Sam, this exec BS doesn't look good on you. If Qi Lu is the "one of the most impressive technologiest" you have known then I would say you can be impressed pretty easily. Qi Lu is the guy who couldn't do a squat with Yahoo so he jumped ship to Microsoft. His main achievement there was to rename their product to "Bing". Finally not getting anywhere for almost a decade, he finally got pushed out and so he jumped on the Baidu train to get dip in to Chinese internet boom. Again no special achievements whatsoever at Baidu and virtually everything he touched was half assed and pure PR vaporware. You also have to remember this guy is not technologist. He doesn't write code, do design or understand modern software architecture. He is a suit which big multinationals need for a public face, sales and marketing purposes.
So let's be honest here. YC needs to tap in to Chinese market's booming startup scene. You can't do that without having native Chinese guy leading these effort. You ideally need a suit who has network and hopefully also understands the little details, you know, like code. But you got only the suit who has network. You will try to do best with what you got. That we get it.
Not sure what your sources are. It would help to cite sources, or at least come out of anonymity before blasting someone like this. That way we can at least evaluate your opinion based on your relevant background.
I don't what Lu's exact involvement was, but "Bing" was a huge improvement over the "MSN search" and "Yahoo search" that really were the same product.
The genesis of Bing is said to be the acquisition of the company PowerSet which did large-scale data extraction from DBpedia and similar sources to make a knowledge graph.
Google had ridiculed this approach before but when Microsoft came out with Bing which was comparable in quality to Google, Google was shocked and they bought Freebase and started talking about a "Google Knowledge Graph".
Anyhow you should try it. Bing and Google are comparable in search quality -- some people might prefer some SERPs from Google or Bing for certain queries, but the difference between raters is bigger than the difference between search engines.
YC needs a suit who will let them convince the PRC that they should be allowed to have a slice of the Chinese economy. They could not have chosen a better person.
Bunnie Huang would be awesome. I'm talking about the role, though. Not necessarily the titles. (Edit: That's not a diss... it's just my ignorance. I mean as far as I know Bunnie would be great for the titles too, but I just can't defend that position because I don't know enough about that level of position). I suspect the titles were just Qi Lu's ask, not a requirement for the position(s).
Admittedly Bunnie is mostly a hardware guy but I think he would also have connections and sensibilities in software and China is pretty big on hardware too.
I'm not going to comment on the rest of your comment, but I found the first 2 sentences to be pretty out of context.
"one of the most impressive technologists" is much different than "most impressive technologist". Removing the plural completely changes the meaning of that statement.
So let's be honest here. YC needs to tap in to Chinese market's booming startup scene. You can't do that without having native Chinese guy leading these effort. You ideally need a suit who has network and hopefully also understands the little details, you know, like code. But you got only the suit who has network. You will try to do best with what you got. That we get it.