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Brad Burnham

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27
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2016-07-13
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2016-07-13
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1
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  1. “So, I think the most recent one that is announced was a company called Obi-Wan. It's an open marketplace that allows anybody who runs a protocol stack to exchange goods and services with anybody else who runs that protocol stack with no central authority that arbitrates that marketplace. I think it's a really interesting extension of the underlying principles of the Internet. I mean, the thing that's made the Internet so fantastically great is that each of us comes to”

    2016-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: USV's Brad Burnham on Co-Founding USV with Fred Wilson, What They Look For In Potential Partners & Whether We Are Entering a Period of Consolidation or Expansion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Personal challenge for me is trying to organize big ideas in a way that are easily communicated in the marketplace. I'm in awe of my partners who blog every day and who they sort of put things out there and edit after the fact and they're perfectly comfortable with that. I personally struggle. It takes me a lot longer to write something because if I see an internal contradiction in what I'm saying, I can't just put it out there and wait for somebody to point it out. And so it takes me a lot longer to work through that. So a challenge for me is becoming a little bit more open about communicating.”

    2016-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: USV's Brad Burnham on Co-Founding USV with Fred Wilson, What They Look For In Potential Partners & Whether We Are Entering a Period of Consolidation or Expansion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Way to make friends. The funny thing is, I actually don't read a lot of blogs, and I'm not sure I have a good rationale for that. Of the partners here, I tend to read a bunch of academic papers, and they make fun of me for that. I get some privilege out of that level of abstraction. I don't know why, or some benefit out of that level of abstraction.”

    2016-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: USV's Brad Burnham on Co-Founding USV with Fred Wilson, What They Look For In Potential Partners & Whether We Are Entering a Period of Consolidation or Expansion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I think that we have fantastic opportunity to participate in the evolution of markets in ways that can help to be a catalyst for positive social change and making some small contribution to that would be success.”

    2016-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: USV's Brad Burnham on Co-Founding USV with Fred Wilson, What They Look For In Potential Partners & Whether We Are Entering a Period of Consolidation or Expansion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “You know, the thing about the venture capital business is you're kind of there at the creation, but you're not the creator. And so I'm constantly in awe of the people that we work with, the entrepreneurs that we meet and that we talk to and that we have the privilege of working with, they're the people that inspire me.”

    2016-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: USV's Brad Burnham on Co-Founding USV with Fred Wilson, What They Look For In Potential Partners & Whether We Are Entering a Period of Consolidation or Expansion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “There's a book called The Irrational Optimist. It's by a guy named Matt Ridley. I think it's a really interesting book. He's more recently written a book called The Evolution of Everything. Both of those books talk about how the world evolves and why. And I think they've been really helpful to me.”

    2016-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: USV's Brad Burnham on Co-Founding USV with Fred Wilson, What They Look For In Potential Partners & Whether We Are Entering a Period of Consolidation or Expansion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “And say, well, that was a real revelation, but I can say that every conversation I've had with an entrepreneur has been enlightening. And because we've tried to organize those conversations around a thesis, I think I've felt enlightened by all of those conversations.”

    2016-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: USV's Brad Burnham on Co-Founding USV with Fred Wilson, What They Look For In Potential Partners & Whether We Are Entering a Period of Consolidation or Expansion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Sounds about right. This is such an unbelievable privilege to be in the position that we're in. It's hard for me to, in a way, isolate a moment when I felt like I was learning more than any other moment. The fantastic thing about being in this business is you have this opportunity to become interested in an area, some initial forays into that area, begin to identify companies in that area. And then these really smart people will come in and talk to you and explain how the world's going to be different as a result of these things that they're working on. And you can ask all the dumb questions you want. And they politely answer them. And you can call them back a week later and say, I still don't understand. And they'll answer that question. And so as a platform for learning, this is the single greatest job in the world. And if you're a curious person, I don't think I can point to a single moment.”

    2016-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: USV's Brad Burnham on Co-Founding USV with Fred Wilson, What They Look For In Potential Partners & Whether We Are Entering a Period of Consolidation or Expansion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Long that interest has been sustained, even though that moment was 10 years ago. So that's the moment that I think about. In terms of the learnings,”

    2016-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: USV's Brad Burnham on Co-Founding USV with Fred Wilson, What They Look For In Potential Partners & Whether We Are Entering a Period of Consolidation or Expansion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Well, I think the stature changed in 2007 time frame. 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. That was a pretty exceptional run. It turns out that we've had a number of other good investments in the 2004 fund that have since returned the fund again. So that fund in general, it was a great fund. One of the things that's a little embarrassing about the venture capital industry is I think we're still getting a lot of credit for that fund and that moment, which is now almost 10 years ago, I do think we're thinking deeply about the market and the opportunity. And I think we continue to make good investments. But I'm frankly a little bit surprised at how much interest there has been in Union Square Ventures since then and how”

    2016-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: USV's Brad Burnham on Co-Founding USV with Fred Wilson, What They Look For In Potential Partners & Whether We Are Entering a Period of Consolidation or Expansion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I do think we're in it. When I was starting out in this business in the mid 90s, every pitch meeting ended with a question about, well, if Microsoft decides to enter your business, how are you going to survive? We see the same conversations now about Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon. If any of these companies decide they want to be in the sector that you're targeting, how do you plan to survive that? I do think it changes the way that venture capital industry is investing.”

    2016-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: USV's Brad Burnham on Co-Founding USV with Fred Wilson, What They Look For In Potential Partners & Whether We Are Entering a Period of Consolidation or Expansion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “The ability to continue to finance these in the private capital markets based on the assumption that they will get to those valuations that we saw in the sort of 2006, 7,8 time frame is going to be difficult.”

    2016-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: USV's Brad Burnham on Co-Founding USV with Fred Wilson, What They Look For In Potential Partners & Whether We Are Entering a Period of Consolidation or Expansion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Are we in an era of expansion or are we in an era of consolidation? And I'd argue that in the 2006-7 time frame when we were really beginning to discover for the first time what I would think of as the native opportunities for the web. These are opportunities that could not have existed prior to the internet. And so I think Google's in that category, Facebook's in that category, LinkedIn's in that category. There's a lot of services that would not have made sense except that we were now in a world where everyone was connected to everyone else. And that was a very expansive period when a lot of value was created. We're now in a world where we're seeing really dominant market power, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, 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 services space. And so I think”

    2016-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: USV's Brad Burnham on Co-Founding USV with Fred Wilson, What They Look For In Potential Partners & Whether We Are Entering a Period of Consolidation or Expansion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I don't know how to think about the degree to which that environment will continue. Obviously, the access to private capital has been greater than it's ever been, and the ability for a company to raise the amount of money that someone like Uber has raised in the private markets is unprecedented. And so will that continue? Should it continue? I'd argue it's probably not that healthy and that you're actually seeing some very weird dislocations when the scarcity of equity in the private capital markets for the real dominant market players, you end up bidding up the price for that to a price level that isn't sustained in the public markets. And that's a weird dislocation that I don't think can continue for too long. I think we will find an adjustment. But I think there's a bigger, larger problem that you touched on, this question of consolidation.”

    2016-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: USV's Brad Burnham on Co-Founding USV with Fred Wilson, What They Look For In Potential Partners & Whether We Are Entering a Period of Consolidation or Expansion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Look at, understand it from first principles to really understand not just what's the same, but what's different, what's rhyming and how to adapt to that new circumstance. A lot of people have a difficult time doing that.”

    2016-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: USV's Brad Burnham on Co-Founding USV with Fred Wilson, What They Look For In Potential Partners & Whether We Are Entering a Period of Consolidation or Expansion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Was a kind of a rinse and repeat attitude to technology differentiation, intellectual property protection, recycling the teams that was a model that worked really well. When the actions shifted to the applications layer in the 2000s, a lot of the people who had built a business over the 90s sort of looked for other sectors, material science, energy, green tech, places where they could use that same model because it no longer made sense in information technology because you weren't doing chips and routers. I think that that was the wrong move. The right move was to recognize that the fundamentals have changed so that yes, there were a bunch of elements that repeated themselves and we can talk about the way market consolidation happened in the 90s and the way it happened again more recently and understanding those dynamics. But the key is step back and look.”

    2016-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: USV's Brad Burnham on Co-Founding USV with Fred Wilson, What They Look For In Potential Partners & Whether We Are Entering a Period of Consolidation or Expansion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Think it's a very good lesson, and I think that the key part of that is recognizing that it doesn't repeat itself. I think one of the failure modes of venture capital is to assume that the past is the future and that you'll continue to see in the same models. I think that in the 90s, for instance, there was a lot of money made in the venture capital business investing in switches and routers and chips and sort of internet infrastructure. And the model for investing was very much around the technologists. You find an academic at a Berkeley or Stanford, and you'd surround them with 15 good engineers, and you would build a product, a router, and then you, after that first prototype was built, you'd recruit your first business team and ultimately you'd raise your series B around that business team. And then, you know, before you raised the Series C, you'd flip it to Cisco.”

    2016-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: USV's Brad Burnham on Co-Founding USV with Fred Wilson, What They Look For In Potential Partners & Whether We Are Entering a Period of Consolidation or Expansion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Commitment that I've seen in Fred before we started Uniscore Ventures and certainly afterwards that I think makes a great board member.”

    2016-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: USV's Brad Burnham on Co-Founding USV with Fred Wilson, What They Look For In Potential Partners & Whether We Are Entering a Period of Consolidation or Expansion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I think it's a combination of pragmatism, market knowledge, connections, willingness to invest time and energy. All of those things are important. The 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 up close and personal because he was very much still doing it in the early days of Takota and then in the early days of Union Square Ventures. And it's that kind of dedication to the entrepreneur's willingness to, you know, it's not about, you know, I mean, 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. And the willingness to do that is what gets you invited into the next winner. And I just think that it's that.”

    2016-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: USV's Brad Burnham on Co-Founding USV with Fred Wilson, What They Look For In Potential Partners & Whether We Are Entering a Period of Consolidation or Expansion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “We've tried to do Same thing with subsequent funds. So, you know, and John came in, somebody we've known very well. Andy Somebody we knew very well. And each time they came in working with us. Some basis that allowed us. Each other in a really meaningful way before In a single office, and we'll do it in the same sort of collaborative collegial way that we've done it so far.”

    2016-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: USV's Brad Burnham on Co-Founding USV with Fred Wilson, What They Look For In Potential Partners & Whether We Are Entering a Period of Consolidation or Expansion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Sort of compensate him for having brought Etsy to the partnership. And so we saw him in all of those contexts over a long period of time before he came into the partnership. It was a very smooth”

    2016-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: USV's Brad Burnham on Co-Founding USV with Fred Wilson, What They Look For In Potential Partners & Whether We Are Entering a Period of Consolidation or Expansion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Integrity. I also knew that he knew a heck of a lot more about technology than either Fred or I did. We saw that on display because we asked him to help out with Dakota early on and he helped come in and sort of played an interim CTO role for a few months and helped reorganize the technology platform there. And then after that recruited him to help build one of our first portfolio companies, a company called Delicious. Where he took over as the president to Joshua Schachter's founder and sort of chief product officer, you know, we watched him there and then... He also had been very actively involved in Etsy early on and brought Etsy to the partnership and we created a venture partner role for Albert”

    2016-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: USV's Brad Burnham on Co-Founding USV with Fred Wilson, What They Look For In Potential Partners & Whether We Are Entering a Period of Consolidation or Expansion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “In a single location, we like the idea that we were together every Monday and talking about the portfolio and thinking about new opportunities and thinking about the market. We had already been working for some time with Albert. I had known Albert since 1999 when he created an incubator and I was involved in helping there. And I got to watch him take that incubator through a very tough time. So I watched his behavior in the down market after 2000 and I was very impressed with him.”

    2016-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: USV's Brad Burnham on Co-Founding USV with Fred Wilson, What They Look For In Potential Partners & Whether We Are Entering a Period of Consolidation or Expansion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Well, so we had a couple of things in mind. Fred and I, when we began to build the team, we first of all enjoyed working with each other very much. I think we complemented each other very much. Fred is one of the best investors I've ever known. He's one of the best board members I've ever known. Obviously, a very good thinker about the business. I think that I added some value to that early days by really trying to narrow the thesis and refine our thinking and get us working on a common set of ideas. And those two things, I think, worked really well for us. When we started to think about adding somebody, we were certainly not interested in adding somebody that we didn't know. We wanted to preserve the very collegial feel of the partnership. We wanted that partnership to exist.”

    2016-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: USV's Brad Burnham on Co-Founding USV with Fred Wilson, What They Look For In Potential Partners & Whether We Are Entering a Period of Consolidation or Expansion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “I think it was 2003, we sat down to figure out whether or not we could raise a fund. We decided to go make an effort to do that. 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. And that was the beginning of Union Square Ventures.”

    2016-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: USV's Brad Burnham on Co-Founding USV with Fred Wilson, What They Look For In Potential Partners & Whether We Are Entering a Period of Consolidation or Expansion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “The history of ATT Ventures was actually kind of interesting in the 99 time frame AT&T decided that they no longer wanted to have an independent venture capital partnership that was running money for them, so they brought that activity back in-house. That led to ultimately to the dissolution of the partnership that was running that fund. So we continue to manage out that portfolio. But during that time that I was managing out the portfolio, I also ended up helping a friend Dave Morgan get a company called Takota Systems started. As a part of that process, I recruited another friend, Fred Wilson, to be an angel investor alongside me in the first angel round that funded that company. Very quickly it became clear that Dave did not need me on that founding team. And so Fred and I enjoyed working with each other enough on that board that we said, gosh, we should go do more of this.”

    2016-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: USV's Brad Burnham on Co-Founding USV with Fred Wilson, What They Look For In Potential Partners & Whether We Are Entering a Period of Consolidation or Expansion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “So I kind of backed into the venture business. I was working at ATT. I did a number of different things for them, but ultimately spun two different companies out of Bell Labs. The second of those was the catalyst for creating a venture capital group at AT&T. And then when that company was sold, I was invited to join the venture capital group as what they call an executive in residence. And the idea was that I was just going to spend a little time there and then go off and run another portfolio company. But while I was there, the guy who ran the East Coast portfolio left. And they said, to die, you're now a venture capitalist. And so that's 1995. I took over that portfolio and made a number of investments in sort of the late 90s and built what I would describe as a wind-aided track record in the late 90s, ended up in the venture capital business.”

    2016-07-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: USV's Brad Burnham on Co-Founding USV with Fred Wilson, What They Look For In Potential Partners & Whether We Are Entering a Period of Consolidation or Expansion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source