Brendan M. Burns

Founder & Managing Director
Stepping Stone Capital Partners, LLC

Brendan Burns has spent over 20 years at leading technology and financial institutions including Moody’s Investors Service, Salomon Brothers, Vigilar and AdOne, an Internet software pioneer.

Currently Burns is the founder and Managing Director of Stepping Stone Capital Partners, LLC.  SSCP is a growth-stage focused advisory and merchant banking firm.  The firm specializes in early and growth stage capital raising, venture investment, M&A and turnarounds across the technology, digital media and consumer products industries.  Additionally, Burns is a principal and investor in Schneider Selections, LLC, an entrepreneurial firm specializing in new business concepts in the wine industry.

Prior to Stepping Stone, Burns spent the prior six years working on turnarounds, including Vigilar, an information security company and EIS (now readMedia), the leading regional press release distribution company and publisher of political information in the Northeast. In both companies, Burns (at Vigilar as CFO and at EIS as CEO and publisher) led a financial and strategic repositioning of the business that impacted all areas of its business including marketing, branding, product and corporate structure.  He also raised a significant outside debt and equity financing and brought in new management team executives.  Vigilar was sold in September 2008 at a 5x return on capital invested.  Burns stake in EIS resulted in a 3x return on capital invested.

Earlier in Burns’ career, as the founding CFO at AdOne (founded in 1995 as a pioneering Internet advertising company), Burns led a series of successful financings from leading venture firms including Venrock, Lawrence, Smith & Horey and New World Ventures (representing the Pritzker family interests).  Under Burns’ guidance, the company became a pioneer in dynamic Internet classified advertising and grew to represent newspaper clients approximating 50% of total US daily newspaper circulation.  In the late 1990’s Burns engineered a management buyout through backing by 12 major U.S. media companies including Advance/Newhouse, Hearst, Scripps and MediaNews.

Upon becoming CEO in 1998, Burns was responsible for coordinating the financial aspects of three successful strategic acquisitions, two major restructuring efforts, and obtained total financing of $55 million from a mix of strategic and financial investors.  Following an extensive merger and restructuring, the Company made it through the “Internet bubble” emerging as a profitable entity with revenue of over $20 million per annum and 150 employees.

Burns has a Master’s in Corporate Finance and Entrepreneurship from the Graduate Business School of Columbia University and earned his Bachelors of Science degree from Fordham University.  Since 2004, Burns has been an adjunct professor in the Lang Center for Entrepreneurship at Columbia’s Graduate Business School and serves on the Advisory board of the Lang Fund which invests in promising student-originated startups.