ROBIN LI

1968–

Chinese computer scientist and digital entrepreneur Robin Li cofounded Baidu, China’s first search engine. Developing pioneering search engine technology, as well as innovative web advertising, he transformed internet usage and access to information, creating one of the most widely used search portals in the world.

Robin Li Yanhong was the fourth of five children born to factory workers in the city of Yangquan, Shanxi Province. Despite his family’s modest circumstances, Li excelled at school, and, with his mother’s encouragement, he enrolled at Peking University, graduating in 1991 with a bachelor’s degree in information management. He then traveled to the US, where he gained a master’s degree in computer science at the State University of New York, Buffalo, in 1994. From this initial platform, Li would rise to become one of the most skilled and innovative internet search engineers in the world.

Early endeavors

Li joined Dow Jones’s IDD Information Services Division in 1994, working on search engine algorithms and helping develop a software program for the online edition of The Wall Street Journal. During his time there, Li invented RankDex, an algorithm that ranked internet search listings according to how many other websites they linked to. Li’s patent for RankDex, filed in 1997, predated the very similar algorithm PageRank, the patent for which was filed in 1998 by the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Li offered his search engine to Dow Jones, but it turned it down; it was this technology that Li would later use to create his own Chinese search engine.

In 1997, Li joined the search engine company Infoseek as a software engineer. He was introduced to John Wu, head of Yahoo!’s search engine team, by Eric Xu, his friend and later business partner. However, Yahoo! at the time did not recognize the commercial potential of search engines and nothing came of the meeting. After Disney acquired control of Infoseek in 1998, it began to steer the business away from searches and toward content. Determined to follow his instincts and pursue search technology, Li decided to leave Infoseek and set up his own company with Eric Xu in 1999.

JACK DORSEY

US internet entrepreneur and computer programmer Jack Dorsey cofounded social networking phenomenon Twitter, which revolutionized the way people communicate.

Born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, Dorsey (1976–) wrote software in his teens that is still used by taxi companies today to organize dispatches. By 2000, he realized that there might be a use for a service that could combine the reach of his dispatch software with instant messaging so that friends could share what they were doing. He cofounded Twitter in 2006; at its peak, it handled over 600 million tweets a day. In 2010, he started a new technology venture, the mobile payment platform Square.

Birth of Baidu

Li set about building a Chinese search engine using the software he had developed while at Dow Jones. With $1.2 million in venture capital seed money from contacts in Silicon Valley, and later funding of $10 million from two tech media companies, Li and Xu returned to Beijing. They licensed their search indexing software to Chinese web companies Sina and Sohu.com. Each time a user ran a query, it generated revenue for the business partners.

Then in January 2000, following a dispute over licensing payments, Li and Xu set up their own search site, which they named Baidu (meaning “countless times”). Their first office was a hotel room near Peking University.

From 2001, they charged advertisers to appear at the top of Baidu search results and also whenever a customer clicked on an advertisement. This increased web traffic and therefore business for advertisers as well as revenue for Baidu. By 2003, Li had also added news and picture search engines to the company.

Li has widened Baidu’s interests to include artificial intelligence. With plans to eventually build “smart” cities, products already include robotic helpers, self-driving vehicles, the Little Fish voice-controlled home assistant, and the Raven R smart speaker.

Meteoric success

Xu left the company in 2004 to start up his own venture capital business, and Li became CEO of Baidu. After receiving billion-dollar takeover offers from Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google, on August 5, 2005, Baidu made its initial public share offer on the US stock exchange NASDAQ. When trading closed that day, the company’s stock had risen by 354 percent; Li’s shares were worth more than $900 million.

Under Li’s leadership, Baidu became one of the world’s most used websites. Globally recognized as a pioneer in modern search technology, his ability to see the early potential of internet search engines, and then to commercialize the technology as China’s digital usage exploded, was key to his success.

Li has continued to tap into this vast new market by adding products for Baidu users, such as access to music files, mapping, discussion forums, and mobile web browsing. Today, he is diversifying into internet TV and artificial intelligence technologies, including self-drive vehicles and voice assistants.