Baidu founder’s inspiring letter to employees is something every tech company needs to read

It’s no secret that Baidu has become embroiled in a controversy more serious than any the company has faced before. Whether it’s fair or not, users are raging at the company and its business practices after a public complaint posted by Wei Zexi, a young cancer victim who was tricked into an expensive but worthless treatment he found via Baidu, went viral.

On Tuesday, Baidu CEO Robin Li sent a letter to all Baidu employees addressing the crisis. And although Li isn’t known for being China’s most quotable tech founder – that honor has to go to Alibaba’s Jack Ma – the letter he wrote is actually damn inspiring. For startups, it’s also a really important read, as it touches on the problems that come with transitioning from a scrappy startup into an established corporate behemoth like the Baidu of today.

Our translation of Robin Li’s letter is below.

Don’t forget the startup spirit and abandon our dreams

Baidu CEO and founder Robin Li

The January incident with Tieba and the April incident with Wei Zexi have caused widespread criticism and questioning of Baidu. The anger of these users is more serious a crisis than anything Baidu has faced before.

These past few days, every night I’ve been thinking: why do so many people who use Baidu every day no longer love us? Why are we no longer proud of our own products? What is the true source of the problem?

I remember the early days of Baidu, when we were competing with Google for users, but I was more afraid they’d poach our talent. At that time, they absolutely had the ability to offer our engineers three times what we could afford to pay. But when they came into China, they didn’t get any of our people. At that time, we all had the same mindset: make the best Chinese-language search engine. We were really proud of what we were doing every day.

Back then for recruiting we used to make these posters with a head and a terse phrase underneath it. For example, we’d put the head of [famous Chinese author who began as a translator] Lu Xun, and under it write: “Do you want to translate, or do you want to create the search for the meaning of China?” Or we’d use the head of [famous aeronautical engineer] Qian Xuesen and under it write: “Do you want a villa overseas, or do you want to return to China and father the guided missile?” Or we’d use the head of Mao Zedong, and under it write: “Do you want to surrender, or do you want to become stronger than your enemies?”

Even today, when I mention these slogans to other people, they get choked up. With that dream and that rallying cry, we went and listened attentively to users, understood their needs, and slowly won the Chinese market from a position of far inferior power [compared to Google]. Our value of putting users above everything else won us users. It’s those users who built Tieba, who answer questions on Baidu Zhidao, and who write and edit the entries on Baike. It’s the content they create and the information they contribute that differentiated us from competitors and created a successful Baidu.

Our values have been squeezed and changed.