he loves: "Never give up."

"People think he's dumb but he knows what he is doing," Ma said of the 1994 film, which won the Academy Award for best picture. When he was very depressed, at a time in Alibaba's early years, Ma watched the movie. "I said, 'This is the guy i should learn from. Believe in what you are doing.'"

Like Gump, Ma has also had a charmed life. He started Alibaba after he first encountered the Internet on his first visit to the U.S. in 1995. Noting that there were no Chinese sites about beer -- the first term he searched on Mosaic -- he came up with the idea of creating a site about China. He came up with the name Alibaba because it brought to mind the words "open sesame." He tested the idea by asking a few stranger in San Francisco if they knew who Alibaba was, and received positive responses.

"I thought, this is a good name, and it starts with "a," so it's always at the top," Ma said.

Building trust between consumers was essential in Alibaba's early years, given that ecommerce was so new and the idea of doing business with strangers wasn't common then. One key to its success was Ma's idea of creating Alipay, an online escrow service, which allows consumers to verify they've received their products before releasing funds.

While the company struggled to find revenue in its early years, Ma said he's glad in retrospect that he never took money from the Chinese government. "I wanted it at the beginning, but later I didn't want it because I think if the company always thinks about taking money from the government's pockets, that company is rubbish," he said.

Later, he said he learned a company shouldn't rely on a government organization to handle ecommerce. "I told my team, 'Be in love with the government, but don't marry them," he said.

As for his nickname "Crazy Jack," Ma said he welcomes the term. "I think crazy is good," he told Rose. "We are crazy, but we're not stupid. We know what we are doing."

Asked what he'll do later in his life, Ma, a one-time English teacher, said he'd like to return to that profession at some point.

"When you have $1 billion, that's not your money," he said. "That's the trust that society puts on you. I would say I will go back to teach, go back to school, and share with young people what I love."

With reporting from CBS News Senior Producer Lulu Chiang.