Qi Lu, every mention

The Steve Ballmer Interview · Acquired Jun 2, 2025 · 24 mentions

• ▶ 2:02:12 Steve Ballmer Bing, that's when we hire, I think that's when we hire Chi Lu.
• ▶ 2:02:16 Ben Gilbert Chi Lu, yeah.
• ▶ 2:02:21 Steve Ballmer Chi Lu is one of the most pivotal, pivotal things at Microsoft.
• ▶ 2:02:36 Steve Ballmer Uh, so Chi's talking about leaving Yahoo.
• ▶ 2:02:40 Steve Ballmer And Chi, I think, went to graduate school with Harry Shum, who had been in Microsoft Research, and Harry was now working on Search, and he was working for Satya, who was running Bing.
• ▶ 2:03:03 Steve Ballmer Chi's a genius.
• ▶ 2:03:04 Steve Ballmer We've got to hire Chi or, you know, we, we, and we, yeah,
• ▶ 2:03:08 Steve Ballmer I don't know if Chi really wants to work or, uh, we gotta pick Chi's brain.
• ▶ 2:03:13 Steve Ballmer We gotta, we just have to learn from Chi Lu.
• ▶ 2:03:16 Steve Ballmer Okay, so Satya, me, Harry fly down to California, and we meet with Chi Lu, and we talk to Chi, and Chi's brilliant, and we're learning all this stuff about Chi, and Chi leaves the room.
• ▶ 2:03:34 Steve Ballmer We should hire Chi, and I should work for him.
• ▶ 2:03:43 Steve Ballmer Harry worked for Satya, who worked for Chi.
• ▶ 2:03:48 David Rosenthal So you flipped the whole reporting structure to hire Chi in the room.
• ▶ 2:03:52 Steve Ballmer After Chi walked, we talked for about 15 minutes, and then Harry calls Chi and said, do you mind coming back?
• ▶ 2:04:02 Steve Ballmer I forget where Chi was thinking he'd take his next job.
• ▶ 2:04:36 Steve Ballmer And she did great work.
• ▶ 2:04:38 Steve Ballmer I mean, she knew about search.
• ▶ 2:04:49 Steve Ballmer I mean, and she's an, I mean, Sach is not an engineer by training.
• ▶ 2:04:53 Steve Ballmer She's an engineer, and he's a PhD in computer science, uh, and he had a lot to bring.
• ▶ 2:05:06 Steve Ballmer Um, you know, she's like.
• ▶ 2:05:14 Steve Ballmer She was important.
• ▶ 2:05:28 Steve Ballmer Let's see, what year would Chi have come?
• ▶ 2:05:50 Steve Ballmer So we, we could probably move him.
• ▶ 2:07:05 Steve Ballmer You know, and then that was, he was on a great path and cheese hire made search as strong or stronger.