Q&A : InnoSpring's Eugene Zhang

Jun 3, 2013, 7:24am PDT

Q&A: InnoSpring's Eugene Zhang builds US-China startup bridge

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Vicki Thompson

Eugene Zhang has operated InnoSpring, a China-U.S. incubator in Santa Clara for a little more than a year.

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Cromwell Schubarth

Senior Technology Reporter- Silicon Valley Business Journal

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Eugene Zhang, president of the InnoSpring incubator, says he is building a bridge between the U.S. and China for startups and investors.
His Santa Clara incubator was the first of its kind when it opened last year in Silicon Valley, backed by Northern Light Venture Capital, Silicon Valley Bank, Shui On Group and Tsinghua University Science Park.
But there are now three, including HanHai zPark which opened in San Jose shortly after InnoSpring last year and HanHai Zibo Life Science Park which officially opened in Burlingame over the weekend.
It is part of the growing connection between startups in Silicon Valley and China that I wrote about in this week's Business Journal cover story, "The Silicon Route." Several InnoSpring-supported companies are profiled there, including TrustGo (a startup I profiled in The Pitch last year), Dew Mobile and Empower Micro Systems.
Zhang spoke to me about the surprises and challenges of the first year at InnoSpring in an interview excerpted here. In addition to running the incubator he is also co-founder of TEEC Angel Fund, was founder & CEO of JEDA Technologies, and over a 20-year career worked at Juniper Networks, Cisco Systems and Sun Microsystems.
You've been operating InnoSpring for a year now. Were there any surprises that popped up in the course of the first year that you didn’t expect when you started?
I think when we started we expected that we would have relatively bigger startup companies coming to us that needed more focus and maybe it would be more U.S. companies coming to us that were interested in going to China.
But we are definitely seeing companies at younger stages from the U.S. who want to go to China and relatively smaller size Chinese companies that are coming to the U.S.

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Cromwell Schubarth is the Senior Technology Reporter at the Business Journal. His phone number is 408.299.1823.

Related links:

Santa Clara, Venture capital, International Business, Startups

Industries:

Technology

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