Given a projective variety X over a field of characteristic 0, and a positive integer r, we study the rth secant variety of Veronese re-embeddings of X. In particular, I'll explain recent work which shows that the degrees of the minimal equations (and more generally, syzygies) defining these secant varieties can be bounded in terms of X and r independent of the Veronese embedding. This is based on http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.04904 and http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.01722.