We are thrilled to welcome Anu Sharma to the investment team at Madrona. Anu brings to our firm the rare combination of leading cutting-edge products and scaling new services at Amazon Web Services, co-founding her own startup, working as a venture capitalist, and writing code for enterprise products as a developer.
I had the pleasure of meeting Anu at AWS’ re:Invent conference several years ago. We stayed in touch, along with a number of others at Madrona, like Soma Somasegar, comparing notes on technology trends and new company opportunities. Even more important than her rare combination of experiences, we were struck from the outset by Anu’s insightful thinking and strong culture fit with our approach at Madrona. Specifically, her team and people focus, customer orientation, collaborative and warm interactions, long-term thinking, passion for products and technology, and curious mind. So, fast forward several years, and we could not be more excited to have Anu joining our team.
Most recently, Anu led product management for AWS Outposts, a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or customer premises. This experience squarely in the center of enterprise customers embracing the cloud computing model and hybrid clouds gave her incredible purview into many of the broader trends around the next generation of enterprise software infrastructure. Over the course of her 8 years at AWS, Anu also had the opportunity to work on a variety of other products, including EC2 accelerated instances and Firecracker, enabling many related technologies — such as machine learning and serverless — that underpin many of our most exciting investment themes.
Beyond this deep understanding of enterprise customers and cloud technologies, Anu previously was herself a co-founder of a company, LifeLemon, in the consumer apparel e-commerce space. This appreciation of what it is like to walk in the founder’s shoes is an invaluable asset as she now turns to helping entrepreneurs with their journeys. Further, in addition to stints leading marketing at Flipkart (their 40th employee) and a developer at Oracle, Anu also spent two years as an Associate at Softbank Venture Capital in India. This broad experience building products, founding and operating a company, and helping founders scale their businesses, in both enterprise and consumer segments, will allow her to bring a wealth of empathy, assistance and insights to companies in our portfolio and founders across the Pacific NW.
“Working with world class teams can be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and Madrona has stood out as one such remarkable team for me. Involved from day one in building and scaling businesses, Madrona has been a genuine partner for young companies in the Pacific NW. I’m excited to be part of the team that has seen what growth at successful businesses looks like and is committed to partnering with founders focused on solving problems for their customers,” said Anu.
Anu has hit the ground running in her first week. She looks forward to meeting and engaging all of you in the Pacific NW innovation economy. Anu will work with our current portfolio and also work with founders who are in the early stages and are looking for a partner and funding to help grow their company. Look her up! Anu is particularly interested in next generation infrastructure services, intelligent applications, and financial services.
You can follow Anu on Twitter here: @anusharma.
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