Brad Burnham
Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Union Square Ventures. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
Brad Burnham is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures. He co-founded the firm in 2003 with Fred Wilson after spending over a decade in the venture capital industry.
1shows
1appearances
13statements
2resolved
1supported
0contradicted
50%fully supported
20said about them ↓ Everything Brad Burnham said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Late-Stage Private Valuations Are Unsustainable and Face a Market Correction
“I'd argue it's probably not that healthy, and that you're actually seeing some very weird dislocations when, you know, the scarcity of equity in the private capital markets for the real dominant market players, you know, you end up bidding up the, in the price…”
Big Tech Dominance Makes Creating New Consumer Web Unicorns Difficult
“We're now in a world where, you know, we're seeing really dominant market power, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, you know, creating a new set of unicorns in the face of that market power is going to be very difficult, certainly in the consumer-facing web serv…”
USV's 2004 Fund Had Four Investments Each Return the Full Fund
“We made investments in Zynga, Twitter, Indeed, and Etsy within about a six month period. In our 2004 fund, each of those returned the fund.”
USV Created Venture Partner Role for Albert Wenger for Sourcing Etsy
“Been very actively involved in Etsy early on and brought Etsy to the partnership. And we created a venture partner role for Albert to, you know, to sort of compensate him for having brought Etsy to the partnership.”
USV Will Add Partners Slowly and Remain in a Single Office
“It'll always be a slow process for us. We think these partnerships are, you know, the dynamics of the partnerships are very, very important, and we'll continue to, you know, as we Add people. We'll do it very slowly, and we'll do it in a single office, and we'…”
VCs Spend More Time on Struggling Startups Than Winners
“It turns out that this is probably a truism in the business that you end up investing more time in your losers than your winners.”
Supporting Failing Startups Earns VCs Entry Into Future Winners
“And the willingness to do that is what gets you invited into the next winner.”
Expecting Past VC Investment Models to Repeat Is a Major Failure Mode
“I think one of the failure modes of venture capital is to assume that the past is the future and that you'll consider it, can you continue to see the same models?”
Infrastructure VC Relies on IP; Application Layer Requires a Thesis
“When you move from the infrastructure layer, where I think Investing is really defined by technical differentiation and intellectual property defensibility. You know, they're, I think, being more opportunistic, more deal flow driven, made perfect sense. When y…”
USV Avoids Direct Competitors to Enable Peer Collaboration
“Because we make an effort not to invest in direct competitors, they, they're perfectly comfortable sharing ideas with each other. So we've been able to organize, you know, because we don't do biotech For instance, you know, we can have a CEO summit where every…”
USV Took 80 Pitch Meetings to Raise First Fund in 2004
“It took us about 80 meetings and a heck of a lot of air travel to get that done, but we finally got the fund done in the early part of, I guess, 2004”
Fred Wilson Managed Flatiron's Portfolio Post-Crash Into USV Launch
“Thing about Fred, most impressive things I've ever seen anybody do is the amount of effort that he put into managing out the Flatiron portfolio after the crash in 2000 which I got to watch, you know, up close and personal because he was very much still doing i…”
The other half of the tape: Brad Burnham's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 17 times in 9 episodes across the shows. 3 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Albert Wenger 6Andy Weissman 3Harry Stebbings 2Charlie O'Donnell 2Bing Gordon 2Jonathan Libov 1David Tisch 1
Statements about Brad Burnham, by other people (3)
USV hired Andrew Parker in 2006 without a resume or reference checks
“They never asked for my resume. They never checked any references. They just wanted to see my web presence. So I showed them my blog at the time because this is pre-Twitter or pre-Tumblr or anything like that. They brought me in for a 40 minute interview and t…”
Weissman: VC funds only need a few right decisions per fund
“Well, that's okay because with this business, we actually don't have to be right every time we have to make a decision just a couple times each fund.”
Wenger had multiple failed attempts entering VC before joining USV
“I first tried to start a venture capital arm for Telebank, and then Telebank got acquired by E-Trade, and then I started my own incubator with very bad timing at the sort of height of the bubble, just before the bubble burst, and then I tried to start a ventur…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 17
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 2 mentions in 1 episode
2017 6 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: USV's Andy Weissman on The Future of The VC Industry, Why USV Does Not Vote On Investment Decisions & Why VCs Should Be Invisible
- 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Bing Gordon on Lessons From Serving On Amazon & Zynga's Board, Why The Best Investors Are Good Listeners and Sceptical Optimists & The Most Important Value Add A VC Can Provide
- 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
2016 6 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
2015 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Brad's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Union Square Ventures | 1 | 13 | 50% 1/2 | full record on 20VC → |