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Kai-Fu Lee : The Indisputable Rockstar of China’s Technology Industry

Leave a Comment / Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Technology is the field that is introducing people to new things almost every day. Whether it is the smartphone, self-driving cars or a mission to Mars, technology is taking us to new horizons. In fact, in the past few years, it has completely transformed the way people live their lives. Great minds are coming with greater ideas, and one such great mind is the Chinese technology enthusiast and the AI expert, Kai-Fu Lee.

Kai-Fu Lee is the founder of the venture capital fund, Sinovation Ventures, and the inventor of the world’s first speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition system, which he developed as his PhD thesis subject.

Early Life

Lee was born on 3 December 1965, in Taipei, Taiwan to a legislator and historian, Li Tianmin. In 1973, when he was thirteen, he moved to the U.S. In the U.S., he attended the Oak Ridge High School. In 1983, he completed a B.S. degree in Computer Science from Columbia University followed by obtaining a PhD degree from the Carnegie Mellon University in 1988.

Kai Fu Lee Sinovation Ventures
Image Source: edge.org

During his PhD at the Carnegie Mellon, he got interested in machine learning and pattern recognition. He even participated in a few competitions, one of which was the US national tournament of computer players, where he represented a Bayesian learning-based system used to play the board game, Othello. He developed the system with his classmate Sanjoy Mahajan and even won the competition.

The topic of the thesis of his PhD was speech recognition, and he developed the world’s first large-vocabulary, speaker-independent, speech recognition, in 1988, as a Kluwer monograph, titled Automatic Speech Recognition: The Development of the Sphinx Recognition System.

Career

After completing his PhD, he joined the Carnegie Mellon University as the member of the faculty. In 1990, after working at the university for two years, Lee left the job and started working for Apple Computer as one of the leading research scientists. At Apple, he was appointed as the head of the research and development groups that worked on the major Apple projects, including Bandai Pippin, PlainTalk, Casper, Galatea, etc. Lee stayed with Apple for six years, and in 1996, left the company to join Silicon Graphics.

At Silicon Graphics, Lee worked as the vice president of the company’s Web Products division, and then was promoted to as the president of Cosmo Software.

After two years of his job at Silicon Graphics, Lee then joined Microsoft and was sent to Beijing, to set up the Microsoft Research (MSR) division there. In 2000, he shifted back to America, where he held the post of corporate vice president of interactive services division at Microsoft.

In 2005, Lee after leaving his job at Microsoft moved to join Google. This move of Lee led Microsoft to initiate a lawsuit against Google and Lee, as Lee had joined Google within one year of leaving Microsoft, which was against the company’s non-compete agreement. Google soon resolved the lawsuits, but Lee was restricted to work on Google’s projects similar to Microsoft’s. So Google sent Lee to China to handle its Asian subsidiary, as its President. Lee held the position till 2009. He became one of the key people for the establishment of Google.cn, and the achievements that the company had during this time in China.

Founding Sinovation Ventures

Despite a great career with Google, Lee left the company in 2009, to found a venture capital to provide support for Chinese talent and technology. On 7 September 2009, Lee formed Innovation Works, later renamed as Sinovation Ventures. The company funds the five most innovative technology ideas from the Chinese entrepreneur and startups every year. Sinovation Ventures involves some big names from the tech industry as the prime investors, including YouTube, Legend Holdings, WI Harper Group, etc.

Lee collaborated with Google to bring an OS for Android specifically built for the Chinese people. The collaboration also brought a desktop phone manager for Android for China.

By 2017, the company had raised over $1 billion funds, and in 2018, it raised over $500 million from its investors. Since its inception, Sinovation Ventures has helped over 300 Chinese startups with their business establishment.

Lee is an iconic personality that has been inspiring not only Chinese people, but people from around the world. In his career, he worked with big tech companies and even chaired some big-name organisations. He held the position of the chairman of the World Economic Forum’s Global AI Council. He was named under the Time 100 list in 2013 and was also featured as the Asia House Asian Business Leader in 2018.

Lee has also published a few books including Be Your Personal Best (2005), A Walk into The Future (2006), Making A World of Difference (2009), Seeing Life Through Death (2015), Artificial Intelligence (2017) and AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (2018).

Logan Green & John Zimmer; The Nice Guys of Ride-sharing

Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

“Follow your instinct,” you might have heard it several times from the mouths of the most successful entrepreneur across the world, but how many times it happened that you really did? Logan Green and John Zimmer, two young tech professionals, are among the ones, who went along with their gut feeling of starting an unusual business of sharing a car with strangers for the money. In the beginning, they were warned by many, that the business has higher chances of failing. But after almost ten years, the two are operating the same business, backed by biggest venture capitalists and making revenue in billions every coming year.

Logan Green was a native of California, where he attended the New Roads High School in Santa Monica. He received a bachelor’s degree in Business Economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara. At the college, he founded The Green Initiative Fund and was the youngest director for the Santa Barbara Metropolitan Transit District.

As a child, Green used to ride with his parents in their car, and whenever he saw outside the car, he found more cars, with most of the times, only a single person riding it. The time he had to join the college, he left his car back at home, to try the other conventional means of transportation. At the same time, his girlfriend Eva was also transferred to a college in Los Angeles.

lyftfounders
Image source: riverfronttimes.com

In the time of three years of her college, Green continued to visit Eva on every weekend riding different transportations. He even asked Zipcar, a car-sharing program, to implant their cars at UCSB, but could not convince them. Finally, he himself bought four cars and started the car-sharing program at the campus. Under the program, the users could unlock cars with radio-frequency identification.

On the other hand, Greenwich, Connecticut brought up John Zimmer, was also interested in the car-sharing concept. Zimmer, a graduate from Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, was influenced with the fact that he could fill the empty seats of his car while going back to home in the college breaks but had no idea from where to begin. After graduating from college, Zimmer started working as an analyst in real estate finance at Lehman Brothers in New York City, keeping a journal about carpooling ideas, side-by-side.

After completing the college education, Green went on a trip to Zimbabwe, where he was introduced to the crowdsourced carpool networks. The idea led him to build a platform named Zimride, using the Facebook API, upon which users could find and plan carpools.

Eventually, at the same time, he was introduced to Zimmer on Facebook via a common friend. Zimmer came to know about Zimride, and both coincided on the same idea of the development of a carsharing platform. As the two shared the similar interest, it took no time for Green to fly to New York and meet Zimmer.

In late 2006, together Green and Zimmer launched the first version of Zimride in the Cornell University and later, in 2007, in the UCSB campuses. Over 20 per cent of students registered for the service, but still, they used it only a few times in a year. During the very time, Uber was also providing its car-renting service, but the service included the rental of brand new luxury cars. The idea of Zimmer and Green was way too different from that.

Green and Zimmer moved to Silicon Valley, to work on the growth of the company and shared an apartment that served as both apartment and office. After working hard on Zimride for five years, they expanded the company to thousands of users and over 50 universities.

The main mission, the two were working towards, was to provide an alternative to car ownership. In 2013, they sold Zimride to Enterprise Holdings and turned there focus towards Lyft, their newly founded company, providing carpooling in local areas.

The next thing they figured out was that having an app for the smartphones can get them more users as well as more frequent rides for localities. So, they hired two engineers to develop an app for Lyft, and within three weeks the app was ready.

In 2017, Green and Zimmer raised $4.1 billion dollars for Lyft, valuing the company at $11.5 billion. Currently, Lyft is providing its services in 50 United States and has grown to 1,000 employees.

In 2009, Zimmer and Logan Green were named finalists in Business Week’s list of America’s Best Young Entrepreneurs and in 2014, the two were named “35 Under 35 list of Inc. Magazine.