Founded & Funded
Madrona Ventures
Listen to conversations between Madrona investors and entrepreneurs, founders, and startup personalities who talk about some of the key moments in building a company. Designed to give would-be founders and others interested in working with or for startups a view into the struggle and the lessons learned, these conversations are informal and informative.
With more than 25 years of investing in early-stage technology companies, Madrona has worked with founders from day one to help build their company for the long run. We invest in seed and Series A companies in the Pacific Northwest building across the information technology spectrum and in Acceleration (B and beyond) stage companies building with AI, regardless of geography.
With more than 25 years of investing in early-stage technology companies, Madrona has worked with founders from day one to help build their company for the long run. We invest in seed and Series A companies in the Pacific Northwest building across the information technology spectrum and in Acceleration (B and beyond) stage companies building with AI, regardless of geography.
Episodes
Mentioned books
Jun 16, 2022 • 39min
IA40 Winner Spotlight: Snorkel Co-founder Alex Ratner on data-centric AI, culture, and 'one of the most historic opportunities for growth in AI'
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."
Jun 2, 2022 • 34min
Robotics Expert Sidd Srinivasa on Trends and What's Ripe for Innovation
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.
May 24, 2022 • 14min
IA40 Spotlight - Madrona and PitchBook Partner for IA40
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.
May 19, 2022 • 37min
IA40 Spotlight: SeekOut CEO Anoop Gupta and VP of People Jenny Armstrong-Owen on AI-powered talent solutions, developing talent, and maintaining culture
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.
May 5, 2022 • 46min
IA40 Spotlight: Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue and OctoML CEO Luis Ceze on foundation models, open source, and transparency
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.
Apr 21, 2022 • 50min
IA40 Spotlight: Starburst CEO Justin Borgman on entrepreneurship, cloud partnerships and enabling intelligent applications
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.
Apr 7, 2022 • 36min
IA40 Spotlight: RunwayML Co-Founder Cristobal Valenzuela on the Intersection of Art and Technology
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.
Mar 25, 2022 • 17min
Founder Voices from Madrona's Annual Meeting
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.
Mar 3, 2022 • 32min
Qumulo CEO Bill Richter on the Benefits of Enterprise Partnerships
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.
Feb 25, 2022 • 33min
How SpiceAI is Tackling the AI Tooling Gap with Luke Kim
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.
