The billionaire founder of a popular search engine drew a big crowd at Stanford University — and it wasn’t one of the guys that started Google Inc. just a few miles (kilometers) from the campus they once attended.
About 600 students crammed into a lecture room Wednesday to soak up the wisdom of Robin Li, who owns rare bragging rights over Google and its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Li, 40, is the chief executive and founder of Baidu Inc., a nine-year-old company that dominates Internet search in China like Google dominates the market in just about every other major country in the world.
The impressive feat earned Li rock-star treatment at Stanford, the place where Page and Brin conceived Google’s technology as graduate students before dropping out to start their now-famous company in 1998.
Li, a China native who got his graduate degree from the University of New York at Buffalo, seemed to relish the adulation he received at his rivals’ old stomping grounds.
“That part is sort of special,” Li said in a brief interview with The Associated Press after he spent a half hour posing for photos and passing out business cards to the hordes of mostly Asian students who flocked around him after his 50-minute presentation.
Li has become an entrepreneurial hero in China, and not only because his company eclipsed Google in that country. He also became a mogul after starting Baidu nine years ago with just $1.2 million in venture capital.
Baidu’s market value now stands at about $14 billion, and Li’s stake in the Beijing-based company is worth more than $2 billion. Baidu’s U.S. shares fell $1.34 Wednesday to close at $394.50 — a more than 14-fold increase from their August 2005 initial public offering price of $27.
Baidu’s meteoric rise from its IPO price also tops Google, whose stock…