The learn-it-all who never left.
He showed up at First Round Capital in 2008 as a college intern from NYU - and he is still there. That sounds like inertia. It is the opposite. Brett Berson looked at an early-stage VC firm when it was young and scrappy, decided it was the most interesting place to learn how companies are actually built, and spent 15 years making himself indispensable - first as an associate, then VP of Platform, then Partner, then co-leader of the whole operation. One firm, one compounding bet, no regrets.
His NYU degrees were in Economics and Film. The economics part is expected. The film part is what makes Berson different. He spent years studying how thousands of micro-decisions - lighting, casting, blocking, score - accumulate into something that either moves people or doesn't. He carried that lens into venture. "Successful companies are similarly built on countless choices that compound over time," he has said. He does not look at a startup and see a cap table. He watches for whether the founders are making the right micro-decisions before anyone else notices them.
That film education also came with an unexpected bonus. When First Round decided to make holiday videos, Berson produced them. They went viral, accumulating millions of views. It was the first proof of something he would spend the next decade building in earnest: that a VC firm could have a genuine media voice - not a newsletter full of press releases, but real editorial journalism that founders actually wanted to read.
The First Round Review was Berson's most enduring creation. Launched in 2013, it became the model for how venture firms use content - not as marketing dressed up as advice, but as genuine deep-dives into how the best founders solve hard problems. Over 500 profiles. Tens of millions of readers. When a startup operator needs a framework for hiring their first VP Sales or diagnosing why their product isn't sticking, the Review is where they land. Berson has called it the firm's way of "transforming a collection of individual companies into a hyper-connected community of entrepreneurs." That is a precise description of what community actually means when it works.
From the Review came the podcast. "In Depth" launched in 2020 - same signature depth, same refusal to let guests give TED-Talk-polished answers, now with Brett's voice on the other end asking the follow-ups. Episodes with Canva's Cameron Adams, Postman's Abhinav Asthana, and Zipline's Keller Cliffton have become required listening for company builders who want operational specificity, not inspiration. Listeners compare it to reading Ben Horowitz's "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" in real time.
His investment instincts track with his editorial ones. He backed Clay - now a $3.1 billion go-to-market platform - at the seed stage, back when it was a tool most people had never heard of. He invested in Persona, the identity verification platform whose founder Rick Song remains closely involved in sales at enterprise scale, a dynamic Berson has publicly called essential to platform business success. And Stedi, the API-first EDI company founded by Zack Kanter, which raised a $70M Series B from Stripe and Addition. Three companies, three different categories, one connecting thread: founder-led, technically precise, and operating in spaces where a $3.5M seed bet can look prescient years later.
He also built Angel Track - a program designed to help operators become better angel investors. It is characteristically Berson: take something (angel investing) that is usually learned through expensive trial and error, build a curriculum around the actual patterns, and make it available to the First Round community. He named himself a "learn-it-all at heart" - a deliberate inversion of know-it-all, and the posture he brings to every company he meets.
In 2015, Forbes named him to its 30 Under 30 list in Venture Capital. He has been at First Round for 18 years now. His Twitter bio reads: "An aspiring learn-it-all. Trying to make @firstround a little better every day for 18 years." Understated for someone who co-leads the firm. But that is the point. The interesting VCs are the ones who show up and build something, not the ones who announce it.