Kaifu Lee: Left Google to Start His Own Business

On September 4, Google declared that the president of Google China Kaifu Lee resigned from his post. Google Shanghai Engineer Institute Yang Wenluo succeeded Li’s responsibility in research and development while vice president of Google China Liu Yun assumed the responsibility of marketing.

Kaifu Lee joined in Google in July 2005 as the president of Google China. During his four years’ tenure, Google China has achieved certain improvement in the competition with the largest Chinese search engine Baidu. Kaifu Lee changed Google China’s development strategy from focusing on innovation to strong and powerful marketing method. Now Google China has the sales team of hundreds of people, while Baidu has thousands of people engaged in marketing.

It is known that Kaifu Lee will cooperate with Lenovo president Liu Chuanzhi, Hon Hai Precision Industry chairman Terry Gou, New Oriental Education Group president Yu Minhong and YouTube founder Steve Chen to set up a company named “Innovation Workshop”, cultivating or investing in the high-tech entrepreneurship projects in China.

“Innovation Workshop” plans to put 800 million yuan (USD 117.18 million) in the next 4 or 5 years. Now, the capital in the first two years has been in position. The pattern is the Angel Investment in addition to the initial capital injection. Kaifu Lee will make use of his experience to help the invested companies in building the management platforms and he will also provide the consultancy services.