Robin Li (simplified Chinese: 李彦宏; traditional Chinese: 李彥宏; pinyin: Lǐ Yànhóng; born November 17, 1968) is a Chinese Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of China's most popular search engine Baidu. He is the richest man in China with personal wealth estimated to be $9.2 billion.
Li studied information management at Peking University and the State University of New York, Buffalo. In 2000 he founded Baidu with Eric Xu (徐勇). He has been the CEO of Baidu since January 2004, which was listed on NASDAQ in August 2005. Li has been listed as one of the 15 Asian Scientists To Watch by Asian Scientist Magazine on 15 May 2011.
Early Years
Li was born in Yangquan, Shanxi, China, where he spent most of his childhood. Both of his parents were factory workers. Li was the fourth of five children, and the only boy among the five.
Li was admitted by Yangquan First High School by achieving the second highest grades in the entrance examination. In high school, Li enjoyed computer class and participated in numerous programming competitions city-wide. In 1987, Li attended the National Higher Education Entrance Examination and achieved the top grade among all examinees in Yangquan. Consequently, he chose Peking University for college where he studied information management for four years and received a Bachelor of Science degree.
In the fall of 1991, Li went to University at Buffalo in the US to study computer science towards a Doctoral degree. He received his Master of Science degree in 1994 after he had decided to discontinue his PhD program work.
Road to Baidu
In 1994, Li joined IDD Information Services, a New Jersey division of Dow Jones and Company, where he helped develop a software program for the online edition of The Wall Street Journal. He also did work on better algorithms for search engines. He remained at IDD Information Services from May 1994 to June 1997.
In 1996, while at IDD, Li developed the RankDex site-scoring algorithm for search engines results page ranking and received a US patent for the technology. He later used this technology for the Baidu search engine.
Another of his important innovative achievements was the picture search of Go.com.
In the nine years since founding Baidu in January 2000, Robin has turned the company into the largest Chinese search engine, with over 70% market share, and the third largest independent search engine in the world. In 2005, Baidu completed its successful IPO on NASDAQ, and in 2007 became the first Chinese company to be included in the NASDAQ-100 Index.
He was listed in the CNN Money annual "50 people who matter now" in 2007.
Personal life
Robin Li is married to Dongmin Ma. In 1995, Li met Ma at a social event of Chinese students in the Greater New York area. They had dated for 6 months before they wedded on October 10 the same year in New Jersey. They have one daughter.
From : www.wikipedia.org
