Founded & Funded

Troop Travel founders Dennis Vilovic and Leonard Cremer discuss the startup journey, including finding the right problem to solve, when to bring on experts, identifying the right investors, and the importance of working closely with customers. They also touch on strategic meeting location selection, the benefits of cloud native technologies in the travel industry, integrating data providers, building a global team, and their vision for the future of Troop Travel.

Get to know Madrona Managing Director Karan Mehandru. Learn what drew him to venture capital and working with founders, what he looks for in founders, what he thinks founders should look for in VC partners, and what he enjoys doing outside the office.       (00:00:00) Introduction (00:01:00) Madrona Managing Partner Karan Mehandru's background (00:01:33) Why venture capital (00:02:50) Founders: Become the best version of yourself (00:04:58) Understand the person behind titles and roles (00:05:44) What Karan looks for in founders (00:06:52) Visionary founders (00:07:34) The role of grit and intellectual honesty (00:08:50) How Founders should select partners/investors (00:11:36) Biggest changes Karan's seen over his career (00:13:56) What has stayed the same (00:14:52) Cats or dogs (00:15:46) Karan's book recommendation (00:17:07) What Karan does outside of the office

Today, Madrona Managing Director S. Somasegar talks with Statsig founder and CEO Vijaye Raji, who spent 20 years at Microsoft and Facebook before launching Statsig as a way to bring the powerful tools he was used to using inside Facebook to all builders. Statsig experimentation platform and automated AB testing helps companies make product decisions in a data-driven way at scale, which means shipping the right products faster. Vijaye and Soma go way back and take a little trip down memory lane, talking about Microsoft’s Small Basic. But then they dive into what it’s like transitioning from big tech to a founder, the importance of data-driven decision-making, integrating AI into those decisions, identifying the ideal customer profile, and learning how to sell your product. Something that did not come naturally to Vijaye. He and Soma talk about all of this and so much more.   You can read a transcript of this conversation here: https://www.madrona.com/statsig-founder-vijaye-raji-product-building-launching-a-startup-ai/

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