Founded & Funded

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.

In this episode of Founded and Funded, Madrona Managing Director Matt McIlwain and Partner Aseem Datar sit down with Qumulo CEO Bill Richter to talk about developing meaningful partnerships. Madrona was an early investor in Qumulo when it launched in 2012, and the company recently partnered with Microsoft to launch Qumulo on Azure as a Service. Startups often partner with large enterprise companies to accelerate growth, but there are benefits to both parties, and in this episode, we take a look at it from both perspectives.

In this episode of Founded and Funded, partner Aseem Datar sits down with co-founder of Spiceai.io, Luke Kim,  to talk about the power of building tools for developers, the difficulty of integrating AI (SpiceAI is making this easier for developers) and moving from a big company to building a startup. 

Madrona Partner, Chris Picardo, sits down with Terray Therapeutics founders (and brothers), Jacob and Eli Berlin as well as data scientist, Narbe Mardirossian to talk about the power of bringing together transformational wet lab processes with ML and AI to speed drug development.  Terray Therapeutics announced their Series A of $60 million in February of 2022 and this podcast follows that announcement.

How do you join a company and lead from the day one? And how do you do that when you come from a completely different work experience than your startup?  Trevor Thompson of TerraClear had a 14 year career in the Navy, including a decade as a Navy Seal,  and is now president of #agtech company, TerraClear. He talks to investor Elisa LaCava about the opportunity for companies to hire experienced veterans and how the company is executing on its mission to make a farmer’s life a little bit easier with their rock picker robot.   

Matt McIlwain and Ishani Ummat discuss the vision, methodology and top level insights from the first IA40 list. 

Aseem talks about growing up in Mumbai with "jugaad" all around him - the Hindi word for 'Hustle', how he made his way to Seattle, to Microsoft and to Madrona.  Aseem joined Madrona this year as a partner after 17 years at Microsoft working in entrepreneurial roles and growing businesses like Azure from the underdog to a contender.  

Madrona Partner, Chris Picardo, sits down with Dr. Ali Ansary, founder &  CEO of Ozette Technologies. Chris and Ali talk about Ozette’s mission to uncover hidden information about the immune system to help with the efficacy of cancer treatments. Ali also speaks about the unique ability of biotech companies to attract traditional tech talent. 

Madrona Investor, Ishani Ummat, sits down with Shirish Nadkarni, serial entrepreneur, now angel investor and author of FROM STARTUP TO EXIT, out from Harper Collins Aug 2021.  Ishani and Shirish talk about starting a company, finding your co-founder, product market fit and how to choose your investors.