The Midas Touch | Dixon Doll

 

About Dixon Doll

For more than 35 years, Dixon has influenced and guided entrepreneurs, investors and executives in the computer, communications, and internet industries. Dixon was named to the Forbes Midas List for four consecutive years and received the 2013 Special Achievement Award in VC from the International Business Forum. He was elected to the Board of the National Venture Capital Association in 2005 serving on the Executive Committee and as Chairman in 2008/9. Under Dixon’s leadership, the NVCA developed a widely embraced set of recommendations (NVCA 4-Pillar Plan) to stimulate liquidity in the U.S. venture capital industry. This plan resulted in bipartisan Congressional support for new job creation legislation and simplification of the IPO process for young emerging companies. Known as the JOBS Act, President Obama signed it into law in 2012. Dixon led DCM’s investments in About.com (Acquired by The New York Times Co.), @Motion (Acquired by Openwave), CENX (Chairmen), Clearwire (Nasdaq: CLWR), Coradiant (Acquired by BMC), Force10 Networks (Acquired by Dell), Foundry Networks (Nasdaq: FDRY), Internap (Nasdaq: INAP), Ipivot (Acquired by Intel), Keep.com, Neutral Tandem (Nasdaq: TNDM) and Mobileum (formerly Roamware). He is the past Chairman of Network Equipment Technologies (NWK) and serves on the Board of Directors of DIRECTV (DTV). Prior to co-founding DCM, Dixon launched the venture capital industry’s first fund focused solely on telecom, investing in such noteworthy companies as Alantec, Bridge Communications, Centillion Networks, Network Equipment Technologies, Optilink, Picturetel, Polycom and UUNet. He also founded and ran a strategic technology consulting firm, served on the faculty of the IBM Systems Research Institute in New York City for 10 years and published a seminal text Data Communications which was adopted as course text by more than 60 universities worldwide.

Dixon has traveled extensively to six continents to serve on advisory boards and give highly sought after presentations on entrepreneurship, technological trends, job creation, government policy and innovation. He also serves on the Executive Committee and Advisory Board for the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research Institute (SIEPR) and is on the Board of Overseers at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. His non-profit activities also have included serving as Chairman of San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum and as a trustee at the University of San Francisco where he currently chairs the Investment Committee.

 

Interview Transcript of: The Midas Touch | Dixon Doll

Dixon Doll: It’s a very cyclical industry. And you can have a discussion about what is the nature of the length of each cycle, the last period of time when the public markets were this healthy, was back in the 99 and 2000 timeframe. I personally don’t think that the market is as out of control now or is, you know, you know, is overly exuberant, back in 99 and 2000, we had companies going public that didn’t have any revenues. And they’d be getting, you know, several 100 million and valuations or more, and there was no drop, no supporting business fundamentals. One of the biggest differences between now and back in 99, and 2000, was that the, the IPO market now has gone global. And you have all these Chinese companies or these Indian companies going public. In the New York exchanges. We had a very vibrant amount of IPO activity in in Asia this year, on on for some non venture backed companies. That was one of the best years that the industry has seen in a long time. So I’m quite optimistic that the good times are going to continue to be experienced here. But just with this difference now that we have to think about the market as a global phenomenon, and these companies they need to build up their distribution strategies and their technologies, and they need to get out into all the corners of the marketplace where they need to be and they need to do it quickly.

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This transcript was generated by software and may not accurately reflect exactly what was said.

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