Presenting
	Pascal Levensohn Founder and Managing Director Levensohn Venture Partners
	and our panel
Daniel Cohen Partner Gemini Israel Funds	Ariel Maislos Founder and CEO Pudding Media	Yoav Boaz Founder and CEO Illuminator
		(Acquired by EMC)

 
Join CICC CEOs for an interactive discussion with Pascal Levensohn, Founder and Managing Director of Levensohn Venture Partners. In the past few years Pascal has been doing extensive research on the performance and key success factors of successful boards. Pascal will present his key findings on the dynamics and importance of board governance in venture backed startups. The program will be specifically targeted for entrepreneurs and CEOs, and what they need to know in order to build and manage their own boards.

 

 

For more information or to RSVP contact Iris Blich at iris@ca-israelchamber.org

 

 

 

Pascal Levensohn has been a finance professional for twenty six years and a venture capitalist since 1996, when he founded Levensohn Venture Partners (“LVP”) in San Francisco. He invests in early stage software, semiconductor, and communications companies.

Pascal was elected to the board of the National Venture Capital Association in April 2007, where he serves on the education committee. He is the Program Chairman of the San Francisco Jewish Community Federation’s Business Leadership Council and a member of the Steering Committee of the Socrates Society, a leadership development program of the Aspen Institute with which he has been involved since 1997. Pascal is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy.

A frequent speaker on corporate governance issues, Pascal has published numerous articles on venture capital trends since 1999. In May 2006 Pascal established and now chairs the Working Group on Director Accountability and Board Effectiveness, a 30 member VC industry group that promotes director education and best governance practices. The group’s first effort, “A Simple Guide to the Basic Responsibilities of Venture–Backed Company Directors”, was released in January 2007. Pascal co-authored the first governance white paper in the VC industry in November 2003, "After the Term Sheet: How Venture Boards Influence the Success or Failure of Technology Companies". A second white paper, “Rites of Passage: Managing CEO Transition in Venture-Backed Technology Companies”, was published in January 2006. Pascal's VC governance work is now part of the curriculum at several universities, including the Harvard Business School and Stanford's Graduate School of Engineering (Department of Management Science & Engineering ). These papers are freely available at www.levp.com/news.

Pascal received a BA in Government from Harvard University and is a graduate of the Lawrenceville School.

An active blogger and podcaster, Pascal writes about religious pluralism and venture capital on his blog, and LVP maintains an active podcast program, VC-InsideOut.

 

 

Daniel Cohen is a Partner at Gemini, specializing in Internet and enterprise software investments. He sits on the Board of Gemini companies Adap.TV, eSnips, SupportSpace and Verix (formerly Business Events). Danny recently relocated from Israel to Gemini’s Silicon Valley Office, managing the fund’s operation in the US and providing portfolio companies with a direct link to the technology and VC activity in California. In addition, Danny led the creation of Gemini’s Internet Lab, which co-invests funds in Internet companies together with Lightspeed VP. He currently sits on the Board of the Lab.
Previously, Danny was a Principal at Gemini, responsible for the Fund’s deal flow and deal sourcing process. He has participated in the investment process of over a dozen Gemini companies, including dbMotion, Business Events, Allot, TriSixty and Mirage Innovations. He blogs on Internet and Israeli Venture Capital here.

Danny began his career as a software engineer at Scitex and was later hired by Sagitta as a software group leader. He moved from development to product management at Sagitta and assumed responsibility for the product management team. In 2000, Danny joined the strategic marketing department at Commtouch and was promoted to Sr. Director of Product Marketing after a short time at the company.

Danny has a BA in computer science and psychology from Tel-Aviv University and an MBA from INSEAD.

 

 

Ariel Maislos is the Founder and CEO of Pudding Media. Before founding Pudding Media, Ariel was the co-founder and President of Passave – the technology and market leader in Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) access solutions, founded in 2001 and acquired by PMC-Sierra in 2006.

A graduate of the prestigious Talpiot program of the Israel Defense Force (IDF), Ariel served in an elite R&D unit of the IDF, developing advanced and innovative digital communication systems. Ariel is also a founder and member of the board of directors of Anobit Technologies, an Israeli startup developing flash memory technology, and serves on the board of directors of Kovio and of Nanoconduction.

Ariel has filed several patents, and was an editor of the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet standard. Ariel holds a B.Sc., cum laude, from the Hebrew University in Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science, and an MBA from Tel-Aviv University.

Yoav Boaz
Founder and CEO
Illuminator

Yoav Boaz is a serial entrepreneur who was the Founder and CEO of Illuminator, a storage management company established in 2004 and was recently acquired by EMC2. Prior to Illuminator Yoav was the Founder and CEO of Integrity Systems, a system integration company that developed enterprise infrastructure software solutions that were sold to F500 companies. One of the products was acquired by Legato Systems in 2002. Integrity Systems was recently acquired by Glasshouse technologies. Yoav holds several patents in the field of storage management