How Baidu's Robin Li founded China's answer to Google
Li Yanhong, better known as Robin Li, is the co-founder of Baidu -- a search engine that is the world’s 4th most visited website. It also invests heavily in autonomous driving and cloud computing.
Robin Li, or Li Yanhong as he is known in Chinese, is one of China’s most famous internet entrepreneurs.
He co-founded China’s equivalent of Google, known as Baidu (pronounced ‘buy-DOO’), and has since become one of the richest people in China, with a net worth of US$20 billion. Since its founding, Baidu has listed publicly on the Nasdaq and is now the fourth-most visited website in the world.
In China the company is part of what’s called BAT -- Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent -- the trio of companies that make up the country’s tech giants.
Humble beginnings
Born in 1968 in what was then an impoverished city in China’s Shanxi province, Li grew up during the Cultural Revolution.
After studying for a degree at the prestigious Peking University, where he majored in library science, he was accepted into the computer science programme at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Following his studies, Li took a job at Dow Jones & Company where he worked on a project for The Wall Street Journal’s online edition.
Chance encounter
Following a chance encounter with William Chang, then the chief technology officer at Disney-owned Infoseek, Li was hired to look after search engine development for the company.
