Robin Li (; born November 17, 1968) is a Chinese entrepreneur, co-founder of China's most popular search engine Baidu.
Li studied information management at Peking University and the State University of New York, Buffalo. In 2000 he founded Baidu with Eric Xu (徐勇). He has been the CEO of Baidu since January 2004, which was listed on NASDAQ in August 2005.
Early years
Li was born in
Yangquan,
Shanxi,
China, where he spent most of his childhood. Both of his parents were factory workers. Li was the fourth of five children, and the only boy among the five.
Li was admitted by Yangquan First High School by achieving the second highest grades in the entrance examination. In high school, Li enjoyed computer class and participated in numerous programming competitions city-wide. In 1987, Li attended the National Higher Education Entrance Examination and achieved the top grade among all examinees in Yangquan. Consequently, he chose Peking University for college where he studied information management for four years and received a Bachelor of Science degree.
In the fall of 1991, Li went to SUNY-Buffalo in the US to study computer science toward to Doctoral degree. He received his Master of Science degree in 1994 after he had decided to discontinue his PhD program work.
Road to Baidu
In 1994, Li joined IDD Information Services, a New Jersey division of
Dow Jones and Company, where he helped develop a software program for the online edition of
The Wall Street Journal. He also did work on better algorithms for search engines. He remained at IDD Information Services from May 1994 to June 1997.
In 1996, while at IDD, Li developed the RankDex site-scoring algorithm for search engines results page ranking and received a US patent for the technology. He later used this technology for the Baidu search engine.
Robin worked as a staff engineer for Infoseek, a pioneer internet search engine company, from July 1997 to December 1999.
Another of his important innovative achievements was the picture search of Go.com.
In the nine years since founding Baidu in January 2000, Robin has turned the company into the largest Chinese search engine, with over 70% market share, and the third largest independent search engine in the world. In 2005, Baidu completed its successful IPO on NASDAQ, and in 2007 became the first Chinese company to be included in the NASDAQ-100 Index.
He was listed in the CNN Money annual "50 people who matter now" in 2007.
Honors
In 1998, he published the book Business War in Silicon Valley
硅谷商战 in the Mainland according to his work and life experience in Silicon Valley.
At the end of 1999, he brought risk investment back to China to found Baidu with his friend Eric Xu.
In 2001, he was titled “the Chinese Top Ten Innovative Pioneers” 中国十大创业新锐
In 2002 and 2003, he was honored of “IT Ten Famous Persons” IT十大风云人物
In April, 2004, he was elected the second session of “Chinese Software Ten Outstanding Young Persons”中国软件十大杰出青年
On August 23, 2005, he was honored the twelfth session of “ASEAN Youth Award” 东盟青年奖
On December 28th, he was honored of “CCTV 2005 Chinese Economic Figures of The Year” CCTV2005中国经济年度人物
On December 10th, he was elected 2006 world’s “Best Business Leader” of the American Business Weekly 美国《商业周刊》2006全球“最佳商业领袖
Personal life
Robin Li is married to Dongmin Ma. In 1995, Li met Ma at a social event of Chinese students in the
Greater New York area. They had dated for 6 months before they wedded on October 10th the same year in New Jersey. They have one daughter.
References
Further reading
Lee, Melanie, "NEWSMAKER-Baidu founder rules China's Web with pragmatism", Reuters, Tue Jan 19, 2010
External links
Robin Li Biography page at Baidu
Robin Li delivers lecture at Stanford University's Entrepreneurship Corner, Sept 2009
Asia.com May 5 2005
Category:1968 births
Category:Baidu
Category:Chinese businesspeople
Category:Living people
Category:Peking University alumni
Category:University at Buffalo alumni
