Kai-Fu Lee

Kai-Fu Lee
Lee at the 2007 Google Taiwan Press Conference
Born	December 3, 1961 (1961-12-03) (age 55) Taipei, Taiwan
Nationality	Republic of China (Taiwan)
Alma mater	Columbia University (B.S.) Carnegie Mellon (PhD)
Thesis	Large-vocabulary speaker-independent continuous speech recognition: The SPHINX system (1988)
Doctoral advisor	Raj Reddy
Known for	Founder of

Kai-Fu Lee (simplified Chinese: 李开复; traditional Chinese: 李開復; pinyin: Lǐ Kāifù; born December 3, 1961) is an American venture capitalist, technology executive, writer, and computer scientist. He is currently based in Beijing, China.

Lee developed the world's first speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition system as his Ph.D. thesis at Carnegie Mellon. He later became a high-technology executive at Apple, SGI, Microsoft, and Google.

He became the focus of a 2005 legal dispute between Google and Microsoft, his former employer, due to a one-year non-compete agreement that he signed with Microsoft in 2000 when he became its corporate vice president of interactive services.

One of the most prominent figures in the Chinese internet sector, he was the founding president of Google China, serving from July 2005 through September 4, 2009. He has created personal website, 'Woxuewang' (Chinese: 我学网) dedicated to helping young Chinese people achieve in their studies and careers.. He is one of the most followed micro-bloggers in China, in particular on Sina Weibo, where he has over fifty million followers.

Lee was born in Taipei, Taiwan. He is the son of Li Tianmin, a legislator and historian from Sichuan, China.

Lee has detailed his personal life and career history in his autobiography in both Chinese and English, Making a World of Difference, published in October 2011.