In August 2018, Lu Qi joined Y Combinator – the US incubator that helped create Dropbox, Stripe, Airbnb and Reddit – to lead its newly established China arm as Founding CEO.
Lu most recently served as Chief Operating Officer at Baidu to “help realize [the company’s] visionary AI strategy.” The Chinese tech giant’s share price rose nearly 60% during the 15-odd months Lu was there. His unexpected departure in May 2018 sparked a 15% drop in Baidu's stock price within two trading days, or a US$14.7 billion decline in its market value.
Despite its success in the US, Y Combinator has described China as "an important missing piece of [its] puzzle." With Lu, who has worked and lived in both the US and China for a long time, onboard, there is a good chance he could take what makes Y Combinator work and successfully adapt it for his home country.
“I have been trying to recruit [Lu] for many years – he is one of the most impressive technologists I know,” said Y Combinator President Sam Altman.
Culturally, too, Lu combines the best of Silicon Valley, where he was instrumental in Microsoft's launch of its Bing search engine, and China, where he has made the leap to the business side, investing in and grooming promising local startups. His appointment also comes amid an escalating trade war between Washington and Beijing that's casting a pall over cross-border investment between the two nations.
The father of Bing
Lu, who holds a doctorate in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, started his professional career in 1996 at IBM’s Almaden Research Center.
Two years later, while having dinner with a friend, Lu mentioned his idea about launching an online shopping service, which impressed a Yahoo! executive who was present. Yahoo!, which had not yet begun to build its own search engine, thought an online shopping service was exactly what the company needed to grow.
Yahoo! invited Lu to visit a few days later and offered him a job on the spot. Lu and his team built Yahoo!’s first search engine. In 2007, he was put in charge of 3,000 engineers and oversaw search and search advertising technology R&D.
When Lu resigned as executive vice president of Yahoo! in 2008, Microsoft recruited him to lead its charge against Google’s dominance in online search and advertising.
Microsoft’s then-CEO Steve Ballmer said, “Dr. Lu’s deep technical expertise, leadership capabilities and hard-working mentality are well-known in the technology industry, and Microsoft will benefit from his addition to our executive management team.”
Microsoft invested vast resources in its new search engine Bing. “The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a duty,” said Lu. “There’s a chance – a genuine chance – that we can make the search landscape more competitive and healthy.”
To differentiate Bing from other search services, Microsoft defined it as a “decision engine.” Bing presents users with information before they click on a link. For example, if you key in “Seattle weather,” information on the city’s weather will appear just below the search box. Bing’s predictive capabilities made it a more efficient search engine.
In October 2009, Bing became the first search engine to include real-time updates of Facebook and Twitter in its search results.
Lu also chose to open up Bing in 2013 as a platform for developers to use some of its advanced functionality and access much of its data.
Microsoft’s share of the search market increased from 8% to 20.9% by the end of 2015. Even though Google’s share was still 63.9%, Microsoft had made respectable headway. “[Lu] is probably the best competition I can have,” said Udi Manber, former head of search products at Google.
Poor, malnourished
When Lu was a child, his parents were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. They ended up having to send their son to a small town in Jiangsu province where his grandparents lived. They were poor, and Lu appeared small and weak due to malnutrition. One of his first major disappointments was being rejected by a shipyard for a factory worker position because he weighed less than 50 kg.
So Lu buried himself in books. Two years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, the national college entrance examination resumed. In 1980, Lu seized upon the rare opportunity to take the exam and gained admission to prestigious Fudan University.
Lu loved physics, but did not qualify for the Physics major because he was short-sighted, a disability that was then considered an obstacle to performing scientific experiments. So Lu chose to study Computer Science. What might have been an unlucky break instead started him on his remarkable life’s journey.
After Lu received his master’s degree in Computer Science from Fudan University in 1987, he started teaching at his alma mater. Lu was satisfied with his life. He had landed his dream job: a stable source of income with a good reputation.
In 1991, Lu met his mentor, Edmund M. Clarke, a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, at a poorly attended lecture. Impressed by Lu’s questions and research, Clarke invited him to pursue a doctoral degree at Carnegie Mellon University and helped him obtain a full scholarship.
"Do more, know more, be more"
The motto epitomizes how Lu lives his life.
While still at school, Lu was never the student with the best grades. Rather, his diligence helped him stand out. He could regularly be seen walking to the library with the largest backpack on campus.
Lu has carried the dedication he showed at university into his working life. At Yahoo! and Microsoft, he had a reputation for being a workaholic. He would get up at four o’clock in the morning, at which time he would check and reply to emails. After his morning run, Lu would arrive at the office around five or six.
This dedication and diligence helped Lu secure his current status in the global tech world. Another key figure bridging the Sino-American tech worlds, Kai-Fu Lee, CEO of Sinovation Ventures and former Google China head, said it best when he called Lu “the light among the Chinese in the US.”
