Robin Li

Cofounder of Baidu

• Born: November 17, 1968
• Place of Birth: Yangquan, China

Primary Company/Organization: Baidu

Introduction

Chinese internet entrepreneur Robin Li cofounded the web services company Baidu and served as its chair and chief executive officer (CEO). Baidu's search engine became one of the most popular in the world, thanks in large part to the influential RankDex site-scoring algorithm for ranking search engine pages that Li developed. Baidu's success made Li a multibillionaire and one of the richest people in China.

Early Life

Robin Li was born Li Yanhong in the city of Yangquan in Shanxi Province in northern China on November 17, 1968. His parents worked in factories. Li was the fourth of five children (and the only boy). He grew up during China's Cultural Revolution. A smart student, Li gained admission to Yangquan First High School by earning the second-highest grade on the entrance exam. In high school he studied computer programming and participated in various citywide programming competitions. In 1987, Li scored among the highest in China's National Higher Education Entrance Examination. In 1991, he received a bachelor's degree from the prestigious Beijing University (formerly known as Peking University), where he had studied information management. Li was a college sophomore when, in 1989, the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square caused the university campus to be shut down.

Life's Work

Li, who became fluent in English, was interested in studying abroad after high school. In the fall of 1991, he went to the State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY-Buffalo), where he earned a master's degree in computer science. He initially planned to continue with his studies and earn a PhD. In 1994, however, Li joined IDD Information Services, a New Jersey division of Dow Jones and Company, where he helped create a software program for the online edition of The Wall Street Journal. He worked at IDD from May 1994 to June 1997.

Li always had a passion for Internet searches and was interested in solving one of the Internet industry's biggest dilemmas in its early years: how to sort information. Li knew that the importance of search results could be automatically ranked by citations, or by how many websites linked to that information, so he focused his research on developing better algorithms for search engines to rank sites.

Li's breakthrough came in 1996, when he developed a "link analysis" search mechanism for IDD that he named RankDex. RankDex ranked websites based on how many other sites had linked to it. RankDex received a U.S. patent in 1996. (Around this time, two Stanford students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, devised a similar algorithm they called BackRub, which later became Google.)

In 1997, Li attended a computer conference in Silicon Valley where he demonstrated his algorithms. William Chang, then chief technology officer at the early search firm Infoseek (partly owned by Disney), hired Li as a staff engineer. Li also published widely circulated papers at this time. Although shy, Li retained his passion for developing Internet search tools in an entrepreneurial setting and became disappointed with Infoseek's lackluster interest in pursuing innovative search techniques.

In 1998, Li's friend Eric Xu, then a thirty-four-year-old biochemist and sales representative for a U.S. biotech firm, introduced the thirty-year-old Li to Jerry Yang, the Taiwanese-born cofounder of Yahoo! Xu, who was making a documentary about American innovation at the time, was working with Chinese American documentary filmmaker Ruby Yang. Together they had interviewed Jerry Yang. Xu and other Yahoo! employees were invited to a playback of the interview. Li's wife, who worked at Yahoo! as a sales representative, brought her husband to the event. Li and Xu were inspired by the success of the Yahoo! cofounder, with whom they could identify.

In 1999, the Chinese communist government, aware of Li's computer science expertise, invited Li to return to China for the regime's fiftieth anniversary celebrations. Dedicated to their vision of building a major media company and inspired by Jerry Yang, Li and Xu started Baidu in a hotel room in Beijing that year. They left their wives in the United States and worked tirelessly, armed with $1.2 million from U.S. venture firms Integrity Partners and Peninsula Capital. In 2000, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and IDG Technology Ventures invested another $10 million.

Baidu, Inc.'s search engine, Baidu, was launched on October 11, 1999. The name Baidu came from an eight-hundred-year-old Song Dynasty poem. Its literal translation means "hundreds of times" and stands for finding retreating beauty in chaos or searching for an ideal. Li's inventions, which are considered the gold standard in web search relevance, remained under the control of the Chinese government. Baidu was heavily censored by China's government, and priority was often granted to advertising companies rather than relevant search results. Baidu has been accused of penalizing the search rankings of websites that decrease their advertising spending. With its near monopoly of search engines in China, Baidu has also been accused of Internet piracy. Li disputed all these allegations. Nonetheless, Baidu complied with the Chinese government's search restrictions, including blocking pornography sites and pages that reference politically sensitive topics, such as Taiwanese independence, the Dalai Lama, and the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising.

By 2004, Baidu, with its Internet traffic skyrocketing, allowed advertisers to pay to appear at the tops of searches. Although known as the "Chinese Google," Google never became a big threat to Baidu, perhaps because of Baidu's software's better ability to parse sentences into Chinese, as well as Google's unwillingness—perhaps because of its ties to the entertainment industry—to allow copyright infringement with music, where Baidu is popular for its free music downloads. In 2004, Google invested $5 million in Baidu, laying the groundwork for acquisition. However, several problems at Google's headquarters in China the next year, including e-mail hacking, may have given rise to Baidu's ability to oust Google and gain control of the market. Google accused Baidu of poisoning the Domain Name System, among other discriminatory practices.

In 2005, Baidu filed to go public; on August 5, it was listed on NASDAQ. Shares jumped from its initial public offering (IPO) price of $27 to $122 that day, the biggest one-day gain since the final days of the dot-com boom, when IPOs regularly soared. Baidu's dazzling debut was due both to its connections to Google and to its own potential.

In 2005, Google made a failed $1.6 billion bid for Baidu, which many analysts felt was a missed opportunity. That year, Li was listed in CNN Money's 50 People Who Matter Now. The next year, he was named American Business Weekly's Best Business Leader for 2006. Around the same time, Baidu introduced an online encyclopedia, Baidupedia, modeled on Wikipedia but without the ability for users to create or edit entries. Baidupedia was filtered by Baidu, Inc., to comply with Chinese government restrictions. It was meant to replace Li's first attempt at offering a Chinese-language version of Wikipedia in 2005. In 2007 Baidu became the first Chinese company to be included in the NASDAQ-100 Index.

There have been some controversies with regard to Baidu's control. In 2008, the government-owned China Central Television (CCTV) aired several in-depth programs investigating Baidu, alleging that the web company earned millions of dollars by advertising unlicensed medical practitioners. The headlines ran on Li's fortieth birthday. When Baidu later increased its ad spending, with most of the money going to CCTV, the negative coverage stopped.

Li dedicated himself to making Baidu a global company and exporting the Baidu brand abroad with such services as games, e-commerce, online payments, video content, and maps. Engineers have translated the site into a dozen languages, and Li held annual Baidu World conferences at the Baidu headquarters in Beijing. In November 2010, Li participated in his first Silicon Valley public forum at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, California. In 2014, UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon appointed Li cochair of the Independent Expert Advisory Group on the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development. Li has been interested in AI since the early 2000s. He has invested billions in AI research. In 2023, TIME magazine named him on its list of 100 Most Influential People in AI.

Personal Life

Li met Dongmin (Melissa) Ma in 1995 at a ballroom dancing event for Chinese students in the Greater New York area. They married on October 10 that year in New Jersey, after dating for only six months.

In 1998, when Li and Xu met Jerry Yang, Melissa was instrumental in getting Li to pursue his passion as it was awakened by Yang's success. She urged him to found an Internet company, something Li said he would not have done without her encouragement and motivation. The couple had four children.

Li is an avid fan of the English Premier League Everton Football Club.

Bibliography

Campbell, Charlie. "Robin Li: The 100 Most Influential People in AI." TIME, 7 Sept. 2023, time.com/collection/time100-ai/6310648/robin-li/. Accessed 7 Mar. 2024.

Greenberg, Andy. "The Man Who's Beating Google." Forbes 184.6 (2009): 82–87. Print.

Greenberg, Andy, and Jie Li. "Internet Intermezzo." Forbes Asia 5.14 (2009): 30–33. Print.

Li, Yanhong (Robin). "Toward a Qualitative Search Engine." IEEE Internet Computing 2.4 (1998): 24–29. Print.

Margolis, Jonathan. "Great Wall of Silence." New Statesman 15 Aug. 2011: 36–39. Print.

Stone, Brad, and Bruce Einhorn. "How Baidu Won China." Bloomberg Businessweek 11 Nov. 2010: 60–67. Print.