James Ding
GSE&IS Profile
James Ding
Managing Director, GSR Ventures Management Company
Having begun his career before the internet was accessible in his home country of China, Jian “James” Ding (MLS ’90) now focuses on internet, wireless, and new media investments as the Managing Director of GSR Ventures Management Company, a venture capital fund that invests in early growth stage technology companies with substantial operations in China. Prior to GSR, Ding served as Co-founder and Chairman of AsiaInfo-Linkage, one of the earliest technology companies in China that provides high-quality telecom software solutions and IT security products and services. During his tenure as CEO, Ding guided AsiaInfo-Linkage to be the first IPO on NASDAQ by a Chinese technology company and built up 70% of the current internet structures in China.
It was Ding’s fascination with computers that brought him to UCLA in the late ‘80s. Having received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from Peking University, Ding enrolled in what was then UCLA’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science with the desire to master new computer technologies and to better understand a newly developed computer network called the internet.
Although difficult to imagine today, the UCLA that Ding encountered when he started as a graduate student was completely unwired. Ding got a job in the computer lab in Powell Library, assisting in the copying of data from floppy disks. Ding spent his winter vacation figuring out how to link the library computers into a network and so became one of the first people to access the internet on UCLA’s campus.
After graduating in 1990, Ding served as a System Librarian at the University of Texas for two years and helped to create the first online magazine written in Chinese characters. Using much of what he had learned at UCLA in Christine Borgman’s Electronic Publishing course, for example, and a library and computer animation course that he remembers fondly, Ding worked to create new software that could encode and decode data into new formats to feature Mandarin characters electronically for the first time.
With the dream of bringing the internet to China and providing open access to information for Chinese students, Ding helped to build online mailing lists in the late ‘90s designed to connect Chinese students attending universities in the United States with other Chinese students both in the US and in China. Given the restricted access to information in China, these mailing lists proved an effective means through which students could share information with their peers back home and lobby for greater access to information in China.
In 2009, Ding became the Executive Chairman of the Joint Research Institute (JRI) Industry Advisory Board. A collaboration between Peking University and UCLA faculty, JRI is the first and only joint research institute between any UC campus and an overseas university. The Institute seeks to leverage faculty research collaborations to provide unique opportunities for students of both UCLA and Peking University in the science, engineering, and medical fields. In his role as Executive Chairman, Ding has helped the JRI establish a fund that supports professors at both universities who wish to better market their research and translate their findings into start up ventures.
Ding is fascinated by the implications of the internet’s rapid growth for business standards and how information is shared and tracked. In his current role at GSR, Ding recently invested in a company that is using data mining and behavioral analysis to create personalized profiles for internet users that track websites visited, purchases made and other online transactions that define an individual’s internet history. These user profiles can then be accessed by advertisers to produce targeted ads that respond to individual users’ interests. Ding is intrigued by both the opportunities and the challenges that accompany the emergence of these new technologies in a dynamic and increasingly global market. With the breakdown of geographical boundaries and the quickening of market acceptance from the conception of an idea to its implementation and sale, the IT world has changed dramatically since Ding’s time as a student at UCLA and continues to evolve, as technology grows increasingly intelligent and essential to the ways in which information is shared and business is run.