In this episode of Founded and Funded, we stray a little from our typical format to answer some questions that often come up in discussions between founders and our investors. Madrona Managing Director Matt McILwain talks with one of our Limited Partners — or the partners of ours that are not the day-to-day investors — Top Tier Capital Partners Founder and Managing Director David York. They explore different kinds of funding mechanisms, the current market conditions, and a bit of a history between the two firms – more specifically, why this San Francisco-based firm decided to bet on Seattle and Madrona all those years ago!

In this episode of Founded and Funded, Madrona Partner Chris Picardo dives into the world of crypto and Web3 with Sila Co-Founder and CEO Shamir Karkal. Sila is a FinTech platform that provides payment infrastructure as a service and sits at the intersection of crypto rails and traditional financial services infrastructure — because as much as some people want to get away from the traditional financial system, crypto still needs to be able to plug into it. Shamir and Chris dive into the importance of this infrastructure, the ups and downs of the crypto market, the trends driving FinTech and crypto, and so much more! 

In this episode of Founded and Funded, we spotlight IIA40 winner Snorkel AI. Managing Director Tim Porter not only talks with Snorkel Co-founder and CEO Alex Ratner all about data-centric AI and programmatic data labeling and development, but they also dive into the importance of culture — especially now — and how to take advantage of what Alex calls "one of the most historic opportunities for growth in AI." 

In this episode of Founded and Funded Madrona Investors Aseem Datar and Sabrina Wu sit down with robotics expert and University of Washington Professor Sidd Srinivasa to talk about the technology and sociological trends that are leading to innovation in the robotics space, where Sidd sees opportunities for founders, and why now it is a time to pay attention to what's happening in the space. Sidd also shares why he is what he calls an "accidental roboticist" and some of the hard-learned lessons from throughout his extensive career.

Madrona investor, Ishani Ummat, speaks with PitchBook Data leader, Daniel Cook, about bringing machine intelligence to the IA40 list.  Their new algorithm takes many data points and creates a company score to predict company outcome probability.  They previewed this work by analyzing last year’s IA40 list and found that late stage companies were 60% more likely to IPO.  Listen as Ishani and Daniel talk numbers and what it means for companies building intelligent applications.

This week on Founded and Funded, we spotlight our next IA40 winner – SeekOut. Investor Ishani Ummat talks to SeekOut Co-founder and CEO Anoop Gupta and VP of People Jenny Armstrong-Owen about their AI-powered intelligence platform, the importance of not only finding and recruiting new hires but also developing and retaining employees within a company, and maintaining SeekOut's own culture while seeing significant growth over the last year. 

This week on Founded and Funded, we spotlight our next IA40 winners – Hugging Face and OctoML. Managing Director Matt McIlwain talks to Hugging Face Co-founder and CEO Clem Delangue and OctoML Co-founder and CEO Luis Ceze all about foundation models, diving deep into the importance of detecting biases in the data being used to train models as well the importance of transparency and the ability for researchers to share their models. They discuss open source, business models, the role of cloud providers and debate DevOps versus MLOps, something that Luis feels particularly passionate about. Clem even explains how large models are to machine learning like what Formula 1 is to the car industry.

This week on Founded and Funded, we spotlight our next IA40 winner – Starburst Data. Managing Director Matt McIlwain talks to co-founder and CEO Justin Borgman about how launching his first company was like getting a Ph.D. in entrepreneurship, and then they dive into the customer problem Justin saw that made him believe the time was right to launch his second — Starburst. The two discuss open-source alignment, why making use of cloud partnerships early, especially cloud marketplaces, can be so beneficial for startups, why Starburst had to change the name of its query engine from Presto to Trino, and Justin’s guidance for creating a future-proof architecture. 

In this episode of Founded and Funded, Madrona is launching a special series to highlight some of its IA40 winners, starting with RunwayML, which offers web-based video editing tools that utilize machine learning to automate what used to take video editors hours if not days to accomplish. Madrona Investor Ishani Ummat speaks with Co-founder and CEO Cristobal Valenzuela all about where the idea came from, how he decided to launch a company instead of joining Adobe – and even how TikTok fits into all of this. Listen now to hear all about it.

Madrona just wrapped our annual meeting, which we were able to have in person for the first time in three years.  The meeting, with about 150 attendees this year, was a much-needed dose of human connection that reminded many Madrona investors why they got into this business in the first place — people and more specifically — great founders. During the day's events, the audience heard about Madrona's results, of course, but the stars of the show were the founders and leaders at our companies — and we took the opportunity to check in with them on this week's episode of Founded and Funded.