Founded & Funded

This week, Madrona Managing Director Karan Mehandru hosts Madrona Operating Partner Anna Baird. The operating partner role is a new one for Madrona, and we're excited to have her on the team to advise our founders. Before transitioning to board positions in the last couple of years, Anna was most recently the CRO at Outreach. Before that, she was the COO at Outreach, and before that, she was the CFO at several companies. That trifecta of C-Suite experience gives Anna a unique perspective to help founders navigate any blind spots they may have. Anna and Karan, who is on the board of Outreach, dive into how the sales profession has changed, how the role of the CRO has changed since COVID, how to talk to customers, how to build high-performance sales teams, go-to-market strategy, AI's role in sales, and so much more. These two tackle it all, and it's a must-listen. Transcript: https://www.madrona.com/karan-mehandru-anna-baird-go-to-market-strategy/ Chapters: (00:00:40) Introduction(00:02:14) How Anna Baird got into tech with an accounting major?(00:06:13) Changes in the sales profession since COVID.(00:09:56) Creating a go-to-market strategy.(00:12:38) Balancing growth and profitability.(00:15:05) Building a high-performance sales team.(00:18:31) Why Madrona?(00:22:21) Don't try to make failure look pretty.(00:24:27) Is AI going to take all the sales jobs away? (00:25:43) Book recommendation.

Madrona Partner Aseem Datar hosts Tigera CEO Ratan Tipirneni. Tigera is in the business of preventing and detecting security breaches in cloud-native applications, and its open-source offering Calico is one of the most widely adopted container networking and security solutions out there. Aseem and Ratan dive into whether or not you should open source, the three business models founders should evaluate when thinking about commercializing an open-source project, how to compete with free, how product-led growth can really kickstart your business compared to traditional go-to-market, and so much more. Words of wisdom from Ratan Tipirneni:  You need to be thinking about commercialization even as you’re launching the open-source offering. Wait to launch a commercial product until you reach a minimum critical mass in your community. Don’t put everything in the open-source bucket. It leaves you no other option but to monetize through commercial support, which is not a very defensible business. Trying to compete with free by offering more free stuff is a losing battle. It is a fallacy to assume that just because you’re offering free software a user will adopt it.  Stick to fundamentals – be clear about who your end users are and what their pain points are. Everything else will take care of itself. Stars are a vanity metric that can be gamed. Signs of daily usage, the growth rate, and user feedback are better places to start.

Get to know Maria Gilfoyle, a venture capitalist with a design-first mindset focus. She shares her journey from wanting to become an artist to her career in venture capital. Highlights include the importance of user needs, user-focused investment decisions, analyzing companies' industry focus and go-to-market strategies, essential books for founders, and exercising as a form of relaxation.

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/