Page 36 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

began in Silicon Valley circa 1997, when Xu and Li were introduced by Li’s
wife, Melissa, a Ph.D. biology graduate of Rutgers University who knew Xu
through the biotech community. Xu and Li became friends, bonding through
their Chinese heritage and similar interests. As intellectually gifted as Li, Xu
was a Beijing University graduate with a doctorate in biology from Texas
A&M University and experience at two U.S. biotech start-ups.
Not only was Xu entrepreneurial, but he was well connected to key
investors in the Valley. Xu made those connections in 1998 and 1999 while
filming a documentary called A Journey to Silicon Valley, which later aired on
the Chinese national television network CCTV. In some 120 hours of taping,
Xu interviewed Valley legends such as John Chambers, chairman and CEO
of the tech stalwart Cisco Systems; Albert Yu, the now-retired programmer
at Intel Corp.; and venture capitalists Steve Jurvetson of Draper Fisher
Jurvetson and Bob King of Peninsula Capital. After watching Xu’s docu-
mentary at Stanford, Li was energized. He asked Xu to lunch the next day to
discuss his brainstorm.
At a Chinese restaurant in Sunnyvale, California, Li pitched Xu to
become his partner. “I wasn’t sure at first. I had two other start-up projects I
was working on,” recalls Xu, who is now 43 years old. “If I was able to get
funding for either one of them, I was going to quit my job.”
But Xu was won over by the persistent Li and his bold idea. Reaching
out to his network, Xu persuaded King to hear Li’s idea. In less than a
week—short even for that heated era—King came on board and lassoed a
second investor, Integrity Partners. They anted up a combined $1.2 million in
late 1999.
“When Baidu got the money and my two ventures didn’t, both Robin and
I quit our jobs in mid-December,” says Xu, who bagged his other ideas. “We
made a commitment to the idea and got on an airplane to Beijing. We found
an office space and started hiring employees.” Just a few weeks after returning
to their homeland, the cofounders opened their shop doors on January 18,
2000, in Beijing.
The serious-minded cofounders named their young firm Baidu, which
translates as “seek for truth” and represents a persistent search for the ideal.
The name comes from an ancient Song dynasty poem chosen to signify the
start-up’s Chinese heritage. An English-language investor relations page on
Baidu’s site attempts to explain the complex, spiritual poem, saying that it

10 SILICON DRAGON