Baidu Robin Li: Not Working For Capital

Before returning to business, far from the US Silicon Valley.

As an engineer, Robin Li's career in the United States for 8 years is undoubtedly successful.

In his latest evaluation of "the most respected entrepreneur in China", experts point out that Baidu is one of the few companies in the world that has mastered search engine technology and has successfully defeated the Internet giant Google in the Chinese market. This inspires the general public of China to be proud of the latest technology in the world.

At the same time, in terms of Baidu Inc's performance, its 13 consecutive quarter revenue doubled, and its market value increased by ten thousand times than that of the initial business of 1 million 200 thousand dollars. It became the first Chinese company to enter the Nasdaq 100 strong constituent stocks, with a single stock up to 3000 yuan.

"All of this will become a myth in the history of Chinese enterprises. Robin Li will also surpass the older generation of entrepreneurs like Liu Chuanzhi and Zhang Ruimin, and become a new example and entrepreneurial dream for Chinese young people."

Some people say that the entrepreneurship of Chinese professional managers is obviously not just to get more wealth, but also the realization of self worth.

At this point, Robin Li is the best footnote - from Robin Li's resolutely abandoning the generous treatment and options of foreign companies, and returning to China to establish Baidu.

It is still the belief of the returned overseas Chinese.

The rise of Baidu

According to the calendar year, Robin Li's summary of Baidu is: 2002, technology year, Baidu search technology is really mature; 2003, traffic year, traffic is 7 times higher than the previous year; 2004 is the brand year, Baidu has been widely recognized; 2005 is the year of revenue; that year, Baidu went on the market smoothly, and created the myth of Chinese capital in the United States.

Next, Robin Li accelerated the pace of internationalization of Baidu.

The Baidu boss, who likes the documentary "the rise of great powers", once used the rising power to imitate Baidu and hoped Baidu would become an international leading enterprise.

"Internationalization is the inevitable choice."

Robin Li said in an interview, "15 years later, Baidu's revenue should be more than 50% from outside China."

This is not the first time Robin Li has said so.

Since 2002, Robin Li has put forward the idea of internationalization on the board of directors of the company every year, but has been denied many times.

Even at the end of 2006, when Baidu's success in China was hard to shake, doubts about its internationalization strategy were heard.

Two years ago, Baidu started the pace of internationalization.

At the beginning of last year, Baidu launched a serious attack on the Japanese market and increased its investment. Robin Li said that the European market will become the next target of Baidu.

In addition to the high-profile strategy of "going out", Robin Li also took aim at the C2C business and snatched the cake of e-commerce. Subsequently, Baidu joined the IM corps and vigorously promoted Baidu HI software.

Today, Baidu has expanded its business to a ten billion scale gaming market.

In April 22nd, Baidu announced that it had formally entered the online game industry through the joint operation with the famous game operators such as Shanda, and launched the Baidu game entertainment platform.

At present, Baidu entertainment game platform has started running seven free online games, among which online games such as "cross the world", "instant noodles Three Kingdoms" and "sky left bank" have been launched.

Before that, Baidu has launched community products such as post bar, encyclopedia, know and space on search.

Insiders say that Baidu wants to rely on the technological foundation of Internet search and strong brand popularity to realize the ambitions of developing Internet users.

In this year's Baidu earnings report, Baidu CEO Robin Li has repeatedly stressed the need to adhere to the diversified line. CFO, who has just been in office for over a month, also said that the two major areas of Baidu's investment in 2008 were to enter the C2C online shopping and Japanese search market.

Some analysts say that Baidu's diversification strategy is somewhat fragmented, which will weaken the advantages of search business more or less, and it will also be somewhat complicated for user experience.

In addition, diversification can effectively avoid competition. However, for these business areas, the diversification of search engines has directly led to the deterioration of competition and become the public enemy of the industry.

In an interview, Robin Li said, "during the 8 years of development, Baidu realized that it is not a simple problem to solve the needs of hundreds of millions of Internet users at the same time. Therefore, our competitors are always ourselves, how to develop better products and services, and comprehensively enhance the user experience is what Baidu needs to do."

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Not working for capital

From the beginning of Baidu's venture, Robin Li has been steadfast in his direction, especially not by capital.

How to make Baidu always advance according to its own wishes? Robin Li has been solving this problem.

In the Silicon Valley Commercial War written by Robin Li, there are many entrepreneurs.

Robin Li, who is familiar with the rules of commercial games, believes that investors can not convince them of anything better than profits. Of course, if the price is right, Baidu will be sold by shareholders at any time.

Therefore, if Baidu wants to make its own efforts to continue to walk better, Baidu's control must be in its own hands.

When the first time was financed, Xu Yong and VVC talked about a good condition of $1 million, 25% of the shares. Later, because of Baidu, venture capital raised the original financing from $1 million to $1 million 200 thousand.

But Robin Li's attitude is very firm, and the proportion of venture capitalists is steadfast.

Similarly, in the second financing, the internationally renowned investment institution, Dafeng Jie and IDG, invested $10 million in the nine month Baidu, of which Dafeng Jie accounted for 75% of the total investment, becoming the single largest shareholder of Baidu, but still had only 30% of Baidu's equity.

When Baidu was successfully launched in 2005, it was speculated that it would be acquired by Google, one of shareholders. In fact, Google had little chance, because Baidu set up a checkpoint in all acquisition channels.

The first hurdle is the "cattle card plan", which is the division of class A shares and B shares of the company's shares. This share arrangement is called a two-tier stock structure.

The operation is as follows: the shares issued in the open market are classified as class A shares, which have 1 votes per share, and all the original shares are B shares, with 10 votes per share.

Once Robin Li and his team share B shares of less than 5% of the issued B shares, all B shares will immediately be converted to the same number of class A shares, and the company will no longer issue B shares.

This means that even if potential purchasers buy most of the original stock, they will not have enough voting power on the board.

Baidu is the first company to take such a share allocation to the United States.

Other levels are "five person board plan", "diluted plan" and "reorganization board plan".

Baidu has set up heavy barriers for its own purpose, although its original intention is to obstruct the calculation of Google flow control company, but more importantly, to ensure that Baidu will not yield to the pressure of institutional investors and public shareholders, only the Wall Street will take the lead, making it easier for the founders to continue to control the lifeblood of the company and operate Baidu according to their own thinking.

"Do not easily give the initiative to investors. No one will be happy in the process of starting a business."

In order to ensure the control of Baidu, Robin Li even deliberately lowered the amount of public offering and the proportion of shares sold publicly.

At present, Robin Li and his husband share 21.3% of Baidu shares, precisely because the Baidu shares they hold have ten times the voting rights of ordinary shares, and they have absolute control over Baidu.

Short board in management

"I didn't fucking do it, and everyone else didn't do it. I shut the company down!" Robin Li finally broke out, cracking the cell phone on the table.

When Robin Li was angry, he liked to throw his own things.

This sudden scene stunned everyone.

There was a brief embarrassing silence in the conference room.

"Your attitude, not your argument, has touched us."

The foreign director said.

The Baidu board finally agreed to the company's pformation.

In early 2001, Robin Li persuaded the board of directors to agree with Baidu's pformation from the search engine of the portal to the search engine profit model, which is also the most classic turning point in the history of Baidu Inc development.

But in the eyes of people familiar with Robin Li, this is the extreme expression of his inarticulate and dislike speech, and is even regarded as a typical example of bad communication in management.

A former Baidu employee said Robin Li was a person who could sit there and be able to see the world.

On one occasion, the employee made a mistake. Robin Li met the staff face to face in the office without saying a word for 5 minutes.

Robin Li was called silent management by employees. "That silence scared me."

Perhaps, it is the reason of personality. Compared with Baidu's early business, only five of the top executives left Robin Li alone.

"Don't hang on to the company you started. This is the truth that has been learned by many painful lessons. Not all the people in the world are fit to sit in the world."

The source of this sentence is "Silicon Valley commercial war" - Robin Li's work before founding Baidu.

Today, this sentence is used to describe Robin Li, but his leadership of Baidu has been deeply branded.

Baidu was Robin Li's first venture. Before that, he worked on technology development in several companies.

Most of the elders who fought with Baidu were students who had just graduated or didn't graduate. Many of them didn't even have work experience.

Robin Li manages his own company on the basis of his own observation of Silicon Valley, but when Baidu moves from a start-up company to a mature company, it seems a little uncomfortable.

"I feel that I have never been a very strong person in management, and the company has exposed some defects in management during its growing process.

My solution in the past is to find out where the company is weak, and find the strongest person in this area and try to attract him to Baidu.

Once people come, I basically give up and finally see the result.

This is good, giving power, trust and passion for work.

In a bad place, full decentralization is not fast enough for him to grow personally. I should spend more energy telling him how to do things.

This is Robin Li's self summary in the company's internal management when he was interviewed by the media.

In this regard, Robin Li also has a sober understanding, "after all, I am not a formal training of professional managers, now do professional managers do things.

Sometimes, when you meet something you have never seen before, you have to learn and even feel it.

Therefore, in a sense, Robin Li can be said to be one of the most successful Internet heroes or entrepreneurs in the Chinese business community, but not the best manager in his empire, but perhaps luckily, young Robin Li has always maintained his inherent sensitivity, which has kept Baidu from stagnating.