Baidu company, which is very popular today, takes its name from a sentence by Xin Qiji: "People looked for him for thousands of times, and suddenly looked back, but that person was in the dim light."
Li Yanhong is the president of Baidu.
Li Yanhong is extraordinary-when the famous search engines Google, Infoseek and Yahoo were in full swing in the online world, he flew against the wind and returned to China to set up China people's own search engines.
Like IT legends Bill Gates and Mike Dell, he gave up his readily available doctorate in foreign studies, dropped out of school and went into business.
In the cold winter of June, 2000, he not only won the big technical commission orders from Sina, Sohu, Netease and TOM, but also successfully raised $654.38+0 billion for the second time.
The Baidu search engine he founded became famous in three years, comparable to China's Google, and went public in six years, which raised eyebrows in overseas capital markets and boosted China's industrial confidence.
Yangquan boy in those days
Li Yanhong, a native of Yangquan, Shanxi, was born in 1968.
Like that generation, he didn't go to kindergarten, and his two sisters basically taught him the first education. When Li Yanhong was 8 years old, he was sent to Yangquan Primary School. At that time, Li Yanhong's attitude towards the teacher was: whoever praised him, he would listen to him; Whoever criticizes him a few words is naughty in class. Most primary school teachers think that Li Yanhong is not a learning material, and neither does Li Yanhong.
After being admitted to Yangquan No.1 Middle School, Li Yanhong became "honest", which remained until he was admitted to the Department of Library and Information Science of Peking University with excellent results.
However, the major of library and information science is far from his ideal. What he touches all day is literature and catalogues, which is boring. In the eyes of ordinary people, the belonging of a library student may be to be a librarian in the library, but Li Yanhong's ambition is obviously not here. But it is also this subject that Li Yanhong did not love, which provided professional knowledge support for his later establishment of Baidu.
Life faces many opportunities, some of which are delivered by yourself, depending on whether you can grasp them, but more opportunities are created by yourself.
Li Yanhong tried to change the fate of choosing the wrong major unintentionally.
He set a path for himself to study abroad, and bought a lot of TOEFL books, "3. 1" every day: dormitory-classroom-library. Originally, he got the position of deputy director of the organization department in the school student union, but after mixing for a period of time, he felt that he was not suitable for taking the road of "red college" and gradually faded out. Peking University advocates students to take courses in other departments. Li Yanhong likes computers and thinks this major has a good prospect. So he often goes to the computer department to take some professional courses.
199 1 year, Li Yanhong graduated from Peking University. With the dream of Silicon Valley, he applied to more than ten universities in the United States and was finally admitted to the University of Buffalo in new york.
Buffalo has beautiful scenery. When Li Yanhong first set foot on this land, it was covered with ice and snow. The University of Buffalo didn't enroll mainland students just because it hired two professors from Chinese mainland. At the request of professors, the school made an exception and recruited several students from Chinese mainland.
When he first came, Li Yanhong attended classes during the day, tutored English and wrote programs at night, and was often busy at school until two in the morning. Li Yanhong's diligence is actually a true portrayal of many China students who have just arrived in the United States-tutoring, attending classes and working.
After graduation, Li Yanhong was hired by a financial information service company and started his working career. Three years later, he set foot on his second venture in Silicon Valley from New Jersey. It was the summer of 1997, and the sunshine was as gorgeous as his dream.
Silicon Valley is Li Yanhong's dream. There are HP, Yahoo, Internet and venture capital, Stanford University and Berkeley. Every inch of land and sunshine there made him yearn for it.
Li Yanhong went to Infoseek Company. William Zhang, then chief technology officer of Infoseek, has been waiting for him. Like any programmer, Li Yanhong always wanted to be "the person everyone needs", and he was excited to join Infoseek. Seeing that millions of people are using their own designs every day, he has unspeakable satisfaction in his heart.
At that time, Li Yanhong's residence was close to Netscape. After dinner, he often goes for a walk near Netscape and watches the office buildings rise. The dusty wasteland turned into a beautiful Netscape industrial park a few months later, which made him sigh the magic of the new economy again and again. There are many China engineers in Silicon Valley. Li Yanhong often attends everyone's parties. When everyone got together and said which company was listed, the stock price soared. So-and-so made money through equity, and the villa was bought on the mountain.
Every conversation is an excitement.
199 10 in China, the government invited a group of overseas students to return to China to attend the National Day Ceremony, and Li Yanhong was fortunate to be one of the invited students.
Li Yanhong, who returned to the United States from the "National Day Ceremony", has no intention of continuing to work at Infoseek. He thought of his good friend Xu Yong. 1 1 One day in June, Xu Yong came to Li Yanhong's house to talk about "big things".
Li Yanhong came up with a "confidentiality agreement". Xu Yong was a little surprised, but immediately turned calm-Li Yanhong has been used to the American way of speaking and doing things in Silicon Valley for two and a half years.
Xu Yong signed a confidentiality agreement. Li Yanhong said: "Let's go back to China and start an Internet company."
Baidu is about to open in China.
Baidu company really opened in March 2000. Except for finance, cashier and administration, they are all technicians. Li Yanhong and Xu Yong are engaged in sales. There are 5 full-time technicians, others are students from Peking University and Tsinghua. It is not that I don't want to recruit more technicians. Li Yanhong lamented that there were too few people in China who really understood search engine technology at that time, so I had to do it while practicing.
Li Yanhong's new company was chosen in the Resource Building of Peking University. This place is very close to Peking University and separated from Zhongguancun by the fourth ring road, which is very suitable for scientific and technological entrepreneurship. His site selection technique was learned from Silicon Valley. Many IT startups work around Stanford University, which is convenient for teachers and students to take part-time jobs.
There are just two rooms left in the resource building of Peking University. Room 420 is at the corner of the corridor, with a large area, which is suitable for technicians to work centrally. 406 is in the middle of the corridor, less than 20 square meters, and Li Yanhong arranges finance and administration in it. Li yanhong's own office is located at window 420. Looking out of the window, he had a panoramic view of the 43 rd building where he lived when he was studying at Peking University. Every night, the lights in Building 43 always remind him of his infinite memories of college life.
The resource building of Peking University is surrounded by green trees, and the old locust tree downstairs is at least 30 years old. That summer, cicadas exploded in this tree and kept singing all night, like an endless seminar. Room 420 has lights on all night, and some people are sleepy, lying in a chair and sleeping; Some people can't help being sleepy, so they go to the toilet to wash their faces and go back to the computer to continue their work. "Smokers" obviously have more ways to resist the night, holding chairs, smoking in the aisle next to the toilet, and serenading after listening. Baidu was born in such a campus ballad-like environment, and won 80% of the Chinese search market in one fell swoop within two years. At the beginning of 2002, the company moved to the more spacious Haitai Building.
After the Spring Festival in 2002, Baidu ushered in a new round of military expansion, this time because of Google.
At that time, the Chinese version of Google had been online in China for two years, and its reputation among netizens in China was getting better and better. One kind of pressure began to make Li Yanhong feel uneasy-on the one hand, Baidu occupied 80% of the China market, on the other hand, Google has become the most mainstream search engine in the world. Google, like an engine killer abroad, chopped Infoseek and Yahoo one by one. Li yanhong began to lose control of his own strength. In other countries, you may attack the city and plunder the land. In China, I, Li Yanhong, will fight you to the end.
So in March 2002, Li Yanhong set up a technical commando team and spent a lot of money to recruit a lot of R&D talents, ready to catch up with Google's technological advantages. Li Yanhong named this secret technical action "Lightning Project".
According to Li Yanhong, members of the "Lightning Project" team must "make Baidu engine fully compete with Google in technology within 9 months. Baidu's daily page views are 10 times more than before, and its daily downloaded database content is 30% more than Google's. The page response speed is as fast as Google, and the content update frequency is more than Google ... "
That summer, the weather was unusually hot.
The members of the "Lightning Team" focused on technological innovation and made some unique inventions during the break: they bought a remote-controlled toy car, put the disks and documents that need to be exchanged on the toy car, and whoever needs anything will be transported by the car, saving a lot of effort. Others bought a scooter and stood on it to report to the finance office. The "Lightning Team" is very busy, and it is the Heat.
However, by August, 2002, Li Yanhong was still dissatisfied with the progress of "Lightning Project" and decided to be the team leader himself to lead the team members in research and development. Because of his profound technical accumulation in search engines and his understanding of the world's cutting-edge technologies at that time, his participation really accelerated the progress of the "Lightning Project" a lot. By the end of 65438+February 2002, the last leaf of the old pagoda tree had fallen off, and the "lightning project" of the new building was finally completed, and the dust settled in a busy and hard work.
"Lightning Project" achieved brilliant results. In Baidu, someone quietly deleted Google's link and confidently used their own products. Among netizens, Baidu's word of mouth began to catch up with Google. When meeting friends in the street, Li Yanhong is not good at "red" others, so Bi Sheng, the marketing director, said: "Baidu is no worse than Google! "It is said that their' red-skinned' friends don't think they have been cheated. A more pertinent evaluation believes that since then, "Baidu and Google are neck and neck in the field of Chinese search."
Obviously, the "Lightning Plan" is a success. On the one hand, it defeated its biggest rival and expanded its market share again. On the other hand, the company's technical strength has been strengthened, and the R&D team has also expanded accordingly. After the end of this plan, the company did not hold a "celebration banquet". Li Yanhong took everyone to the suburbs to play twice, which was a reward for everyone.
Baidu still has a long way to go. Compared with his peers in Silicon Valley, Li Yanhong is only more familiar with the road of China.