Qi Lu

Lu Qi (; born September 3, 1961) is a Chinese American software executive and engineer who is the head of MiraclePlus, a startup incubator in China. Previously, Lu was the head of Y Combinator's China until it was shut down. He was formerly the chief operating officer of Baidu until he stepped down in May, 2018. He has served as the executive vice president of Microsoft, leading development of Bing, Skype, and Microsoft Office, and software engineer and manager for Yahoo!'s search technology division.

Early life Lu was born in Shanghai, China, and was sent to live with his grandparents in a remote village in Jiangsu by his parents during the Cultural Revolution. Lu arrived in Pittsburgh in 1988, becoming the second Chinese student to be admitted to the School of Computer Science. His doctoral research focused on distributed file systems that enable multiple users to share files on a computer network. He stepped down on May 18, 2018. In August 2018, he joined Y Combinator as the head of research and assumed control of YC China.

In November 2019, Y Combinator decided to shut down YC China. Lu continues to fund startups under his new program, MiraclePlus. Much like its parent Y Combinator, MiraclePlus operates two cohorts per year (one in the summer, and one in winter).