News & Views

On this week’s Founded and Funded, we talk to the founders of Sila, Shamir Karkal and Angela Angelovska-Wilson.  Managing director, Hope Cochran, talks about why she invested, and the founders share their story of how they came to unite to build Sila.  Sila offers banking as a service to… READ MORE

(Dr. Graham Hughes and Harjinder Sandhu of Saykara)

On the newest Founded and Funded podcast, join Madrona managing director, Tim Porter, as he sits down with Founder, Harjinder Sandhu, and President, Dr. Graham Hughes of Saykara to discuss the future of AI in the healthcare provider’s domain. Saykara is… READ MORE

L-R: Joe Heitzeberg, Wagyu Rancher, Msakii Ishii, a Cow in Gorgeous Setting

We’ve seen some brilliant ideas take off by way of crowdfunding, but crowdfunding the protein you eat is was a new take on the idea – and it worked!  In this episode of Founded and Funded, Madrona managing… READ MORE

(Photo Clockwise, Soma, Tony, Scott and Kevin) 

In this environment, Sales and Go-to-Market (GTM) for enterprise companies has changed, sometimes drastically.  What we do know is that in the work-from-home environment, tight coordination and focus is even more important in selling and GTM.  We spoke with sales leaders representing early,… READ MORE

Photo: Luis Ceze

OctoML on Octomizing/Optimizing ML Models and Helping Chips, Servers and Devices Run Them Faster; Madrona doubles down on the Series A funding

Today OctoML announced the close of their $15 million Series A round led by Amplify Partners.  Madrona led the seed (with Amplify participating) and we are… READ MORE

What a change we have all experienced in these last few weeks.  Everything has been shifting at an incredibly rapid pace and we have all had to adjust both our personal and professional lives.  For those of us that can, we are primarily working at home, amongst our dogs,… READ MORE

These are certainly uncertain times.  The only certain thing is that the world has changed.  As these CEOs shifted to working from home and managing distributed teams, they got on a conference call with managing director, Steve Singh, to share how they have been addressing moving their business forward. … READ MORE

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

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

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

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… READ MORE

(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… READ MORE

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… READ MORE

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… READ MORE

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… READ MORE

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),… READ MORE

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… READ MORE