Despite past tensions between eBay and Alibaba under former CEO Meg Whitman when the two companies waged war in China, eBay's new CEO John Donahoe is open to partnerships with the company according to Bloomberg. Alibaba's founder and Chairman Jack Ma has been in the United States for the past 2 weeks with top executives on a team-building exercise. While here, he has met with eBay, Amazon.com, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, Starbucks, and GE to discuss possible partnerships.

Ma spoke before the Asia Society in New York City on Thursday (link), and said he wants to enter the U.S., but not to compete.

eBay PowerSellers use Alibaba.com to acquire inventory from all over the world to sell online. In China, Alibaba operates a C2C marketplace, online payment service and other business services in addition to its B2B global marketplace.

While previous trips to Silicon Valley had inspired Ma because of the hard work he observed, he was surprised that most companies today are in a very depressed mood. He said there was a focus on money, with engineers talking about products that could make money, not about how the products could change the world. "I was a little bit disappointed," he said.

Ma talked about his experience in building Alibaba from a small team in Hangzhou and building it into a company of 12,000 employees, with plans to hire an additional 5,000 this year. He said that at Alibaba, the customer is number one, employees are number two, and shareholder are number three. (The customers pay you, the employees stay with you, but the shareholders - "they are all gone when disaster comes.")

English-teacher turned entrepreneur and business leader, Jack Ma is known for his motivational public-speaking. Yesterday, he donned a sweater in classic Bill Gates style.

Ma spoke about the global economic crisis. People should not to wait for the government to take action, he warned. For years at world economic forums in Davos, people have spoken about social responsibility. "It's time to take action. Social responsibility is not a slogan. Bury it into the business model. Not only care for yourself, care for employees, the customer, the environment. Take action, put it into reality, into action."

The man who beat eBay in China said he values hard work over MBAs. "Everything (MBAs) say is right, but everything they do is terrible."

Of the companies he met with, Ma seemed most impressed with Starbucks.