Baidu_CEO_Robin_Li(李彥宏)于2009年在Stanford的演讲稿.doc

Stanford Technology Ventures Program Robin Li Co-Founder,Chairman,and CEO,Baidu.Lnc September23,2009 The Internet bubble burst The Nasdaq Composite Index fell from 5000 to 11001 The Nasdaq Composite Index 1999-2003 You know, Baidu was founded at the beginning of 2000, and quickly NASDAQ reached its historical high of 5,000. I remember it was March of 2000. Then it dropped to about 1100 a little over a year later. That is a very difficult time for people in the Internet industry. I think its much severe than what you have experienced in the past year or two for the general economic situation. During that time, its just the very early days of Baidus startup experience. Thats why when we offically entered the recession or the challenging situation casued by the financial crisis, i keep asking myself, what should we do ? what i learned during the last downturn, especially in the early 2000 that when the Internet bubble burst, i guess, some of you still remember, its quite an experience for many of the companies and many of the people who work for those Internet companies, we were lucky to raise the first round of money before the Internet bubble burst. But the challenge is that we really didnt have a business model at that time. We didnt have a feasible business model, lets put it this way, because when we started, the business model is to provide the backend search technology to the portal companies in China. We did that, we came up with very good Chinese Search Engine Technology, and we signed up a lot of the Chinese portals in a very short period of time. That includes SINA, Sohu, Netease, Yahoo! China, and any major portal company. You can think of in China. But what we quickly found was that we were still losing money. Although we probably signed up the portal companies that represent more than 80% of the Chinese Search traffic. Baidu still could not survive. Thats the challenge we faced. So quickly i realized that we were too optimistic about the future of Inter