In this week's episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Managing Director Matt McIlwain hosts NYSE Group President Lynn Martin ahead of our Intelligent Applications Summit on October 10th and 11th. Lynn will be speaking at the Summit, but we thought it would be great to have her on the show to talk more about her background, the NYSE, capital markets, IPOs, and, of course, the role data, AI, and large language models are playing in the markets and in companies broadly! This conversation couldn’t come at a better time now that we’re seeing a number of tech companies teeing up IPO plans. Lynn thinks we’ll be back to a more “normal” IPO environment in 2024 – but you have to listen to get her full take! You can also read the transcript here: https://www.madrona.com/nyses-lynn-martin-on-capital-markets-ipo-trends-and-the-role-ai-is-playing-in-the-markets/

Jeff Huber, Co-founder and CEO of Chroma, discusses the importance of purpose-built solutions and the pain point of taking machine learning projects from demo to production. The podcast also explores the challenges of building machine learning models and advancements in language models, the availability of resources in the AI space, Chroma's journey and community building, and lessons on acquiring and retaining talent in startups.

In this episode, Madrona Partner Jon Turow and Cohere CTO and Co-founder Ivan Zhang discuss the world of foundation models for the enterprise. Ivan shares his renegade journey, renegade hiring practices, importance of feedback loops with customers, and the difference between fine-tuning and teaching a model. They also explore the role of home rolled and hosted models, implications of foundation models in organizations, and share insights about surprising advancements and future predictions in technology.

This week we have the pleasure of having former Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia on the show again. Bob is an active investor and sits on the boards of many next-generation data platform companies, and more recently, he launched his first book — "The Datapreneurs." Given the long history between Bob and Madrona Managing Partner Soma, we had to have Bob joins us again to talk about his new book and dive into the world of data and AI. These two old friends discuss what exactly a datapreneur is and the Arc of Data Innovation concept Bob wrote about in his book. They also talk through how companies can add value with AI through copilots and agents and what white spaces and opportunities there are for entrepreneurs right now — especially when it comes to semantic models. You can read a transcript of this episode here: https://www.madrona.com/bob-muglia-datapreneurs-podcast/

Former Tableau CEO Mark Nelson and Google's James Phillips discuss modern app development, data analytics, and scaling amidst competition. They explore the advantages of Power BI as a SaaS service, building products from scratch, addressing data challenges, and share parting advice for building successful companies and solving customer problems.

In this episode, Madrona Managing Director Soma Somasegar talks with Typeface Founder and CEO Abhay Parasnis. Typeface combines generative AI platforms with its own brand-personalized AI, so all businesses can create content that is multimodal and on-brand. Typeface just announced $100 million in new funding, and Madrona couldn’t have been happier to participate in the round. Abhay and Soma have known each other for almost 20 years from their time at Microsoft. But In 2022, Abhay left Adobe, where he was CTO and CPO, because he saw an inflection point coming that he wanted to be a part of. This was, of course, before ChatGPT and all the other popular GenAI tools that we’ve all been playing with this year even came out. Typeface has made waves quickly, attracting Fortune 500 customers and partnering with Salesforce and Google Cloud. In this week’s episode, Abhay shares about the need to balance your passion and recklessness for going after a dream with a product that you know will resonate with customers. He explains that people relationships are the real currency when launching a new company, and how advisers are just as important as what he calls the flag planters and road builders that founders need to seek out, to help them on their startup journey. These two industry veterans share all of this and so much more. You can read a transcript of this episode here: https://www.madrona.com/typeface-abhay-parasnis-shaping-enterprise-genai-strategy/   Chapters: (00:00:00) Origin of Typeface (00:00:32) Welcome and summary by Coral Garnick Ducken (00:02:02) Introduction to Abhay Parasnis (00:03:15) Build products customers want (00:05:05) Maintain a beginner's mindset (00:06:21) How experience at "Big Tech" prepares you to become a founder (00:06:54) Leaving Adobe before ChatGPT launched (00:09:21) Genesis of Typeface (00:14:18) Generative AI vs. previous waves - mobile, cloud, etc. (00:15:55) "Escaping the glass" (00:19:15) Strategic partnerships to innovate faster (00:22:35) Iterating on a product for a customer (00:26:25) Building a team and culture (00:29:40) Advisers are equally important as team (00:31:15) Saying no to good ideas is an important skill! (00:32:48) GenAI Scouts  

Get to know Madrona Partner Vivek Ramaswami. Learn what drew him to venture capital and working with founders, what he looks for in founders, where he focuses, and what he enjoys doing outside the office.   (00:00:00) Introduction (00:00:15) Vivek Ramaswami’s background (00:00:55) Why venture capital  (00:02:47) What Vivek looks for in founders  (00:04:38) One thing every founder needs (00:06:54) Sectors in which Vivek is interested (00:09:33) Why Madrona (00:11:24) Vivek's book recommendation (00:13:16) What Vivek does outside of the office

In this week's IA40 spotlight episode of Founded & Funded, Investor Sabrina Wu talks with Airtable Co-founder and CEO Howie Liu. Airtable is a low-code platform that enables teams to easily build workflows that modernize their business processes. The company launched in 2012 and has been on a product-led journey since then. Last year, Airtable ranked number three in the growth stage section of the intelligent applications 40. And just in May, the company announced new embedded AI capabilities to make it possible for teams to integrate powerful AI into their data and workflows. In this episode, learn about Howie's transition from a first-time founder to a second-time founder, the lessons he took with him from that journey, and how he decided to go up against the dominant forces in the low-code productivity tools space when he was only a few years out of school. As Howie explains it, to be a founder, you really have to have the perfect balance of naivety and pragmatism, but you'll have to listen to hear his explanation. You can read the transcript of this conversation here: https://www.madrona.com/airtable-howie-liu-no-code-apps-product-led-growth-ai-enabled-workflows/  

This week, Madrona Managing Director Tim Porter talks to Numbers Station Co-founders Chris Aberger and Ines Chami. We announced our investment in Numbers Station’s $17.5M Series A in March and are very excited about the work they’re doing with foundation models, which is very different than what has been making headlines this year. It isn’t content or image generation – Numbers Station is bringing the transformational power of AI inside of those foundation models to the data-wrangling problems we’ve all felt! You can't analyze data if the data is not prepared and transformed, which in the past has been a very manual process. With Numbers Station, the co-founders are hoping to reduce some of the bifurcation that exists between data engineers, data scientists, and data analysts, bridging the gaps in the analytics workflow! Chris and Ines talk about some of the challenges and solutions related to using foundation models in enterprise settings, the importance of having humans in the loop — and they share where the name Numbers Station came from. But, you’ll have to listen to learn that one! You can read a transcript of this conversation here: https://www.madrona.com/numbers-station/

Get to know Madrona Partner Jon Turow. Learn why he got into VC, what he looks for in founders, where the opportunities lay for founders when it comes to generative AI, and what he enjoys doing outside the office.   (00:00:00) Introduction (00:00:39) Jon Turow's background (00:01:19) Why venture capital (00:02:27) Why Madrona (00:03:20) Opportunities in generative AI (00:05:35) What Jon looks for in founders (00:07:02) Jon's book recommendations (00:08:58) What Jon does for fun