Founded & Funded

Starting a company is a lonely business. Finding co-founders can be the solution to this – but what if you don’t know anyone who fits the bill?  Linda Lian of Common Room set out to build a company and recruited her co-founders one by one.  Hear her story and theirs.  Viraj Mody, Francis Luu, Linda Lian in conversation with Madrona’s Shannon Anderson.

Investor Matt McIlwain speaks with CEO of Accolade, Rajeev Singh.  Rajeev is the CEO of Accolade, a healthcare advocacy company, but this is not his first time leading.  Matt and Rajeev talk about learning resilience, how it's not about directing but more about convincing employees of the road ahead, and how the role of the CEO has changed considerably.  They also talk about what the entrance of big tech companies into healthcare means for consumers and the industry. 

In this episode of Founded and Funded, Anu Sharma continues her deep dive into commercial open source projects and talks to Jeremiah Lowin, the founder and CEO of Prefect, a dataflow automation platform that is trusted to build, run, and monitor millions of data workflows and pipelines. Jeremiah talks about how he and his team built this open source community from zero to 5,000, and how the community helps the team at Prefect reach their users and intentionally break out of internal echo chambers that often trap early stage products. 

Going back to the archives to bring forward one of our most popular episodes which is a deep dive on Hope Cochran’s journey to investor, public board member and colleague.  She tells the story of being overlooked at her first job which spurred her to take a post in a small European country in her early 20s to take on a huge challenge.  That spirit of adventure and ambition set her on the road to entrepreneur, CFO, and founder advocate.  Dan Li, who is now a CEO of a new stealth company, Plus, sat down with her to learn her story.  

Knock was on the verge of raising their B round and then Covid hit. Co-founder and CEO Demetri talks with Madrona investor, Scott Jacobson, about how they successfully navigated 2020, including an inside round, and came out even stronger.  Knock raised in early 2021 from a new outside investor and is a crucial element in the big business of multifamily.

Building a company on open-source software is not easy.  As one of the creators of Kubernetes, and a founder of Heptio, Joe Beda has experience building open source, cultivating a community and founding a company.  In this conversation he talks with Madrona Partner, Anu Sharma about the varying states of open source and how founders can think about building companies around or on top of these powerful technologies.  This is a co-production with Traction, Anu’s blog and video conversations on GTM for technical products. 

Strike Graph, a company started by two white tech guys, and funded in mid 2020 with just an intern, is now growing and serving customers.  It is also two thirds women or gender diverse.  The road to getting there was clear to CEO Justin Beals before he even incorporated.  In this conversation with Hope Cochran and Elisa La Cava, Justin talks about the whys and how he set out to build his company this way and what this has meant for their success as a team. 

The path to building a company (and getting venture funding) can be varied.  Two of the paths available are Startup Studios or Accelerators.  They each offer different benefits.  Madrona investor, Elisa La Cava sat down with Madrona Venture Labs’ Mike Fridgen and FFA’s Leslie Feinzaig to dig into the differences and the types of companies that benefit from these programs. 

At the start of 2020, Barry Wark and the team at Ovation.io were on a growth path – not even they could envision 75x usage growth they ended up seeing.  Madrona investor, Chris Picardo, talks to Barry about the year and how the incredible amount of genomic data created by COVID testing will be a tailwind to academics, researchers and others looking for treatment and cures for disease.     

This slightly unusual Founded and Funded is the story of the early years of Madrona as told by the founders and early team members, Tom Alberg, Paul Goodrich, Matt McIlwain and Greg Gottesman.  They recount the first meeting with Jeff Bezos, early missteps by a green investing team and the struggle to raise a fund following the dot com bust. We celebrate our 25th year by talking about the first ten!