What is the growth process of Baidu company?

The growth process of Baidu from weak to strong

Baidu, of course, grows.

1at the end of 999, when the Nasdaq index jumped from 2500 to 3000, it took another month and a half to rush to 4000. At the age of 3 1, Li Yanhong named his company. He has worked in American search engine company Infoseek for three years, but he is considering Infoseek's competitor Inktomi. I forget where I read it. Inktomi is an Indian word meaning "spider of wisdom". Li concluded: If a brand from Hindi can be recognized by American users, then if your company becomes a world-class company one day, it is no problem to give it a name from ancient China. Therefore, at the end of1990s, when Internet companies in China generally adopted Chinese and English mixed brands such as Sohu, Ctrip and E Long, he chose the word "Baidu" in Song Ci.

In the following eight years, Li Yanhong made countless interpretations of the word "Baidu", but he never talked about the origin with Inktomi and the international dream implied in it. This is really not an idea that can easily attract * * *. Since 2002, Li Yanhong has put forward the idea of internationalization in the company's board of directors every year, but it has been repeatedly rejected. Even by the end of 2006, Baidu's success in China was hard to shake. When it announced its entry into Japan, it was teased by Zhang Chaoyang, the founder of Sohu: "They listen to the voice of Wall Street too much, and may think it will make money faster." For such doubts, Li Yanhong has a straightforward rhetorical question: "Why does no one question American companies: The American market is so big, why do you want to be a market outside the United States?" 165438+20071In mid-October, Li, who was rarely interviewed, told Global Entrepreneur: "After 15, more than 50% of Baidu's revenue should come from outside China." Although he is not confused, Li shows no signs of being fat in middle age, and his face looks younger than his actual age 10 years old. Many people who started businesses with him began to concentrate on investing and enjoying life, and Li never played the role of an angel investor. On weekdays, he used a ceramic teacup with a lid, which was common in1980s. He had to walk dozens of steps in the office area to get water from the public drinking fountain. He is probably the least known among the "knowledge heroes" in 2000. Before going public, Li rarely made a splash. After listing, the outside world paid close attention to his rapidly growing wealth, and he was even more reluctant to portray himself as a representative of "getting rich overnight". An entrepreneurial veteran who left Baidu said that Li is the kind of person who "is not afraid of the deep alley."

All along, he has been labeled as introverted, low-key, dedicated and cautious-in the colorful network industry, Li's personality is too traditional, as if he were a "quiet leader" coming out of management works. The story of Li Yanhong and Baidu is simply summarized as a focused victory: this student majoring in library and information science who worked for search engine company Infoseek during the first wave of Internet in the United States ushered in the "paradigmshift" in the technology industry with great persistence. These judgments are not wrong, but they cover up some other aspects of Li. For example, from the outside, Li Yanhong's life transition seems to be very smooth. He didn't lack funds from the beginning of his business, and there were peers like Overture and Google to try and make mistakes, so Baidu was always smooth sailing. For a long time, people didn't know Robin Li's internationalization instinct and that he would try to think within the time frame of1year in the Internet industry. It is even more difficult for people to know what Li Yanhong is thinking and what changes have taken place since he went public.

Dual role

To understand the present Li Yanhong, you must first know "Li Yanhong 1.0" (or "Li Yanhong Beta").

"One advantage of Li Yanhong is that he is relatively calm. I am calm when I make a decision, and I am usually unmoved by the outside world, "said Isabella Chow, who led 372 1 to compete with Baidu for several years. In China's Internet industry, Zhou Hongyi is the representative of speed and strength, but at least in the competition of search engines, he thinks he lost to Li. In his view, in addition to luck, Li's decision seems to be slower and more rational, which really affects the fate of Baidu.

In addition to the competition for search products, Zhou also surpassed Li Yanhong twice at the capital level. Once in 2003, 372 1 and Baidu almost merged, and the other time, the two companies talked about the acquisition with Yahoo respectively. Robin Li will negotiate with 372 1 and Yahoo, which seems to show that he, like all entrepreneurs, once had doubts about Baidu's independent development, but as a result, he has controlled this fear more than once. With the sale of 372 1 to Yahoo, Baidu has entered a stage where its competitive resistance is getting weaker and weaker.

What Zhou said is calm and calm, which is Li's role most of the time. 1999 when Li yanhong and Xu Yong founded Baidu, they deliberately built an enterprise with Silicon Valley temperament: recruiting first-class talents, establishing an atmosphere of equal communication, and tolerating failure (please see Gemag.com.cn's article "Going Out of Baidu" in February 2006). For example, when Wang Mengqiu, its technical backbone, entered Baidu, his greatest feeling for the company was that everyone spoke directly and frankly, "Say one thing, not to mention the weather". Accordingly, most of the time, Li Yanhong and Xu Yong are not strong interveners. Therefore, in the industry, Baidu is usually not a company that responds fastest to market changes.

If it is only so calm and pragmatic, it will be difficult for Baidu to achieve a strategic leap-unless the direction set by Li is always correct. Of course, always being correct means taking less risks. And this "pragmatism" is exactly what Li Yanhong opposes. He said that his style is: "I dare to make bold decisions, but I am pragmatic in implementation and have many alternatives." So what is often overlooked by the outside world is that Li knows how to switch to the iron fist mode when necessary. The most appropriate explanation for Li's "phased strength" is the "lightning plan" in 2002. This big move that almost determines the fate of Baidu is rarely fully discussed by the outside world. In September 20001year, Li Li led Baidu to end its previous operation mode of providing search technology to major portals. In the domestic market share of 80%, he terminated the cooperation with the portal website and launched his own website and bidding ranking. The reason for Li's decision is that in the winter of Internet in China, the website only wants "the cheapest technology" instead of "the best technology", which makes him feel bad. One detail that must be emphasized is that Li Yanhong, who has always been cautious, changed his tactics this time because he saw the bidding ranking launched by Overture in the United States. Industry insiders recalled that Baidu responded quickly to this matter and even surpassed Yahoo in the US market. "I quit my old job and gave up so many stock options, not to be a mediocre company, but to survive," Li once said. "Every time I tell investors, I always say that you have to look ahead and see what it will look like in two years or even three years and five years."

As a result, Baidu took the initiative to become a direct competitor of Google. And it was an opponent who looked obviously backward at that time. In March, 2002, Li called more than ten backbones of the company and put forward a radical idea: within nine months, Baidu's daily visit pages will increase by 10 times, and the page response rate and content update frequency will exceed that of Google. To this end, he asked these engineers with irregular working hours to hold regular meetings at 9 am twice a week. After the mobilization meeting, the engineers went directly to buy mattresses and piled them in the conference room. In the next nine months, the Baidu team will keep two or three major improvements every week with the goal of "fast, accurate, complete and new". Finally, by the end of the year, 60% of the technical indicators were guaranteed to surpass Google. It can be said that in this year, Li changed from a direction maker to a product manager, which laid the growth curve of Baidu in the future and the smooth IPO in August 2005.

Happiness and sadness

With the IPO of Baidu on August 5, 2005, Li Yanhong's life ended.

What the outside world saw was that Baidu's share price rose by 353.85% on the first day, and its revenue doubled in the following quarter 1 1. But there are more changes that the outside world is not susceptible to. For example, until Baidu went public, most people still regarded it as "China's Google". Google's official entry into China really made Baidu ready, but the subsequent market performance made people tend to believe that Baidu's position had been difficult to be shaken by any external force for at least a few years-Baidu entered a stage where there was no clear opponent. But Li Yanhong can't stop. Global Entrepreneur asked him what he was thinking recently, and his answer was: "Many times, a field got together with some new companies, not because the new companies did something terrible, but more often because the old companies made mistakes, and it didn't take into account some very important aspects."

Since 2006, he began to express a concern to the outside world: China has surpassed Britain in terms of the number of netizens and GDP, but China's search advertising market is only 400 million US dollars, which is about 1/5 of Britain's. "The Chinese search volume of media reports is likely to have surpassed that of the United States. With such a large search volume, the entire paid search market is so small, which actually means a waste of a large number of search volumes. " Li said that the Internet market in China is not mature enough, which makes him very depressed. This really seems like a dilemma. Admittedly, Baidu needs to focus, but its profits are less than those of the newly established online game companies, which is a bit helpless. In the third quarter of 2007, Baidu's net profit was1.81.70 billion yuan, while Giant Network, which only entered the market in 2006, earned a net profit of 290 million yuan this quarter by relying on the game journey. Moreover, focusing on developing search-related products seems difficult to bring Baidu another profit pillar: Google's AdSense technology of embedding advertisements in affiliate websites brings about 40% revenue, but Li Yanhong thinks that if there are still a lot of search behaviors in Baidu.com that don't match advertisements with better traffic quality, then it is a question whether "vigorously developing the traffic value of website alliances" is a correct choice now.

Baidu's high share price, which is highly regarded by the industry, may also become a double-edged sword. As the strategist said, "Nothing can promote the decadence of the army more than complete victory." At the beginning of Baidu's listing, some entrepreneurs left one after another, including CTO Liu Jianguo, chief architect Zhou Limin, and senior manager of Big Search Department Chen Zhenyu. For the employees who stay, Baidu also needs to give an explanation: to what extent is the employee's efforts positively related to Baidu's stock price performance, from 100 to 400 dollars in one year? At least in the outside world, concerns about Baidu's execution have gradually increased: Baidu's last sensational product was released in 2003. The rumored instant messaging software that will be available in early 2007 has not been seen by the outside world.

"Baidu's own mechanism will not have any problems in the general direction," Li Yanhong said. But when asked what the potential risks are, his answer is: "There are many details, if any." . If it is negative, it can be said to be a crisis. "

"Internationalization is localization"

It is not difficult to understand what kind of card Li Yanhong's card internationalization is.

Li defined the Japanese invasion as a test of Baidu's core competitiveness: What works in China also works abroad? Under the current growth situation and stock price momentum of Baidu, the cost of this experiment is not high, but the effect may be doubled: it not only realizes income growth, but also re-creates an entrepreneurial atmosphere within the company. But the question is: What is the internationalization of Baidu? The free Internet service doomed Baidu not to take China's cheap labor as a competitive advantage, like the internationalization of most China companies. If you rely on the quality of service, which developed country can Baidu make a name for itself? First of all, exclude English-speaking countries: it is too early to fight Google in the world. In the surrounding markets, South Korea is not a suitable choice. In 2003, Li Yanhong visited the Korean market, where the top three search engines were all local companies. "We don't know why people succeed." . The good news is that Japan, whose economy is five or six times the size of China's search engine market, still seems to have a chance. The leading search companies in Japan are Yahoo and Google, which are two competitors that Baidu is very familiar with. Google's share has risen sharply in recent years, which also shows that this market is not exclusive, as long as you work hard, it will pay off. Moreover, Li Can felt the market demand. In 2006, he hired a Japanese Internet consulting company in Japan to investigate competitors' products. When Li Yanhong pointed to the "Iamfeelinglucky" button on Google's Japan page, he asked the staff of the consulting company, "What does this button do?" The other party can't answer. This strengthens Li's judgment that even Google has not designed products aimed at Japanese netizens. Yahoo's search technology is in the United States. Even if Sun Zhengyi's Japanese Yahoo team is familiar with local needs, it is still a "two skins" operation mode with technology and user experience separated. From Baidu's point of view, what needs to be tested is Li Yanhong's "understanding of users and understanding of the market" as the company's core competitiveness.

In an interview with this magazine, Cui Shanshan, technical director of Baidu, mentioned the prospectus when Baidu went public. At that time, in order to express Baidu's special understanding of the China market, 38 English expressions of "I", "I" and "I" appeared in Chinese on the front page of the prospectus. "It's easy to misunderstand," Cui Shanshan said. "In fact, we can do well in the China market not only because we are from China. In that case, we will not be able to enter Japan. "

In July 2006, Baidu officially started the research and development of Japanese search engine. This team is not full-time and hardly knows Japanese. It only relies on the experience of Chinese word segmentation and a translation to complete the conversion from Chinese word segmentation to Japanese word segmentation within one month. After the feasibility verification, Baidu set up a special Japanese search R&D team in Beijing headquarters. In addition to daily development, this team also needs to learn Japanese from specially invited Japanese professors, and their scores are regularly assessed and counted into personal performance. Throughout 2007, apart from launching Japanese search, Baidu's main job in Japan was to set up a local team to copy Baidu's entrepreneurial way in that year. In Japan, Li Yanhong's recruitment requirement is "a Japanese who has a deep understanding of the Internet and search engines", but he does not require academic qualifications and work experience, or even Chinese or English. For Baidu, this is equivalent to finding a group of people who are easily overlooked in the Japanese market-Japanese who can't speak English will not be reused in American companies or even domestic companies, but there are often "senior netizens" in this group. In addition to technicians, Baidu also recruits professionals from advertisements. Li explained: "Search engines are essentially a kind of media, with advertising revenue as the main source of income. People in advertising companies can easily understand the development of search engines and Internet websites. " But when asked what kind of products the Japanese market needs to make, Li Yanhong and Yu Jun, vice president of Baidu products, both said "I don't know": this needs to be decided by the local team, and they only teach "methodology".

As people often say, there is no turning back in internationalization. Is Li Yanhong mentally prepared? "Do you think we need to retreat?" Li asked.

Constitutionalize

Regardless of whether Baidu's internationalization can be immediate, Baidu must answer a realistic question: when the company's income doubles, can the middle and high-level capabilities also double? At the beginning of 2007, Baidu had about 3,000 employees, and by the end of the year, this number had become 6,000. It is increasingly difficult for employees to maintain enthusiasm during the start-up period. Some old employees complain that the expansion strategy has lowered the recruitment threshold. However, new employees can't help but feel less income because they don't have options.

These are all questions that Li Yanhong has been thinking about for a year. After going public, Li's role has become bigger and bigger with the company's growth-it is increasingly impossible for him to play the product manager, but he needs to keep an eye on which board of the "barrel" needs to be filled. Some things can be seen at a glance. For example, Baidu's options are mainly concentrated in the top 300 employees. How to attract late talents? In addition, Baidu's most unique talent training mechanism in its early years was to let interns work like normal employees, and everyone had to train successors for their posts, but this was done when the scale of employees was relatively stable, when the number of employees suddenly doubled.

At the end of 2006, Liu Jianguo, the chief technology officer who worked in Baidu for seven years, applied for resignation. Li Yanhong then found his mentor Willemi. Chang of Infoseek wants the other party to recommend a replacement. But what Zhang Yiwei and Li are talking about is not a technical problem, but that Baidu needs an effective mechanism to attract and cultivate talents. Just like Li's style, he didn't say anything at that time, but a few days later, he called Zhang Yiwei again and went straight to the point: How about you coming to Baidu? At that time, Zhang was running his own company, but at the invitation of Li Yanhong, he flew to Beijing and spent five days, 65,438+05 hours a day, having a one-on-one interview with Baidu executives. Even his initial refusal statement that he wanted to stay in the United States for more time was accepted by Li Yanhong. So, on October 5th, 2007/kloc-0, 65438, Zhang Yiwei officially joined as the chief scientist.

The outside world once understood that the joining of the former CTO of Infoseek was that Baidu was about to have a technical architecture revolution, but Zhang Yiwei denied this statement to Global Entrepreneur. He described his first task as "constitutionalism": "It is not to guide any details, but to find an organizational structure and establish a mechanism for cultivating talents." And he started his formal work at Baidu, and he still had intimate conversations with employees. According to Zhang's memory, in countless interviews, there were not a few employees who talked with him for more than five hours. At the end of each chat, he would ask everyone to recommend the next person worth talking to. A few weeks later, Zhang Yiwei began to pay attention to two aspects: the assessment system and incentive mechanism of technical staff. In Baidu, the evaluation of employees and teams is based on efficiency. If the product is made quickly and the quality is stable, you can get a higher rating. The direct consequence of this is that employees can only work overtime to improve efficiency, thus ignoring the optimization of product structure. "I hope they have time to think more, instead of working overtime under great pressure." Zhang said. Under this consideration, Zhang Yiwei first set up technical committees in each branch of the technical department, with engineers as members, responsible for reviewing employees' products and evaluating their technical titles. In the evaluation criteria, two important aspects have been added: first, the technical value, that is, the quality and structure of the developed products, the value to the company and the future value; The second is the value of human resources. That is, whether the engineers have made progress in the research and development of this product. After the implementation of this reform, engineers can first pay more attention to its internal structure when developing products, and also let engineers of technical committees broaden their horizons and grow.

At the same time, Zhang also tried to establish a more scientific performance appraisal system. Previously, the project progress and technical assessment of Baidu employees were all assessed by the "manager". Zhang suggested that the technical Committee take over the technical assessment of employees. In addition, in the performance appraisal of superior employees, the subordinate employees he manages are also allowed to participate in scoring. Most importantly, on this basis, Zhang Yiwei can start the next thorny project: salary system adjustment. It is said that Li Yanhong has long had the idea of adjusting the salary system, but there are too many factors involved. First of all, the technical committee's assessment of employees ensures the objectivity of salary system adjustment. Zhang then determined the principle of salary adjustment, such as giving stock according to employees' potential rather than their current ability. On the one hand, the evaluation of this potential is based on the evaluation of the technical Committee, and on the other hand, it is based on Zhang Yiwei's judgment in the process of talking with employees. It is said that in 2007, the salary of recent graduates of Baidu increased by at least 30% compared with the previous year, and the annual salary of some programmers has reached 300,000 yuan.

Focus?

At the same time of internationalization, Baidu has embarked on a product road different from Google.

Since 2005, it has set up a community around search with Post Bar, Know, Encyclopedia and Space. In 2007, it entered C2C and news field successively. Li yanhong, who used to emphasize concentration, now finds it difficult to stay focused? Li Yanhong said that he thinks that "the clues of Baidu products are still very strong": "The meaning of the word search is a bit narrow, because what we really want to do is to make people get information more conveniently". This statement is true, but the outside world needs to know what Baidu may do under the big concept of search. Or maybe do nothing? -For entrepreneurs in China's Internet industry, it is not good news to bump into Baidu prematurely. But this standard is difficult to define. According to Baidu's internal statement, when considering whether to develop a product, they mainly consider three questions: Do users have needs? Have the existing products met the needs of users well? What are the advantages of Baidu doing this? Pay attention to their order: Baidu's advantages are in the third place to consider. As for C2C, Baidu should do it for many reasons: the essence of C2C products is a product search; Most keywords of Baidu search are product search. But Li Yanhong's most direct judgment on it is: "C2C has only a short history in China, and there are few companies at present, which means it must be imperfect."

If we must summarize the product context of Baidu, it may be: on the basis of information search, gradually strengthen the connection of various people. An obvious trend is that with the development of the network industry, the Internet has changed from information-centered to people-centered, and the role of people on the Internet has become more and more clear, which can be seen from the rise of people-centered products such as blogs. In the early days, in Baidu Post Bar, in order to make the product simple and clear, Baidu product department did not add signature files, avatars and other contents, but after discovering that users were increasingly eager to "meet", Baidu launched Baidu Space and dating products connected with keywords. In the eyes of Baidu's product personnel, Baidu's advantage in making friends and future IM strategy lies in that people with * * * the same characteristics or interests can be found by clicking the keywords in each user's personal description-* * the same characteristics and * * * the same interests are an important basis for making friends, which can solve the problem that the existing IM tools have too much invalid communication time. Now Baidu's product manager will even dilute some functions for a product that lacks the quality of interpersonal interaction. In Baidu Space, a new product launched by Baidu in 2006, some engineers who just joined Baidu put forward suggestions, hoping that the photo album of the space can be made into a photo exchange community similar to Flickr. The people in the product department used the analysis data to show that in Flickr, only a few pictures form communication, and most people just regard it as a space for storing photos, without forming a real picture community, which is not practical except dazzling.

Of course, a tempting topic is: Will Baidu become China's Microsoft when it continues to enter other fields? And its entry into the sites of Tencent and Alibaba will make the heavyweight players in this industry have a new Lian Heng? Possibility is not nonexistent. When the whole industry has realized the strategic position of search engines, heavyweight players always have to choose between Baidu and Google. For a long time, Alibaba has been a big advertising customer of Baidu and Google, but when Baidu enters the C2C field, at least Taobao's advertising will inevitably tilt-no one will want to use their own funds to fatten their opponents. Equally important, both Ma Yun and Ma Hua Teng have sufficient funds, which means that they have time and patience to fight a long search war. At least for now, Ma has gained a lot of experience in the research of Korean search companies (please refer to another cover article in this issue, Post Penguin Age).

For these speculations, Li Yanhong said that he saw a lot in the media, but he did not hear it in the industry exchanges. "Can't a company like Baidu innovate and do something new?" Li asked. He also evaded the question of whether IM products will clearly give a signal to challenge Tencent. He said: "Tencent is already using Google, which has no essential impact on us."