Kai-fu Lee is a Chinese venture capitalist and popular microblogger best known for his role as founding president of Google China. He has also held high-technology executive positions at Apple, SGI and Microsoft. Born on December 3, 1961, Lee went on to create the world's first speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition system as his Ph.D. thesis at Carnegie Mellon. In 2009 he co-founded Innovation Works, a venture capital fund for Chinese internet start-ups.