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
IA40 Spotlight - Madrona and PitchBook Partner for IA40
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 A…
IA40 Spotlight: Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue and OctoML CEO Luis Ceze on foundation models, open source, and transparency
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 w…
IA40 Spotlight: RunwayML Co-Founder Cristobal Valenzuela on the Intersection of Art and Technology
Founder Voices from Madrona's Annual Meeting
Qumulo CEO Bill Richter on the Benefits of Enterprise Partnerships
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 …
Building Terray Therapeutics – Bridging the Gap Between Drug Discovery and Treatment
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 toge…
Trevor Thompson of TerraClear on Leadership, AgTech and Building for Farmers
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 c…
What is the IA40?
Matt McIlwain and Ishani Ummat discuss the vision, methodology and top level insights from the first IA40 list.
Meet the Investor: Aseem Datar of Madrona
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 pa…
Building a company at the intersection of life and computer sciences with Dr. Ali Ansary of Ozette
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 t…
From Startup to Exit with founder Shirish Nadkarni and Ishani Ummat
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…
Linda Lian of Common Room on Building a Team of Co-Founders One by One
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 a…
Rajeev Singh of Accolade on Resilience, the Expectations of Leaders and Building a Healthcare Company
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 le…
Building a Healthy Open Source Community with Jeremiah Lowin, Founder and CEO of Prefect
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 platf…
The Entrepreneurial Journey with Hope Cochran
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 bei…
Behind the Scenes of Raising a Round, or Two, or Three, a Conversation with Demetri Themelis of Knock Rentals
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 in…
Building Companies on Open Source, Conversation with co-creator of Kubernetes, Joe Beda
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 found…