Founded & Funded

This slightly unusual Founded and Funded is the story of the early years of Madrona as told by the founders and early team members, Tom Alberg, Paul Goodrich, Matt McIlwain and Greg Gottesman.  They recount the first meeting with Jeff Bezos, early missteps by a green investing team and the struggle to raise a fund following the dot com bust. We celebrate our 25th year by talking about the first ten!

As we take a break and plan Season 4 of Founded and Funded, we bring you the first in a new podcast series from Madrona investor, Anu Sharma.  In this series, Anu speaks with experienced founders, engineers and product leaders about the mystery of GoToMarket or GTM.  Focused on uncovering not just how to measure but how to build a GTM that resonates with customers, the first episode is an interview with Jon Gelsey on the complexities when developers are your customer base.  Gelsey, who led AuthO and Xnor.ai through major periods of growth, talks in depth about how the product experience is part of the GTM especially when building a developer centric product.  For links to posts on GTM and to the podcasts- https://tractionnow.io/ and available on all podcast platforms. 

Daniel Li, Chris Picardo and Erika Shaffer from Madrona Venture Group  talk about the incredible number of financings in PNW in September.  40 companies raised over $450 in venture financings.  We talk about how GitLab manages their 1,300 employees who are remote, and we touch on a guerrilla approach to selling SaaS - use some SEO know how.  Sign up for the DL, Dan's weekly newsletter here. http://thedl.danielxli.com/issues/the-dl-september-2020-pnw-venture-deals-trusting-amazon-how-to-remote-work-and-how-to-sell-saas-282565 

Jumping off of this week's DL, we talk about Microsoft's announcements (as we lived through the huge outage of Office 365 etc) and talk about the guy who started Snowflake and many other enterprise tech companies that are doing rather well - Mike Speiser from Sutter HIll.  Touch on drones in the home and a quick how-to on Gen Z.  You can also read it here.  http://thedl.danielxli.com/ 

This week Dan Li and Ishani Ummat from Madrona talk about a surprisingly huge IPO in China that rivals some of the US tech IPOs.  For water. Dan takes a bit of a deep dive on Chamath Palihapitiya SPAC (Hedosophia II!!) and the 'memo' on OpenDoor that doesn't as much make a case for the specific company but for the market capacity.  Other highlights are how image rights in social media are not what they seem (free and easy) and an esports league that had escaped our knowledge until now - Farming Simulator League - and it's global! The DL for this week - https://bit.ly/35VDLF2 

The smoke is here and we've been stuck indoors - so there is a lot to cover.  Hear Erika Shaffer, Daniel Li and Ishani Ummat discuss the news from the week.  We review the growth of hiring in the tech world, Investment memos and what entrepreneurs (and VCs) can learn from them and hit on some truth telling from Reed Hastings on working remotely.  Want to dig into the text detail? check it out here. http://thedl.danielxli.com/issues/the-dl-tech-s-hiring-spree-vc-investment-memos-remote-work-at-netflix-and-dl-baby-advice-277248 

Hope Cochran sits down with the founders of Sila, a banking as a service company, to talk about why she invested, how they came to build this company, and the problem of moving money on the internet.  Sila has navigated this complex regulatory and technical world to enable fintechs or companies that need as a part of their business to hold their customers’ money to launch quickly and focus on their product, not the details of moving money. 

This week, new Madrona team member, Anu Sharma, joins Dan to talk about The DL.  On the docket for this week are impending IPOs, Amazon Stores, Amazon Halo and some funny bits from NeoPets to Waterskiing with a Drone.  Also, hear a brief preview of our upcoming podcast with Sila, a fintech for fintechs. 

Madrona investors, Soma and Elisa, continue last week’s conversation with the co-founder of Coda, Shishir Mehrotra. They discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the future of work as well as what companies within the tech space will look like moving forward. Shishir offers a unique perspective with a leadership background from his time at mature companies like Google and Microsoft and being a two time startup founder.  Listen in to hear Shishir’s take on the future of work and the growth of the maker generation!

Discussion on this week's DL which covers Amazon's struggle with gaming, a revolutionary way to remove pet hair that happens to be one of the fastest growing companies on the Inc magazine list, and how a super creative firm called MSCHF has turned masterclass into cartoons.  

check out the DL here - http://thedl.danielxli.com/issues/the-dl-what-amazon-s-bad-at-covid-activities-inc-5000-pnw-and-how-to-talk-like-a-monopoly-270811