China's power pours into Silicon Valley to greet the incubator era

In specs, from San Francisco to San Jose, big and small dozens of incubators, thousands of entrepreneurs are here looking for their dreams. It is no exaggeration to say that today's Silicon Valley is the era of incubators. Paul Graham (Paul Graham) founded the Y Combinator created by one star start-up company, David MACCU (Dave McClure) startups to nurture a global entrepreneurial team.

Recently, a Chinese power has joined the star-Spangled Circle of Silicon Valley: Innospring, the US-China innovation incubator, which was just set up in April this year. This is the first Silicon Valley incubator in the U.S.-China Science and Technology circle, focusing on helping to achieve growth and cross-border development for the early entrepreneurial teams in the Chinese and American countries. Innospring's incubator is located in Santa Clara (Santa Clara) in western Silicon Valley, near the headquarters of technology giants such as Cisco, Intel and EMC.

Behind Innospring are strong technology ventures in China and the US: Tsinghua Science Park, Ruian Real Estate Group, northern Aurora VCs and Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). Ruian Real estate to provide office facilities, Tsinghua Science and Technology Park to bring innovative impetus, and two of the venture to ensure a successful incubator of the most important relationship network.

The incubator of Tsinghua Brand

Innospring has a strong brand of Tsinghua, President Zhang Yuqing (Eugene Zhang) has been studying at Tsinghua University for eight years. He has been in Silicon Valley for more than 20 years, hands-on experience of the hardships of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, witnessed the Chinese entrepreneurial circle to learn and pursue the process of Silicon Valley.

Zhang Yuqing in Tsinghua Electronics Engineering Department for eight years, 1990 came to the United States to study work, has worked in Fujitsu, Sun, Cisco and Juniper and other technology giants, as a software, chip, router and server research and development. In the 2002, Zhang Yuqing started his own entrepreneurial path, founded the chip Design Automation (EDA) company Jeda, still holds the position of CEO.

Tsinghua University graduates in the Silicon Valley Chinese circle is an important force, founded in 2001, Tsinghua Entrepreneur Association is the focus of this strength embodies. Elites, solidarity and mutual assistance are the characteristics of this organization. The Tsinghua Entrepreneur Association, which includes 280 members, has a high threshold: Tsinghua graduates, of course, and the founder or executive of a large company.

In 2003, Zhang Yuqing joined the Tsinghua Entrepreneur Association and began to engage in investment gradually. 2010, gradually from Jeda day-to-day management work away from the Zhang Yuqing and Tsinghua alumni co-founded the Tsinghua Entrepreneur Association Angel Fund, officially embarked on the road of investment, hoping to gather strength to help young entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. The fund is also funded by the 4 million of dollars that successful entrepreneurs personally contribute.

The Angel Foundation of Tsinghua Entrepreneur Association founded two years time, has invested 23 start-up companies, most of them are Silicon Valley pioneering team. Of these, two companies have already entered a round of financing, and several have achieved stable revenue and business models. Relying on the industry expertise of the Tsinghua Entrepreneur Association, Zhang Yuqing They are mainly engaged in the mobile internet, clean energy and chip design field of venture capital.

In the Silicon Valley venture capital process, the Tsinghua Entrepreneur Association Angel Foundation recognizes the significance of helping some of the earlier startups grow. Many small start-up teams have yet to meet investment standards, and if an incubator provides them with the help they need to grow, these early teams will be able to focus on their products and markets for long-term development.

Tsinghua Science and Technology Park in the Chinese market has a wide range of business, and Northern Lights investment is to build a bridge between Silicon Valley and China, the two sides have a common goal, this is the origin of innospring. In fact, the founder of Aurora Deng itself was the chairman of the Tsinghua Entrepreneur Association, the largest contributor to the association's growth. Combined with Silicon Valley banks and Ruian real estate, four companies have spent $ millions of to build innospring.

Recall 10 years ago own entrepreneurial experience, Zhang Yuqing more firmly believe that the value of the establishment of innospring. "When I started my business, I didn't have Y Combinator these successful incubators, everything to do their own work, financing, servers, human resources, legal services and so on, and now Innospring provides a package of entrepreneurial services, so that entrepreneurs can focus on building a successful product, realize their dreams, Bring in the return of investment, let innospring sustainable development.

Four hatching elements

Like other successful incubators, Innospring is built around four factors: financing channels, entrepreneurial mentors, hardware facilities and integrated services.

In terms of investment, Kleiner, Northern Lights, Jinsha River, Broadband Capital (CBC) and the Angel Foundation of Tsinghua Entrepreneur Association, five investment institutions with operations in China and Silicon Valley have jointly funded the formation of Innosping's own seed investment Fund, which provides initial investment for early companies in the incubator. Kleiner and Silicon Valley banks have a broad relationship with the Silicon Valley investment circle, and they are able to recommend potential start-up teams to many investors to secure funding channels for entrepreneurs.

Innospring's unique model is the introduction of reinvestment: Welcome some start-ups that have not yet launched their products, provide venues, data centers, entrepreneurial guidance and human resources, and wait for them to evolve and decide to invest. At this stage, innospring only charges the cost of venues and facilities for the start-up team: it is currently a 300 dollar per month for a workstation (Cube).

For investment and equity, Innospring does not intend to set a fixed share. Zhang Yuqing introduced, innospring to the incubation company will take specific problems specific analysis of investment strategy. At present, the main investment of incubator such as Combinator is focused on the internet and mobile Internet, so it is easy to adopt the investment policy of fixed investment share ratio.

Innospring's investment portfolio also includes areas such as clean energy and chip design, and therefore does not apply to the Y-combinator model. Zhang Yuqing to Sina Technology, Innospring will also hold 2-3 training camps each year, with demo day to close and attract investors, but at the initial stage of development, will focus on incubating the current entrepreneurial team, the first time this year to host the demo day.

The Chinese factor is that innospring is unique to other incubators in Silicon Valley. Over the years China's major science and technology parks have come to the Silicon Valley to organize a variety of entrepreneurial competitions, looking for good entrepreneurial projects, and Tsinghua Science Park is the main support, but the Silicon Valley still lacks a platform to truly support China's related early entrepreneurial projects. And innosping behind the strong Chinese resources, can provide the necessary resources to help start-ups enter the Chinese market.

In the direction of entrepreneurship, innospring plans to find a group of successful entrepreneurs with rich management experience, or people with professional knowledge in the vertical field, to help entrepreneurs eliminate the doubts and difficulties in their entrepreneurial process. In Zhang Yuqing's words: "Entrepreneurs sometimes get bogged down in difficulties and find solutions, but after a bit of expert dialing, it may be suddenly enlightened."

Because of the lack of funds and personnel strength of the entrepreneurial team, recruitment, remuneration and benefits, as well as the law and other peripheral services are innospring for entrepreneurs to provide important support. Zhang Yuqing They will be able to accomplish these tedious and time-consuming tasks for the entrepreneurial team through credible and long-term partners, so that entrepreneurs can focus more on product development.

Investment standards and entrepreneurial team

Innospring has been settled in more than 10 entrepreneurial teams, including weavermobile mobile Internet applications such as developers, but also accusilicon such a chip design company, as well as HTML5 animation platform, such as wooden bumps entrepreneurial team.

Accusilicon is a chip design start-up company, mainly produces 4G GPS equipment used in ultra-low phase noise, ultra-low jitter of the clock chip. Founder Zhou Yi is also an "old Silicon Valley", he worked as a firmware and software engineer, and then turned into a chip design. Accusilicon has been in the project for two years and last year was invested by the Tsinghua Entrepreneur Association Angel Fund.

The chip sector has been largely dominated by big companies, and the project has been unpopular. But Zhang Yuqing they have seen the performance of the sample greatly appreciated, and after the third party laboratory test samples, that Zhou Yi chip products have a complete industry-leading level, so decided to invest. Accusilicon has been settled in Innospring, has been four major customers, is about to carry out mass production.

Promising entrepreneurial team and mobile app developer Weavermobile. They developed the Facebook photo management application photobox! Downloads have reached hundreds of thousands of times since the start of the year, and recently Weavermobile has also developed a browser based on the Sina microblogging platform, "small Microwave" (http://www.weiboread.com/).

When it comes to choosing investment criteria, Zhang Yuqing said to Sina technology that the entrepreneurial team is the most valued investment standard, whether the founders ' unity will be the decisive factor for the success of the company. It would be more trustworthy if the entrepreneurial team had worked together before. Second, to see the market potential of products, whether there is a market space in the future. Technical content and barriers are also important areas of consideration, especially in the field of chip design and clean energy, while mobile internet entrepreneurship is relatively low cost.

The innospring is only just getting started compared to many of the Silicon Valley business incubators, but the incubator has drawn attention and coverage from TechCrunch and other U.S. technology media. In TechCrunch's detailed report, Chinese power is a big word. China is the world's most important technology market, but also the most early stage of the entrepreneurial growth market. Innospring with Tsinghua background and Sino-US venture Investment support obviously has unique advantages.