Last month, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd's Jack Ma invited 1,600 former employees to its home turf in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province. The company's $25 billion initial public offering had made many of them wealthy and he urged them to start businesses that would be meaningful in the long term.

"He knew a lot of us got rich and wanted to tell us not to waste our money," said Sun Shuihua, who worked at Alibaba for a decade. "He told us to treat our wealth responsibly."

Sun, 36, has already started. She is spending 5 million yuan ($804,000) to set up an online retail business, becoming part of a generation of Alibaba workers who have made their fortunes and are now putting the money into startups.