Pascal Levensohn

Bio

Since 1996, Pascal has been the Managing Partner of Levensohn Venture Partners LLC (LVP) and the CEO of Levensohn Global LLC (LG) and its predecessor entities. LVP is a Registered Investment Advisor. In these roles, Pascal advises a select group of multi-generational family offices on direct technology investments and philanthropy. He has restructured or established nine family offices since 1990 and specializes in training and empowering next generation family members as stewards of their family enterprises. Pascal has advised the Dolby family since 2011 and is the Senior Managing Director of Dolby Family Ventures, a single-LP venture capital investing organization whose sole investors are Dolby family affiliates and Levensohn Venture Partners. Pascal co-manages these technology investment funds with David Dolby. The Dolby Family Ventures organization focuses on making breakthrough technology startup investments in sectors including Advanced Digital Signal Processing, Augmented and Virtual Reality, Aerospace, and the Life Sciences. A significant subset of the Dolby Family Ventures platform is dedicated to making specialized impact investments in biotechnology and therapeutics, focused exclusively on neurodegeneration. This organization was formally established in April 2014. In addition to his work with the Dolby family, Pascal is currently the strategic advisor on direct and venture capital investments to Arden Road LLC (Lex Hixon Group, New York), a family office that he has advised continuously since 1996, initially as the Chief Investment Officer for the APH Group (Alexander P. Hixon family, Pasadena, California). Pascal currently advises three additional family organizations (two U.S., one international). Across its client base, the LVP team oversees over 50 active public and private portfolio companies. Prior to 2011, LVP invested over $200 million in venture capital companies across three VC funds under the LVP franchise between 1996 and 2007, returning over $450 million to its investors to date. LG advises institutional investors and sophisticated family offices on due diligence, investment structure, and family office corporate governance, principally related to direct venture capital and private equity investments. Pascal is currently the Chairman of the Board of ShotSpotter, Inc. (NASDAQ:SSTI), Chairman of the board of NativeWaves GmbH (Salzburg, Austria), Vice Chairman of the board of Authentic Vision GmbH (Salzburg, Austria), a director of Mixed Dimensions, Inc., a director of GenomSys, SA (Lausanne, Switzerland), and a director of Cure Network Dolby Acceleration Partners LLC (San Francisco). He has served as board chairman, audit committee chairman, compensation committee chairman, and board secretary for venture-backed companies since 1996 and first served as a public company director in 1993. Pascal served on the board of directors the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) from April 2007 – April 2011; he chaired the NVCA’s education committee for three years of his term. He was a faculty member of the Kauffman Fellows Program Center for Venture Education (2006-2017) where he taught best practices for VC-backed company board members. He is currently a Senior Strategic Advisor to Silicon Castles GmbH (Salzburg, Austria), which also includes teaching governance best practices to European entrepreneurs as a member of the faculty of the Startup Executive Academy (since 2016). Pascal has published widely read white papers on best practices for venture capital boards (1999, 2003, 2006, 2007) and is the co‐author of the first Chinese college textbook on venture capital: 投 学 Venture Capital: Theory and Practice, with Professor Liu Manhong of Renmin University of China (first edition 2011; second expanded edition 2018). He has lectured on board governance topics at top universities in the U.S. (Harvard Law School, Stanford School of Engineering, Stanford Rock Center Venture Capital Directors College), China, and Singapore. Pascal holds an AB in Government, cum laude, from Harvard University. He began his career in New York at Bankers Trust Company in 1981 and became a risk arbitrageur at the First Boston Corporation in 1983. In 1990 he became a partner at Blum Capital (formerly known as Richard C. Blum & Associates). He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former co-chairman of the Socrates Society Forum of the Aspen Institute (2007-2009). He is a former Trustee of the American Academy in Berlin (2016-2019), where he served as the Chairman of the Governance Committee and a member of the Executive Committee. He is a former chairman of the board of directors of CK Mondavi & Family, Inc., which is a private, family owned business controlled by the descendants of the Peter Mondavi, Sr. and is the 13th largest winery in the United States. He is a former chairman of the Business Leadership Council of the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco and a former Vice President of San Francisco’s Temple Emanu El, where he served on the board of directors for 6 years (1994-2000).