Page 35 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

that later made Google a runaway success, Li demonstrated his technology at
a U.S. computer conference. There he met William Chang, the chief tech-
nology officer of pioneering Internet search engine Infoseek Corp., and soon
signed on as staff engineer.
“William persuaded me to join him, and he wanted me to develop the
first-generation search engine,” says Li. He recalls spending the first two
weeks holed up in a conference room writing software codes during the height
of the Internet boom. His hopes were dashed, however, when Walt Disney Co.
acquired Infoseek in 1999 and sidelined his project. However, his entrepre-
neurial instincts kicked into high gear when Li’s boss became an instant mil-
lionaire from the sale. That was the push Li needed to return to China and
start his own business.
“I am Chinese, and I see that the Chinese economy is very strong. I see
that China is five years behind the United States with the Internet, and I am
not sure how many opportunities there are in the United States,” says Li, who
found lots of potential in China, just as people did in Silicon Valley in the
1990s. Li was so strongly influenced by the feverish start-up activity in the
Valley that he penned a book, Silicon Valley Business War, that was published
in 1999 by the Beijing-based science and engineering school Qing Hua Uni-
versity; that book chronicled the early dot-com battles among Yahoo!,
Netscape, and other Internet leaders.
On my next trip to Beijing in fall 2006, after I had interviewed Li a few
months earlier, I seek out sources to clue me in on Baidu’s meteoric rise. I
observe colleagues in Beijing automatically turning to Baidu as their source
for answers to anything.
My quest leads to Li’s low-profile cofounder, Eric Xu, whom I’ve tracked
down through Fan Zhang, an early investor in Baidu. On a late Sunday
morning, I phone Xu and leave a voice message, explaining the reason for my
call. Surprisingly, he returns my call within 15 minutes. We book an ap-
pointment to meet in Shanghai the next week.

Secret sauce
I catch up with Xu at the executive lounge of the Intercontinental Hotel in the
new Pudong section of Shanghai. During a fascinating two-hour-plus
interview, he relates the previously untold early history of Baidu. The journey

Baidu—China’ s Boldest Internet Start-Up 9