Pascal Levensohn, founder and managing director of Levensohn Venture Partners in San Francisco, takes an active, hands-on approach to investing.
To that end, he has traveled to Israel three times in the past seven months because his latest endeavor is to personally deepen the links between Silicon Valley and the Holy Land.
His firm, a venture capital consortium of 24 companies that he started in 1996, manages $170 million in two operational venture funds and is actively investing in a third fund. LVP recently invested in Petach Tikvah’s Veraz Networks, a telecommunications company.
“Whether in business or otherwise, I am fully engaged in something or not engaged at all,” said the multilingual Levensohn, whose Romanian father survived the Holocaust and whose French Canadian mother converted to Judaism when she married in 1955. Levensohn lived in Puerto Rico until he was 11.
“When I am engaged, I do my best to leave my fingerprints on that project. I insist on understanding the details of an undertaking before committing to it.”
In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, Levensohn said he is currently checking out a few other Israeli companies, but he wouldn’t reveal which ones.
“As companies continue to diversify around the globe,” he told The Post, “they will be forced to re-evaluate their sustainable competitive advantages.”
In the Post article, Levensohn cited Veraz, a voice-over-Internet-telephony firm formed by a merger two years ago with a San Jose-based company, as an example. When the company was formed, it had offices in Israel and California, but recently began outsourcing software development in India through a third-party provider.
“Israel has some of the best DSP [digital sytem processing] engineers in the world, but we decided to supplement that strength with lower-level developers from India,” he told The Post. “Companies have to think about where their interests are best met.”
Levensohn, who was the first in his family to attend college, earned a B.A. in government from Harvard. He has been a professional equity investor since 1983.
Before launching LVP, he worked with portfolio-company management teams since 1990, when he joined the merchant-banking firm of Richard C. Blum & Associates as a managing director and partner.
Because of Levensohn’s affinity for hunkering down in the trenches and his multicultural background, his trips to Israel have had a purpose beyond just business. He is on the North American board of directors for Hand in Hand, the Center for Jewish-Arab Education in Israel. Hand in Hand now sponsors three Jewish-Arab schools in Israel that have a joint Jewish-Christian-Muslim curriculum. Levensohn’s Web log about Hand in Hand and related ventures can be found at www.pascalsview.com.
“If there is to be any lasting, peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs in Israel, the socioeconomic gap between Arabs and Jews must be bridged,” said Levensohn, who has traveled extensively in Kuwait, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, as well as Ecuador, Costa Rica, Britain, France and Australia with his wife and two children. “Fear, suspicion and mistrust must give way to mutual respect for each other’s faiths and cultural traditions.”
Respect and trust are what LVP tries to instill in its investor partners and companies. “What makes LVP different is we focus on companies that have a measurable amount of revenue,” said Levensohn, who recently completed a six-year tenure on the board of San Francisco’s Congregation Emanu-El. “We only make three or four investments per year. This strategy allows LVP to spend significant time with each portfolio company and to take an active role in helping to develop the company.”
“Our investment model is opposed to taking technological risk. Before we invest, we want to know that the technology already exists and works. And businesses are now able to access new markets that they couldn’t just a few years ago. This is a new chance to make a lot of money.”
But making money is not the only goal for Levensohn, who still remembers the first anti-Semitic comment directed at him in Puerto Rico when he was 9. The purpose of his business and philanthropic efforts is to build relationships and give him the opportunity to support causes by getting directly involved.
“I’m not just interested in writing checks,” said Levensohn, who is also on the steering committee of the Socrates Society, a leadership development program of the Aspen Institute. “Whenever I go to Israel or the Arab Middle East on business, I take the opportunity to spend time and meet with groups doing socially important work in those countries. I recently increased my own activity in promoting interfaith dialogue among the three Abrahamic faiths at the grassroots level.”