BRETT BYERS

Brett is a Managing Director of Partner Ventures V and VI.   Since 2013, Brett and Blake have invested together via Partner Ventures with their own funds and on behalf of third-party investors.  Starting in 2009 and while at VCFA, Brett led several successful investments backing Blake and Partner Ventures.

Prior to joining Partner Ventures, Brett led venture capital investing as a Managing Director for VCFA Group, with over $730 million committed to management, for well over a decade.  At VCFA, Brett established and led VCFA’s San Francisco office and pioneered several areas of secondary investing, such as SBIC restructurings, and increasingly focused on purchases of direct interests in private companies over time.  Brett was deeply involved in the full range of management responsibilities at VCFA, including firm strategy, general management, fundraising, hiring, training, team management, investment strategy, deal sourcing and negotiation, due diligence, financial analysis and financial reporting.

Prior to his time as a venture capital investor, Brett was General Counsel and Vice President, Investor Relations of 8×8, a publicly traded semiconductor manufacturer now focused on business communications systems. He also served as a corporate and securities attorney with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Palo Alto, California and with the New York office of Mayer Brown, serving the venture capital and buyout community, investment banks and public and private operating companies in private fund formations, private and public company investments, joint ventures, merger and acquisitions, public offerings and technology licensing.

Brett began his career as a designer of VLSI semiconductors, central processing units (CPUs) and computer systems with Raytheon’s Missile Systems Division and Kendall Square Research, a massively parallel processor supercomputer maker.  There is one issued patent with Brett as a co-inventor: “System for inserting instructions into processor instruction stream in order to perform interrupt processing”, US Patent Number 5,822,578A, Issued Oct 13, 1998.

Brett serves, and has served, as an active board representative for a number of private portfolio companies.

Brett has served as a member of several charitable boards, including that of Rainforest Trust.  He co-authored a peer-reviewed scientific paper in Nature Climate Change relating to tropical forest conservation and restoration.

Brett received a BS in electrical engineering from Cornell University and a JD from Yale Law School.