Founded & Funded

By Madrona VenturesBusiness Technology

Founded & Funded episodes

April 21, 2022 IA40 Spotlight: Starburst CEO Justin Borgman on entrepreneurship, cloud partnerships and enabling intelligent applications
This week on Founded and Funded, we spotlight our next IA40 winner – Starburst Data. Managing Director Matt McIlwain talks to co-founder and CEO Justin Borgman about how launching his first company was like getting a Ph.D. in entrepreneurship, and then they dive into the customer problem Justin saw that made him believe the time was right to launch his second — Starburst. The two discuss open-source alignment, why making use of cloud partnerships early, especially cloud marketplaces, can be so beneficial for startups, why Starburst had to change the name of its query engine from Presto to Trino, and Justin's guidance for creating a future-proof architecture.
50 min
April 07, 2022 IA40 Spotlight: RunwayML Co-Founder Cristobal Valenzuela on the Intersection of Art and Technology
In this episode of Founded and Funded, Madrona is launching a special series to highlight some of its IA40 winners, starting with RunwayML, which offers web-based video editing tools that utilize machine learning to automate what used to take video editors hours if not days to accomplish. Madrona Investor Ishani Ummat speaks with Co-founder and CEO Cristobal Valenzuela all about where the idea came from, how he decided to launch a company instead of joining Adobe – and even how TikTok fits into all of this. Listen now to hear all about it.
37 min
March 25, 2022 Founder Voices from Madrona's Annual Meeting
Madrona just wrapped our annual meeting, which we were able to have in person for the first time in three years. The meeting, with about 150 attendees this year, was a much-needed dose of human connection that reminded many Madrona investors why they got into this business in the first place — people and more specifically — great founders. During the day's events, the audience heard about Madrona's results, of course, but the stars of the show were the founders and leaders at our companies — and we took the opportunity to check in with them on this week's episode of Founded and Funded.
18 min
March 03, 2022 Qumulo CEO Bill Richter on the Benefits of Enterprise Partnerships
In this episode of Founded and Funded, Madrona Managing Director Matt McIlwain and Partner Aseem Datar sit down with Qumulo CEO Bill Richter to talk about developing meaningful partnerships. Madrona was an early investor in Qumulo when it launched in 2012, and the company recently partnered with Microsoft to launch Qumulo on Azure as a Service. Startups often partner with large enterprise companies to accelerate growth, but there are benefits to both parties, and in this episode, we take a look at it from both perspectives.
32 min
February 25, 2022 How SpiceAI is Tackling the AI Tooling Gap with Luke Kim
In this episode of Founded and Funded, partner Aseem Datar sits down with co-founder of Spiceai.io, Luke Kim, to talk about the power of building tools for developers, the difficulty of integrating AI (SpiceAI is making this easier for developers) and moving from a big company to building a startup.
33 min
February 17, 2022 Building Terray Therapeutics – Bridging the Gap Between Drug Discovery and Treatment
Madrona Partner, Chris Picardo, sits down with Terray Therapeutics founders (and brothers), Jacob and Eli Berlin as well as data scientist, Narbe Mardirossian to talk about the power of bringing together transformational wet lab processes with ML and AI to speed drug development. Terray Therapeutics announced their Series A of $60 million in February of 2022 and this podcast follows that announcement.
38 min
January 14, 2022 Trevor Thompson of TerraClear on Leadership, AgTech and Building for Farmers
How do you join a company and lead from the day one? And how do you do that when you come from a completely different work experience than your startup? Trevor Thompson of TerraClear had a 14 year career in the Navy, including a decade as a Navy Seal, and is now president of #agtech company, TerraClear. He talks to investor Elisa LaCava about the opportunity for companies to hire experienced veterans and how the company is executing on its mission to make a farmer's life a little bit easier with their rock picker robot.
31 min
November 22, 2021 What is the IA40?
Matt McIlwain and Ishani Ummat discuss the vision, methodology and top level insights from the first IA40 list.
13 min
November 19, 2021 Meet the Investor: Aseem Datar of Madrona
Aseem talks about growing up in Mumbai with "jugaad" all around him - the Hindi word for 'Hustle', how he made his way to Seattle, to Microsoft and to Madrona. Aseem joined Madrona this year as a partner after 17 years at Microsoft working in entrepreneurial roles and growing businesses like Azure from the underdog to a contender.
23 min
September 07, 2021 Building a company at the intersection of life and computer sciences with Dr. Ali Ansary of Ozette
Madrona Partner, Chris Picardo, sits down with Dr. Ali Ansary, founder & CEO of Ozette Technologies. Chris and Ali talk about Ozette's mission to uncover hidden information about the immune system to help with the efficacy of cancer treatments. Ali also speaks about the unique ability of biotech companies to attract traditional tech talent.
35 min

About Founded & Funded

From the publisher's feed

Listen to conversations between Madrona investors and entrepreneurs, founders, and startup personalities who talk about some of the key moments in building a company. Designed to give would-be founders and others interested in working with or for startups a view into the struggle and the lessons learned, these conversations are informal and informative.