Category: Podcasts

Founded and Funded: Starting a Company with your Best Friend, the co-founders of Algorithmia, Kenny and Diego

(Kenny Daniel and Diego Oppenheimer)

Tim Porter opens Season Two of Founded and Funded, with Algorithmia’s founders, Kenny Daniel and Diego Oppenheimer. This duo started Algorithmia in 2014 and teamed up with Madrona, working out of our office for a while as they got off the ground. The team has made huge strides since their initial algorithm marketplace. Corporations and government institutions now turn to Algorithmia to enable them deploy AI models and run them at scale.

Kenny and Diego met in college at Carnegie Mellon and stayed in touch as they went very different directions – Kenny to do a PhD and Diego into business at Microsoft. They came back together to bring the power of academia to business and started the company to unlock the power of algorithms.

They talk about everything from the six month backpacking trip with a beat up laptop that was the genesis of the company to building a distributed team (by happenstance) to where we are in the adoption of machine learning and intelligent applications in this wave of innovation.

 

Also available on all your favorite podcast platforms.

Disrupting the TV Ad Industry with Sean Muller, Founder of iSpot.tv

Madrona funded iSpot.tv in 2013 based on the idea that TV advertising was ripe for disruption. Social network signals measured impact of the ads, and digital technologies enabled iSpot.tv to report on which shows ran which ads. Within a year, the company narrowed its focus to provide advertisers with stats on where their ads ran, where their competitors ads ran and the engagement with them. Fast forward to today and iSpot.tv is the leading provider of TV attribution – how effective was your TV ad at spurring customers into action to go purchase your product.

In the latest Founded and Funded, Madrona Managing Director, Len Jordan, sits down with iSpot.tv founder, Sean Muller, to talk over his journey from wanting to know more about who was responsible for the creative in ads to tying effective advertising to business outcomes.

They talk about how these digital media natives who founded iSpot.tv didn’t entirely realize what they had in terms of a data and business asset when they first launched. Could it be that TV advertising was not measured in real time in 2014? (Yes!)

Sean recounts how they got their first customers – a semi-cold call from ESPN – and the targeted use of the mute button during conference calls. He also talks about how having pivoted to a provider of metrics he foresaw that they had to take a bold step to bet the company on doing a deal with a TV manufacturer to take their business to where it is today – the go to source for TV attribution data.

iSpot.tv’s journey from startup to established provider of TV advertising and business outcomes data is one of both finding the market and then seeing where it could go – and pursuing that course. Available here and on all podcast platforms!

Indochino’s Drew Green on Surviving a “Success Diaster” and Building Meaningful Partnerships

(Drew on stage in China at the 40th Anniversary celebration of the Dayang Group October 2019)

In this episode, Scott sits down with Drew Green, the CEO of Indochino, a made to measure men’s clothier based in Vancouver, BC. Indochino has 50 storefronts where style experts measure and customers can feel and see the fabrics. The company started with suiting and has been adding casual clothing over the last couple of years with an outerwear line that launched this fall. Additionally, Indochino has teamed up with the Yankees, Red Sox – and most recently with RJ Barrett, a Canadian basketball player who just signed with the Knicks to promote Indochino’s menswear.

Drew joined Indochino in what investor Scott Jacobson described as the company entering a near death experience. Why did he do it? Drew recounts the story of the decision to move his family from Toronto to Vancouver BC which revolved around a conversation with Scott during half time of a football game.

Startups have a hard time partnering with larger companies. A partnership was crucial for the success of Indochino. Drew talks about how a great partnership is not hard to understand but is sometimes difficult to execute. For it to be a partnership, each party has to benefit from the relationship. When Scott and Drew traveled to China in 2014, to set up the partnership with the leading suit maker in China, the Dayang Group, they translated a deck (and hoped it made sense in Mandarin) and relied on an interpreter to communicate a deal that would save the start-up and put it on the road to success.

Drew, Scott and the Dayang Family, Fall 2019 at the 40th Anniversary celebration of Dayang Group

In Fall of 2019, Scott and Drew returned for the 40th anniversary of this company and Drew shared the stage with Warren Buffett (Drew was in person, Warren by simulcast) and it was clear that Indochino has become an incredibly important part of Dayang’s business over the last five years. A real partnership had been forged.

Click here to listen to the full podcast on iTunes. Also available on all other platforms.

Building a B2B Marketing Culture from the Ground Up with Elissa Fink, former CMO of Tableau Software

The latest Founded and Funded podcast with with Madrona Venture Group’s Tim Porter

Elissa Fink joined Tableau early in the company’s journey as their marketing lead. Tableau was always a product driven company with an early passionate audience. Elissa saw this and undertook at the start of her Tableau career to update the brand positioning to be people first and lead with their stories.

Tableau is one of the Seattle success stories. It was acquired by Salesforce for $15.7 billion in the summer of 2019, making it the second largest acquisition ever in the Seattle tech ecosystem and brought together the leader in CRM with the leader in analytics. The company started in 2003 and Elissa joined Tableau four years later when revenue was under $5 million a year. She helped grow the company to over $1billion in annual revenue and helped take the company public.

A key to Tableau’s marketing success was an intense focus on customers and end users. By tapping into these early customers and their appreciation of getting a job done faster and better, Tableau was able to have early broad-reach success that was later leveraged into larger enterprise sales.

Elissa addresses the importance of brand in the early days.

“It’s all about consistency.”

– Elissa Fink

The brand voice was the backbone for the demand generation work which was the key to the growth of the young company.

As the company moved into enterprise sales, marketing played a big role. Elissa and her team had seen the writing on the wall and been working with the influential analyst firm, Gartner, for some time. Elissa remembers when the Magic Quadrant that had them clearly in the challenger category was sent to her – that was a big day for the company.

In fact one of the important roles for marketing is to look 18-24 months ahead. What will the market want at that time?

Competition was sparse in the early days but that changed. Microsoft announced a competing product and wrapped it into their formidable enterprise sales process. This was a frightening time at Tableau but the strength of the product prevailed. Customers who were passionate about data wanted to use Tableau and they continued to buy. Tableau’s product driven approach paid off yet again.

For startup companies, Elissa knows hiring is hard. For marketing which has become such an analytics and numbers focused endeavor, Elissa advises not to hire for experience but hire people who are deeply interested in a problem you need to solve, and who have the good judgement needed to succeed in a startup.

For marketing leads, she suggests assessing the assets you have across brand, product, and community. Where are the leverage points? And where do you need to shore up your leverage points in order to have a strong basis for marketing. This assessment will help you prioritize in the busy world of a startup.

Elissa is an advisor to startups including Outreach.io, Qumulo and Amperity and sits on the board of the Washington Technology Industry Association. She recently taught a class at the University of Washington on B2B marketing.

Note: The largest acquisition was Amgen’s acquisition of Immunex for $16.0B in 2002. Source: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/salesforce-buying-seattle-based-tableau-for-15-7-billion-in-stock-one-of-the-northwests-largest-acquisitions/

Building Marketplaces is Hard, Mark Britton Shares His Tips for How to Succeed

Seattle is known for marketplaces, Expedia, Amazon, Zillow, Redfin, Rover.

“Building them is REALLY hard.”

If you are looking to build a marketplace based company – you inherently have two sides and two potential customer groups for whom to optimize. In the latest episode of Madrona’s podcast, Founded and Funded, Mark Britton, the founder of AVVO, talks about how he approached this at AVVO; the opportunities founders have to create meaningful marketplaces and the common mistakes they make.

One of these mistakes comes from misjudging who your most important customer is.

“The touchstone is the consumer – you have to really understand the consumer and solve their problem in a very unique way.”

Since a marketplace is a flywheel, you need to get it going and that is not easy. Mark suggests get started by limiting your geography or the product in a way that makes it possible to generate the supply side in a meaningful way for your very first customers. For AVVO that meant a practice area of law and a geographic region.

With most marketplace businesses, the big tech companies will start to encroach. One example is the Trips service from Google released earlier this year that offers a search for vacation packages, flights and more, all of which have been traditional fare for travel marketplaces for years.

“Every single e-commerce model that is informationally driven; Google believes they should own that.”

Mark suggests that entrepreneurs who are thinking about a building a marketplace, focus on the community they have a passion for. Google is trying to capture everything about the world, you know a community or a specific market, so leverage that focus and lean into it.

Build out the tools to increase interactivity on the platform and keep your eyes open for when the competition from big tech companies heats up. Your focus has the opportunity to prevail against big tech.

The addition of AI and ML related technologies is another challenge for startup marketplaces – the big companies have teams, compute and the technology to help make the connections and matches in a marketplace. Even if they do so incrementally, they will be doing it at scale.

This all comes back to your unique love of the community and ability to understand and build it in a way that is not possible from a Google or an Amazon.

“Building community is such an art – Google will not be your tight community.”

 

 

Mark is a Strategic Director at Madrona Venture Group and Elisa La Cava is a Senior Associate. You can contact them by emailing or connecting through LinkedIn.

 

 

How to Choose Your Early Customers with an Eye to the Future, with DocuSign Founder, Tom Gonser – Founded and Funded Episode 4

In this episode of Founded and Funded, Madrona Managing Director, Len Jordan speaks with the founder of DocuSign and Seven Peaks investor, Tom Gonser. DocuSign is a Seattle success story – and Len was an investor during his previous role at Frazier Technology Partners.

DocuSign was founded during a time when installed software was the name of the game and the DocuSign team recognized that using the web to enable secure access to documents was going to be how the tricky problem of document signing was going to be solved. It just took persistence to convince the market.

Tom and Len discuss how a company that is changing a process that is both regulated and used by small and large companies alike is a complicated process. You have to start with one industry (real estate in this case) but then recognize when there is the opportunity to broaden the customer scope. This is often realized through selling to small companies initially to provide low levels of monthly revenue and product feedback so that you can level up to larger scale enterprise companies that will provide confirmation to the broader market that the solution is needed – as well as the revenue to grow.

While DocuSign had some early fundraising success, Tom reflects on how the middle years were the hardest. During this time the team was working on the product, the market was experiencing a recession, and their revenue and progress stalled somewhat, but this was also the time when their focus on creating a solution for smaller companies sustained them.

Len and Tom also talk about how you build a successful team from zero to a billion. Tom made the unusual decision to not be the CEO early on. Tom’s experience in previous companies had shown him that his passion was product and customer experience and he pursued that at DocuSign. Tom addresses how the most important element to growing a company is making sure you have the right people in the right roles as you grow – and recognizing when a role has outgrown a person or vice versa. Finding people in the early days who can be flexible in their changing roles as the company grows is crucial to retaining the corporate knowledge and culture while also enabling the company to grow as it needs to.

Product roadmaps are often influenced by existing customer requests for features. Tom and Len talk about building customer engagement and the balance between charting your own product future and building to customer expectations. Many companies struggle with this and Tom admits that sometimes DocuSign got it right and sometimes they didn’t.

Listen below or on any of your favorite platforms and let us know what you think at [email protected].

Founded and Funded – Building a Customer Satisfaction Team (and a lot more) with Oliver Sharp

In this episode of Founded and Funded, Tim Porter, speaks with Oliver Sharp, co-founder of Highspot about the journey of building the company. They talk about the inspiration behind Highspot (corporate content you need for your job should be as easy to find as a how to YouTube video), building a culture of customer satisfaction from day one, and how people from large companies transition (or don’t transition) to startup life.

Highspot has raised $120 million with their most recent round of $60 million announced in June of 2019. Highspot is a sales enablement platform that helps sales people find the content they need to close deals.

The team came together at Microsoft and the transition to a startup was a return to their roots as hands on learners. Though senior contributors and managers at Microsoft, as Oliver says “a startup doesn’t care how senior you are – you have to learn it all yourself” and they all had to re-learn the hands on work of creating and marketing a product. Customers were at the center of this.

Some lessons from this discussion:

  • Customers have crucial insight, though you have to figure out which ones to pay attention to early on. Oliver talks about how they learned more from the customers who passed than the ones who bought the product in the very early days. The ones who passed had reasons they didn’t and understanding those were key to building the product.
  • But while focusing on the product is crucial it’s not the way you succeed. You have to take your technological masterpiece and tune it to the customers’ needs.
  • And the words are important – How you define the problem may not be how they define it. Highspot originally set out to create the best content search out there to help marketers and sales people identify the best content for a given situation. But your customers “don’t think about search problems, they think about the making more money problem.”
  • So you both need a great product and you need the story you are telling your customer to fit with what they are looking for, or the pain they are feeling. You aren’t selling search (in this case) you are selling the solution to their problem (which you know is mostly search.).
  • CSAT or Customer Satisfaction measurement is not a new thing in business but with SaaS it is more tightly woven into the software renewal cycle. And it’s so much easier to measure and to react quickly. SaaS puts more emphasis on the customer satisfaction as a direct ingredient in sales.
  • Building a successful CSat team starts with the product creators. Start with the people who helped design the product. Those people are the most invested in what the product is now – hearing from customers is the most powerful way to learn where you went wrong.
  • Other topics of interest are building a team from junior on up – how hiring college grads has worked out extremely well for HIghSpot – and Oliver covers what not to say in a startup interview!

You can listen here or on any of the platforms you prefer – iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, SoundCloud, and Stitcher

Building a Team and a Culture at Amperity with Kabir Shahani – Founded and Funded Episode 2

Our second episode of the Founded and Funded podcast features the founder and CEO of Amperity. Amperity works with brands like Starbucks, Alaska Airlines, MGM Resorts, Gap, Planet Fitness, and Brooks Running to help them understand their customers. The company launched in fall of 2017 and from the beginning was purposeful about their company culture. Shannon Anderson, Madrona’s Director of Talent, talks to Kabir Shahani about the process they used to develop their values amongst the founding team and how they have kept it updated over the last two years of growth.

Listen below or on any of your favorite platforms and let us know what you think at [email protected].

Earlier this year, when Amperity moved into a new space, they created a book about their story and that book inspired this podcast (which is not available on Amazon – you have to join the company to get one).

Kabir talks about creating and living a company culture, what he has learned as a manager and CEO about management, and the romance of being a creator and entrepreneur. One of the elements Amperity’s team used to create their initial set of values was a personal philosophy document. Below is the process that Shannon Anderson uses with our new companies who are not looking to spend a lot of time thinking about these big topics.

This should take only 1 hour. If you take longer, you are over-analyzing.

Step 1: Pull together everyone from your founding team for one hour. Set the time. Each person works silently to write down six single word adjectives that reflect your personal values at work (how you personally like to work with your team and your customers, how you like to get things done, and the behaviors you value in working with others). (10 minutes)

Step 2: Each person writes each of their adjectives on a sticky note. Paste all the sticky notes on a common wall. (5 minutes)

Step 3: Step back as a team. Reflect on what you see and then collaborate. Do a values sort, refining all the sticky notes into six categories of adjectives. Invent a new adjective, as needed, to reflect the meaning of the collection. These are your company’s six core values. (10 minutes)

Step 4: For each of the six core values write down the signals and noise. Signals are “what this behavior looks like in action”. Draw these signals from the adjectives in step 3, and from people in your life who model this attribute. Noise is not necessarily the opposite of signals but are sometimes confused with signals. For example, someone who is unwavering, dogmatic, inflexible might be mistaken for passionate and committed. Or, too much of a signal (works hard, simplifies and gets things done) might be noise (works hard, creates complexity or works on the wrong things). Again, pull from the model of real people in your life where you have seen noise that looks like signal. (20 minutes)

Step 5: Thread this language into your everyday meetings, performance reviews, interviews. Hold each other accountable and demand that everyone behaves congruently with these values in good times or they will not serve you when the going gets rough.

Founded and Funded – Madrona’s Podcast about Startup Life

Today we are launching a podcast. We looked around at the offerings for startups in Seattle and felt there was room for experienced entrepreneurs to share their moments of truth – where they made mistakes and figured it out, a turning point in the business, their “ah ha” moment, or just what got them through. And to tell some great stories along the way. We have entrepreneurs of all kinds in and out of our doors every day and every one of them has an interesting story. We hope to share some of them here.

In each episode, someone from the Madrona team will sit down for a discussion with one of these entrepreneurs. We hope you get to know the broader team here through some of these discussions – from investors to HR and recruiters to Biz dev and Comms pros. In the first season you will hear from Managing Director Hope Cochran who used her pursuit of opera early in her career to help her manage a room full of businessmen, and Venture Partner, Mark Britton on what he learned building Avvo into a leader in the field. Others in the first season are Oliver Sharp, founder of HighSpot who advocates that customer success is not just a department at a company, it’s everyone’s number one goal, and Elissa Fink who talks about how building a BtB brand that resonates with customers is just as important as a BtoC brand.

We worked with Larj Media to get going and they were great Mentors – thanks Tina and Joelle!

Here is the teaser to give you an idea of what to expect. We will be putting the podcast in all the usual places, ITunes, Spotify, Google Play, SoundCloud etc – if there is somewhere you want it and can’t find it let us know at [email protected]