Dan Burstein co-founded Millennium Technology Value Partners with Sam Schwerin in 2002. He has been actively involved in many of Millennium's most important investments including Facebook/Meta Platforms, Alibaba, and Spotify and led the firm's investment in Twitter.
Before Millennium, Dan was Senior Advisor at The Blackstone Group, where he worked for 12 years in a variety of capacities. Over the course of his career, he has been a consultant to the CEOs and senior executives of major global corporations including Sony, Toyota, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems.
Dan has also served on more than a dozen public and private company boards. He has been a Forum Fellow at the World Economic Forum in Davos and has been honored many times for his books and journalistic work, including awards from the Overseas Press Club and Sigma Delta Chi. He and Sam Schwerin have co-authored thought-leading articles on the Direct Secondary Market and the ever-growing, ever-evolving role of alternative liquidity solutions to address the needs of constituents in the venture capital ecosystem.
Dan has made personal venture capital investments since 1983, when he first worked as a consultant in Silicon Valley. He began making institutional venture capital investments in the second half of the 1990s. He articulated and led an investment thesis that focused on early-stage companies building backbone infrastructure for the internet and enhancing the security, reliability, and user experience of the web. The small funds he led experienced extraordinary returns available in that time period for this investment thesis. Much of the capital Dan invested in that period was in startups and early-stage companies.
The New York Times bestselling author of 15 books, Dan has written about technology trends, global economic issues, and popular culture. Among his path-breaking books are Yen! a 1988global bestseller about the rise of Japanese financial power; Road Warriors, a 1995 book about the birth of digital media and the early days of the internet; Big Dragon, a 1998 book about China's future; Secrets of the Code, a 2004 guidebook to the Da Vinci Code that was on the New York Times bestseller list for six months; Blog! a pioneering 2005 book about the birth of social media; Secrets of 24,about the political, moral, and technological issues in the TV series"24," and Secrets of Inferno: In the Footsteps of Dante and Dan Brown (2013).
His 2011 book, THE TATTOOED GIRL: The Enigma of Stieg Larsson and the Secrets Behind the Most Compelling Thrillers of our Time, was nominated for the prestigious Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Dan's books have been published in 33 languages and several have been turned into documentary films. THE IVY HERO: The Brave Life of Sergeant William Shemin is his most recent book (2022), co-written with a cousin, about a World War I hero and relative who received the Medal of Honor posthumously—and a century late—owing to the anti-Semitism prevailing at the time of WW I.
Dan is a frequent speaker at venture capital events and is often asked to help judge venture capital competitions. He has made numerous TV appearances on CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, and the History Channel and has written more than a thousand articles for well-known magazines and newspapers.
AlwaysOn named Dan to its lists of the "Power Players" in New York’s venture capital community, the top 100 Power Players in Digital Media, and the top venture capitalists in the U.S. He is a frequent speaker and judge at the youngStartUp Venture Summits.
Dan has written poetry since childhood. In recent years, a growing body of his poetic work is devoted to themes that come from the worlds of business, technology, AI, the Metaverse, and other issues involving the techno-future that is rapidly coming towards us all.
