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
Navigating the Dynamics of Startup Boards: Managing Disagreements & Effective Governance
In this episode, Madrona Managing Director S. Somasegar and General Counsel Joanna Black discuss the fundamental role of a board in a startup's growth and development. They touch upon the importance …
Karan Mehandru & Anna Baird on Go-To-Market Strategy, and Navigating Sales, Growth, and Leadership
This week, Madrona Managing Director Karan Mehandru hosts Madrona Operating Partner Anna Baird. The operating partner role is a new one for Madrona, and we're excited to have her on the team to advis…
Tigera CEO Ratan Tipirneni On Commercializing Open Source
Madrona Partner Aseem Datar hosts Tigera CEO Ratan Tipirneni. Tigera is in the business of preventing and detecting security breaches in cloud-native applications, and its open-source offering Calico…
Founded & Funded Investor Spotlight with Maria Gilfoyle
Get to know Madrona Investor Maria Gilfoyle. Learn how she pivoted from wanting to become an artist into venture capital, her design-first mindset focus, what she looks for in founders, and what she …
Troop Travel Founders on the Startup Journey and Relationships That Matter
Today, managing director Steve Singh sits down with Troop Travel Co-founders Dennis Vilovic and Leonard Cremer. Madrona invested in Troop and its corporate travel meeting management platform in 2021.…
Investor Spotlight with Madrona Managing Director Karan Mehandru
Get to know Madrona Managing Director Karan Mehandru. Learn what drew him to venture capital and working with founders, what he looks for in founders, what he thinks founders should look for in VC pa…
Statsig Founder Vijaye Raji on Product Building, Launching a Startup, and AI
Today, Madrona Managing Director S. Somasegar talks with Statsig founder and CEO Vijaye Raji, who spent 20 years at Microsoft and Facebook before launching Statsig as a way to bring the powerful tool…
NYSE's Lynn Martin on Capital Markets, IPOs, and the Role AI Is Playing in the Markets
In this week's episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Managing Director Matt McIlwain hosts NYSE Group President Lynn Martin ahead of our Intelligent Applications Summit on October 10th and 11th. Lynn …
Chroma's Jeff Huber on Vector Databases and Getting AI into Production
This week, Vivek Ramaswami talks with Chroma Co-founder and CEO Jeff Huber. Chroma is an open-source vector database, and vector databases have taken the AI world by storm recently, with Chroma quick…
Cohere's Ivan Zhang on Foundation Models, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, and Feedback Loops
In this episode, Madrona Partner Jon Turow and Cohere CTO and Co-founder Ivan Zhang dive into the world of foundation models for the enterprise. Cohere was founded in 2019 — a time when even the most…
Data Visionary Bob Muglia on Data, AI, and New Book — 'The Datapreneurs'
This week we have the pleasure of having former Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia on the show again. Bob is an active investor and sits on the boards of many next-generation data platform companies, and more …
Google's James Phillips and Former Tableau CEO Mark Nelson on PLG and Scaling in the Face of Stiff Competition
This week, investor Aseem Datar is possibly making app dev and product development history with his guests. We've got former Tableau CEO Mark Nelson and James Phillips, the former president of Micros…
Typeface Founder Abhay Parasnis on Shaping Enterprise GenAI Strategy
In this episode, Madrona Managing Director Soma Somasegar talks with Typeface Founder and CEO Abhay Parasnis. Typeface combines generative AI platforms with its own brand-personalized AI, so all busi…
Founded & Funded Investor Spotlight with Vivek Ramaswami
Get to know Madrona Partner Vivek Ramaswami. Learn what drew him to venture capital and working with founders, what he looks for in founders, where he focuses, and what he enjoys doing outside the of…
Airtable's Howie Liu on Product-Led Growth & Embedding a 'Little LLM Brain' in Every Cell
In this week's IA40 spotlight episode of Founded & Funded, Investor Sabrina Wu talks with Airtable Co-founder and CEO Howie Liu. Airtable is a low-code platform that enables teams to easily build wor…
Numbers Station Founders on Applying Foundation Models to Data Wrangling
This week, Madrona Managing Director Tim Porter talks to Numbers Station Co-founders Chris Aberger and Ines Chami. We announced our investment in Numbers Station’s $17.5M Series A in March and are v…
Investor Spotlight with Jon Turow
Get to know Madrona Partner Jon Turow. Learn why he got into VC, what he looks for in founders, where the opportunities lay for founders when it comes to generative AI, and what he enjoys doing outsi…
Panther Labs Founder Jack Naglieri on Cloud-Native SIEM and Self-Growth
This week on Founded & Funded, Madrona Partner Vivek Ramaswami talks to Jack Naglieri, Founder and CEO of 2022 IA40 winner Panther Labs. Jack founded Panther, a leading cloud-native security informat…
MotherDuck's Jordan Tigani and DuckDB's Hannes Mühleisen on partnerships and commercializing open-source projects
This week, Madrona Partner Jon Turow brings us a story about a great partnership forming between two people, who had never even met, when they each find themselves on a mission to focus on what it i…
GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke on Generative AI-powered Developer Experiences
Today we have the pleasure of hosting GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke! He and Madrona Partner Aseem Datar talk about how Thomas got into working with computers and coding and the work he's been doing since …