I’ve been learning about Jack Ma recently. He’s the founder of Alibaba, the China-based e‑commerce behemoth. As of this writing, the company has a market capitalization (i.e., valuation) of roughly $188 billion. Alibaba has a variety of successful business lines, including a marketplace, cloud computing, and financial services.

Jack is an impressive founder, but one fact surprised me. Alibaba is a technology company, but Jack Ma isn’t technical at all. He doesn’t write code and doesn’t have a deep understanding of tech. Yet he was able to found and scale a wildly successful technology company that changed commerce in his country.

If ever a nontechnical founder building a technology company needed inspiration, Jack Ma was the one. For nontechnical founders, his journey is worth studying.