Former NVCA chairman Dixon Doll has teamed up with Eric Ball and Jack Crawford to launch a venture capital firm named Impact Venture Capital, with investment offices in Burlingame and Sacramento, California.
Impact Venture Capital will host a large-scale global venture summit event this year in California at the new Golden 1 Center, widely recognised as the most high-tech arena in the world.
The firm will make investments alongside corporate venture groups in early stage information technology start-ups, with a focus on software and data analytics, and a commitment to serving one of four global challenges: security and government; energy and transportation; agriculture and health; and education and media.
Doll, Ball, and Crawford have a long work history of co-investing and corporate portfolio management and share a strong global professional network in the startup and venture capital industries.
Doll has spent nearly four decades in venture capital, having previously started the industry’s first fund focused on telecommunications technology at Accel. He later founded Doll Capital Management (DCM) and helped grow it to USD3 billion of capital under management. Doll also served as chairman of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and was on the board of DirecTV for five years through its acquisition by AT&T for USD49 billion.
“After attempting to retire a few times, I’m excited to get back in the game and build a new firm that has the potential to impact the lives of billions of people,” says Doll. “When you have the opportunity to work with two energetic and smart investors like Eric and Jack, why would you ever want to sit on the sidelines?”
Ball previously served as the treasurer for Oracle, helping to manage USD50 billion in assets. He was named one of the top 100 influencers in the US financial markets. He later served as CFO at C3 IoT and was the founder of Targhee Ventures where he invested in 18 start-up companies.
Crawford previously managed Velocity Venture Capital and co-invested alongside of both Doll and Ball in a number of promising start-ups. Operating primarily inside California’s technology triangle (bounded by San Francisco, San Jose, and Sacramento), Velocity Venture Capital has a long history of investing in early stage companies including the first round investment in Soft Machines, recently acquired by Intel for USD270 million. For the last seven years, Velocity has been running innovation programmes for start-ups, graduate students, and corporate venture groups from across the US.
Both Ball and Crawford are graduates of the Kauffman Fellows programme, an elite venture capital executive education programme that provides two years of professional development to 40 selected Fellows each year.
“I’m thrilled to see two alum in Eric and Jack partner with a VC legend like Dixon Doll,” says Phil Wickham, executive chairman of the Kauffman Fellows programme. “These two were peer-selected leaders of their cohort, and I’m confident that their team will have great success as they work with Kauffman’s global network of venture capitalists and corporate venture groups.”
“Access to the knowledge, professional networks and financial capital of venture investors is the lifeblood of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Without it, most start-up founders lack the resources they need to scale and grow their ideas into the next generation of great American companies,” says Bobby Franklin, president and CEO of NVCA. “We congratulate the team at Impact Venture Capital on a successful launch and wish them luck as they start this journey.”
