News & Views

This week we are publishing a non-covid related podcast – recorded before Seattle was hit hard. We hope it provides some relief! We are also prepping some great podcasts that deal directly with how founders and people are managing through this time – and looking to the future. Stay… READ MORE

David Shim, founder of Placed, now CEO of Foursquare has some invaluable advice for founders.  He built Placed over six years from an idea incubated at Madrona into the industry standard for brands and advertising agencies – and an acquisition by Snap. This conversation with Matt McIwain, managing director,… READ MORE

Madrona is excited to welcome Ishani Ummat as our new Associate. Ishani hails from the Seattle area and graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Washington with a degree in Finance and concentrations in Global Health and the Comparative History of Ideas.

As her… READ MORE

In our third episode of Season Two, Tim Porter connects with serial founder and seasoned fundraiser, Kristen Hamilton. Kristen co-founded early e-commerce highflier, Onvia (so much so that the company received an early cease and desist letter from Amazon about Onvia’s ‘superstore’ tagline). Onvia went public 10 days before… READ MORE

Today, Madrona Venture Group announced that we’ve led the $7.6M Series A investment in Esper, an investment that Tim Porter and I spearheaded for the firm. Esper is a devops platform for Android IOT devices.

As everything around us becomes smart and connected, developers of devices have many new challenges. We are… READ MORE

We first met the Snowflake team three years and three months ago. At the time, Snowflake was at a sub-$10M revenue run rate, and we were skeptical that the world needed another data warehouse, given the number of other data warehouses from both the cloud providers and… READ MORE

One of the most fun opportunities I get as a venture capitalist is to partner with founding teams from the very beginning of their journey. It’s with great pleasure that I get to announce one such journey, which we have been working on for a while … our investment… READ MORE

Wow I just listened to this episode with Mikaela Kiner, the founder of Reverb and the author of the new book, Female Firebrands and it’s wide ranging and inspiring.  We hear the story of how Mikaela left her corporate career to strike out on her own and ended up… READ MORE

(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… READ MORE

With the start of the new decade, I started life as a venture capitalist – with Madrona Venture Group. A venture firm that has steadfastly invested in entrepreneurs and businesses from Day One for the Long Run.

I have been an entrepreneur for the majority of my career. Being an… READ MORE