Founded & Funded

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

This week on Founded & Funded, Madrona Partner Vivek Ramaswami talks to Jack Naglieri, Founder and CEO of 2022 IA40 winner Panther Labs. Jack founded Panther, a leading cloud-native security information and event management platform, because he had experienced first-hand the threat detection challenges companies have at cloud scale. Growing frustrated with the compromises required by traditional SIEM platforms, Jack took his experiences from Yahoo and Airbnb and set out to build a solution that detects and responds to suspicious activity in real time. In this IA40 spotlight episode, Jack shares where the inspiration to launch his own company came from – hint it was from a cold email he received. He also breaks down why he decided to take the leap and become an entrepreneur and what it’s like transitioning from a software engineer to a founder and then to a successful founder. Jack also shares details about what it takes to land – and keep — your first customer and provides some advice about how CEOs should be the only ones learning on the job. But you’ll have to listen to get all the details.

This week, Madrona Partner Jon Turow brings us a story about a great partnership forming between two people, who had never even met, when they each find themselves on a mission to focus on what it is they do best. You’ll hear from Hannes Mühleisen, creator of the DuckDB open-source project, and Jordan Tigani, the database leader who saw an opportunity to commercialize it, about the lightning-bolt moment that led to one of them flying halfway around the world to meet — how does this happen and how do they set their partnership up to be the foundation of a really big business while still supporting the open-source community? Jon gets into all of this and so much more. MotherDuck and DuckDB have become integral for students of the modern data stack, but this story of inspiration, partnership, and execution is something that builders everywhere can learn from.    (00:00:00) Introduction (00:01:27) Jordan's background (00:01:48) Hannes background, launching DuckDB (00:04:29) Customer feedback in an academic environment (00:06:22) Landing on DuckDB Labs (00:08:13) Should DuckDB launch a commercialized product? (00:10:10) Jordan's intro to DuckDB (00:13:57) Deeper dive into Jordan's expertise (00:16:12) Jordan and Hannes meeting for the first time (00:18:53) Hannes was approached by others to commercialize DuckDB (00:21:32) Scale up vs. scale out (00:24:27) What can MotherDuck do that wasn't possible before (00:28:01) What Hannes has learned through this journey (00:28:51) What Jordan has learned through this journey (00:30:07) Wrap-up

Today we have the pleasure of hosting GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke! He and Madrona Partner Aseem Datar talk about how Thomas got into working with computers and coding and the work he's been doing since becoming GitHub CEO in November 2021, including the recent launch of Copilot X. But these two discuss so much more, including the rise of generative AI, talking about everything from how it is a new way for developers – everyone really – to express their creativity to how it democratizes many skills and access to those skills. They also discuss how the constantly evolving world developers have always worked in has set them up with the perfect safety network to leverage generative AI to its fullest potential. Thomas also offers up advice for people just launching a startup. But you'll have to listen to hear it all.   You can read a transcript of this conversation here: https://www.madrona.com/github-ceo-thomas-dohmke-copilot-generative-ai/   Chapters (00:00:00) Introduction (00:01:31) GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke's background (00:02:55) Thomas on generative AI (00:05:33) What does genAI mean for developers (00:09:47) What should developers be excited about  (00:14:52) Thomas Dohmke's advice for early entrepreneurs (00:17:20) Open-source projects that excite Thomas  (00:20:30) Low-code No-code to democratize development  (00:22:25) Wrap-up

In this week’s IA40 Spotlight Episode, Madrona Investor Sabrina Wu talks with Credo AI Founder and CEO Navrina Singh. Founded in 2020, Credo’s intelligent responsible AI governance platform helps companies minimize AI-related risk by ensuring their AI is fair, compliant, secure, auditable, and human-centered. The company announced a $12.8M Series A last summer to continue its mission of empowering every organization in the world to create AI with the highest ethical standards. Navrina and Sabrina dive into this world of governance and risk assessment and why navrina wanted to make governance front and center rather than an afterthought in the quickly evolving world of AI. Navrina is not why about what she thinks we should all be worried about when it comes to the abilities of LLM and generative AI and her passion for an “AI-first, ethics-forward" approach to Artificial intelligence. These two discuss the different compliance and guardrail needs for companies within the generative AI ecosystem and so much more.

This week, we’re excited to release a special live episode recorded during the community event portion of the Madrona 2023 annual meeting. Managing Director Matt McIlwain talks with Madrona Alumni and Acquired Podcast Hosts Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal. The three reflect on Acquired episode No. 28, which dove into the Amazon IPO with the late Madrona Co-founder and original Amazon Board Member Tom Alberg, and the early days getting the show off the ground from the Madrona offices.

Madrona Managing Director Soma dives into the world of intelligent applications and generative AI with Common Room Co-founder and CTO Viraj Mody. Madrona first invested in Common Room in 2020 — and we had the pleasure of having the founders join us on Founded & Funded the following year. Common Room is an intelligent community growth platform that combines engagement data from platforms like LinkedIn, Slack, Twitter, Reddit, GitHub, and others with product usage and CRM data to surface insights from across an organization’s entire user community. Customers like Figma, OpenAI, and Grafana Labs use Common Room to better understand their users and quickly identify the people, problems, and conversations that should matter most to those organizations. Soma and Viraj dive into the importance of deeply understanding the problem you’re trying to solve as a startup — and how that will feed into your product iterations — why organizations need a 360-degree profile of their user base, how Common Room has utilized foundation models to build intelligence — not just generative intelligence — into its platform — and so much more.

Get to know Madrona Managing Partner Matt McIlwain. Learn where he gets his spark to work with entrepreneurs, 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.