Brad Svrluga

General Partner

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Brad focuses his investing activities on web services and digital media. At High Peaks, he has led the firm’s successfully exited investments in Pump Audio (sold to Getty Images), Threadsmith (sold to Vistaprint), and Allworx (sold to PAETEC). At BCI, amongst the investments he was responsible for were HealthShare (sold to WebMD) and Profile Systems (sold to AT&T).

Brad leads High Peaks’ efforts in the New York City market, and is an active participant in the NYC venture community. He is a graduate of Williams College, where he captained the rugby team and majored in economics.

Brad blogs at canibuyavowel.wordpress.com

I am intensely committed to education, and especially to access for the less fortunate. I pursue that passion through my support of BART Charter School, where my wife Julia is the founding Executive Director, and my decade-plus involvement as a board member at Summer Search, an incredible inner city youth development program that is based in the Bay Area and with additional operations in Boston, NYC, Philadelphia, and Seattle. I’m also a theater fan, and board member of the Tony Award-winning Williamstown Theatre Festival.

I suffered long as a Red Sox fan, struggle with my golf game, thrive with my skiing, and really wish I could still knock you down on a rugby pitch or throw a fastball you couldn’t catch up to. I’m dead certain that being a dad is way harder than being a VC, but I’ve been doing the latter for more than 12 years, and the former only 3.

STUFF YOU WOULDN’T KNOW

First Job:
I grew up in a fishing town on the coast of Massachusetts. My first job was working in a small outfit that built and repaired wooden lobster traps for the local fleet. Lots of pounding nails and bruised thumbs. These guys weren’t innovators, though, so the switch to wire traps caught them flat-footed and they’re long gone.

Greatest Life Experience:
I took a three-month sabbatical after working for a year in South Africa and hitchhiked solo around southern and eastern Africa with a backpack and no particular agenda. It’s a liberating feeling to wake up thousands of miles from home and realize that nobody knows where you are, you are accountable to no one, and responsible for nothing but getting yourself fed.

Most Humbling Life Experiences:
Touring England with my college rugby team, a scheduling miscommunication had us misrepresented as the American Collegiate All Star team, and thus we had a game scheduled against a London Suburban All Star side. We lost 93-0, only because they were polite enough not to run it up past 100.

Random Fact:
My small immediate family is the only group of Svrlugas in the world – there are 7 of us who were born with the name. When my great-grandfather came to the US it was spelled Svrljuga (silent J, and not a terribly uncommon name in Croatia), but the folks at Ellis Island made him drop the J. Some have suggested they didn’t go far enough in their efforts to make it easier.