Founded & Funded
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.
- Update frequency
- every 12 days
- Average duration
- 31 minutes
- Episodes
- 104
- Years Active
- 2021 - 2025
Archon's Jamie Lazarovits on Unlocking the Full Power of Antibodies With AI
What does it take to move from cutting-edge academic research to launching a biotech company that could transform medicine? In this week’s episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Partner Chris Picardo s…
Beyond the Model: Taking AI From Prototype to Production with Unstructured’s Brian Raymond
In this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Managing Director Karan Mehandru hosts Brian Raymond, founder and CEO of 2024 IA40 winner Unstructured. Unstructured turns raw, messy, unstructured data i…
Perseverance Over Speed: Creating a New Category with Impinj's Chris Diorio
In this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Managing Director Tim Porter and Venture Partner Patrick Ennis host Chris Diorio, co-founder and CEO of Impinj, the pioneer and world leader in RFID techn…
Startup to Scale: A Mini Masterclass in Efficient Growth and GTM
In the latest episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Managing Director Tim Porter hosts Pradeep Rathinam, a seasoned software executive with over three decades of leadership experience. Paddy was the F…
From Dark Matter to Voice AI with Deepgram Founder Scott Stephenson
Today Madrona Managing Director Karan Mahandru and Scott Stephenson, Co-Founder and CEO of Deepgram, a foundational AI company building a voice AI platform providing APIs for speech-to-text and text-…
Temporal Founders Bet on Open Source and Developers to Enable Invincible Applications
Madrona Managing Director Soma Somasegar hosts Temporal Co-Founders Samar Abbas and Maxim Fateev in studio. Temporal was founded in 2019 based on an open-source microservices orchestration engine pro…
Investor Spotlight: Chris Picardo on Cross-Disciplinary Innovation and Finding Unique Founders
In this episode of Founded & Funded, host Coral Garnick Ducken interviews Madrona Partner Chris Picardo for the latest Investor Spotlight. With degrees in math and English, Chris shares his unique jo…
Transforming TV Advertising: iSpot’s Sean Muller on the Role of AI and the Future of Streaming
In this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Venture Partner Len Jordan sits down with Sean Muller, Founder and CEO of iSpot, to talk about the company's evolution in measuring TV advertising for bot…
Investor Spotlight: Sabrina Wu on Founder Grit, Authenticity, and Building Intelligent Applications
In this episode of Founded & Funded, host Coral Garnick Ducken interviews Madrona Investor Sabrina Wu for the latest Investor Spotlight. These two discuss Sabrina's transition from private equity to…
Building Predibase: AI, Open-Source, and Commercialization with Dev Rishi and Travis Addair
Madrona Partner Vivek Ramaswami hosts Dev Rishi and Travis Addair, co-founders of 2023 IA40 Rising Star, Predibase. Predibase is a platform for developers to easily fine-tune and serve any open-sourc…
Read AI's David Shim on Making Meetings More Efficient With Intelligent Agents
In this episode, Madrona Managing Director Matt McIlwain hosts David Shim, founder and CEO of Read AI. These two have known each other for over two decades, having worked together at Farecast and the…
Transforming Corporate Travel: A Conversation With Steve Singh and Christal Bemont
In this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Managing Director Steve Singh and Christal Bemont, CEO of Direct Travel, Madrona's newest portfolio company, delve into the acquisition of Direct Travel a…
Building a Modern Database: Nikita Shamgunov on Postgres and Beyond
In this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Investor Paul Goel and Neon Co-founder & CEO Nikita Shamgunov dive into the database market and the importance of creating a killer developer experience w…
How Bobsled is Revolutionizing Cross-Cloud Data Sharing
Investor Sabrina Wu hosts Bobsled Co-founder and CEO Jake Graham for the latest episode of Founded & Funded. Jake is revolutionizing data sharing across platforms, enabling customers to get to analys…
How Writer CEO May Habib Is Making GenAI Work For the Enterprise
Madrona Partner Vivek Ramaswami hosts May Habib, co-founder and CEO of Writer, a 2023 IA40 winner. Writer is a full-stack generative AI platform for the enterprise. In this episode, May shares her pe…
Investor Spotlight: A Conversation with Madrona’s Soma Somasegar
Hear from Madrona Managing Director Soma Somasegar as he discusses his path to venture capital by way of 27 years at Microsoft. He shares invaluable insights about what he looks for in a founder, the…
Dust Founders Bet Foundation Models Will Change How Companies Work
Madrona Partner Jon Turow hosts Gabriel Hubert and Stan Polu, the co-founders of a 2023 IA40 winner, Dust, which enables information workers to create LLM-based agents that help them do their own wor…
From Creating Kubernetes to Founding Stacklok: Open-Source and Security with Craig McLuckie
In this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Managing Director Tim Porter talks to Craig McLuckie, who’s most known as one of the creators of Kubernetes at Google. Madrona previously backed Craig’s c…
The Evolution of Enterprise AI: A Conversation with Arvind Jain
Madrona Investor Palak Goel talks with Arvind Jain, founder and CEO of Glean, which has raised about $155M since launching in 2019 and was named a 2023 IA40 winner. It should be no surprise that Glea…
Investor Spotlight: A Conversation with Madrona’s Tim Porter
Hear from Madrona Managing Director Tim Porter as he discusses his path to venture capital by way of mechanical engineering and Microsoft. He shares invaluable insights about what he looks for in a f…