Palak joined Madrona in 2022. He focuses on sourcing and evaluating new investment opportunities across Madrona’s investment themes and supports the growth and strategy of current portfolio companies. Palak is particularly interested in working with technical founders building AI/ML-powered applications, open-source projects, and cloud and data infrastructure.
Journey to Madrona
Before joining Madrona, Palak worked as a product manager at Microsoft. At Microsoft, Palak worked on a variety of products, including Outlook, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Teams, Windows, Visual Studio, and Bing. Most recently, Palak worked on Microsoft Turing, an initiative to build best-in-class deep learning models and productize them across the Microsoft product family.
Lessons learned
- Before starting a business, it is important to ask yourself why — Why us? Why this? And why now?
- There is nothing more important in product/company building than solving customers’ problems. Customer empathy should always be at the center of every business decision.
When he’s not in the office…
Outside of work, Palak can be found on a squash or pickle ball court (depending on the weather), listening to an audiobook, trying out a new recipe, or learning to ski.
Noteworthy
Palak graduated from Brown University with a dual concentration in computer science and economics. At Brown, Palak captained the Varsity Squash team.