Page 34 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

Li’ s long march

With Google taking direct aim, Li is fired up. His miraculous rise from shy
computer scientist to tech star has its roots in Yangquan, an inland Chinese
city of 1.2 million people in a coal-mining area some 380 kilometers
southwest of Beijing. The fourth of five siblings, Li Yanhong grew up there
during the Cultural Revolution and later became known by his English
name, Robin.
Bright enough to get into Beijing University, Li was a sophomore in 1989
when the Tiananmen Square political uprising and shootings led to the brief
closing of his college campus. A disheartened Li began looking for new
horizons. Undergraduate degree in hand, he applied to study in the United
States, landed a fellowship at the State University of New York-Buffalo, and
earned a master’s degree in computer science in 1994, concentrating on infor-
mation retrieval: the roots of search.
Li learned about the rewards of entrepreneurship while working for
American tech firms. For five years he had software jobs at Dow Jones & Co.
and Infoseek, a Disney-owned search company. He was a senior consultant at
IDD Enterprises, an online financial data service and the publisher of the
weekly Investment Dealer’s Digest, when Dow Jones acquired IDD in 1995;
Li’s boss, Larry Rafsky, pocketed several million dollars from the deal.
“Before I came to America, my impression was that my chances of being a
success were not good. But after seeing his success,” says Li, “I saw that with
tech entrepreneurship, you can make a great success.”
Li began dabbling in a side project that involved developing software for
the online edition of The Wall Street Journal. Soon, he figured out a comput-
erized method for sorting through vast amounts of information on the
Internet by ranking Web sites according to the number of related links. When
Dow Jones showed no interest in his search technology, Li left the firm
in June 1997 and got a patent in the United States. His former boss Rafsky,
who today runs the publishing software firm Acquire Media Corp. in New
Jersey, praises Li as “one of the smartest and hardest-working people you will
ever meet.”
At the same time that Google cofounders Page and Brin were tinkering
with mathematical formulas for searching the Web, Li was doing the same
thing. In the summer of 1997, as Page and Brin hit upon the ranking formula

8 SILICON DRAGON