Founded & Funded

In this episode, Madrona Managing Director, Tim Porter, speaks with Elissa Fink.  Elissa was the CMO of Tableau during the years that it emerged and grew into the leader in data visualization.  She speaks about building a B2B marketing machine by making it personal.  And how transparency and integrity with customers is important to building the trust and long term relationships.  The podcast ends with some tips for measuring conversion and hiring people who will make a difference to a startup’s growth. 

Seattle is known for marketplaces – Expedia, Zillow, Redfin, Amazon.  Building them is REALLY Hard.

Mark Britton, a Strategic Director at Madrona and the founder of Avvo, a marketplace for consumers to find lawyers, talks about the opportunities for startup founders passionate about a community based marketplace, and the mistakes he sees entrepreneurs make when they set out to build one.  He and Elisa La Cava from Madrona talk about the evolution of Google from search to interactive services for consumers, what to do when big tech wants your market and how AI and ML technologies can change the playing field. 

Tom Gonser came up with the idea for DocuSign in the late 90s and founded DocuSign in the early 2000s.  In this conversation with Madrona Managing Director, Len Jordan, the two talk about building a company that changed the approach to a highly regulated and established process that is at the heart of so many aspects of both business process and consumers’ lives.  It’s not straightforward and required a flexible approach to both customer and industry growth as well as the persistence to make it through a tough global market with the 2008 recession. 

There are great lessons in the conversation about balancing customer feedback with product vision and roadmap as well as keeping the right team in place for the stage of growth of your company. 

In this episode, founder of Highspot, Oliver Sharp speaks with Madrona Managing Director, Tim Porter about the importance of being connected with your customer.  This connection informs your product market fit, your sales and market story, and how you reach your customers.  Oliver offers straight talk about how to understand your audience – and how thinking in their terms is more valuable than you may realize.  He covers how to build a successful customer satisfaction team (start with the product designers) and how this approach of being close to the customer was the crucial element that changed the trajectory at Highspot. 

Oliver also talks about making the transition from big company to startup.  He has done this journey back and forth several times and as he states “a startup doesn’t care how senior you are” the work needs to get done.  Oliver offers some ideas for interviewing if you are thinking of making the leap from big to startup.  One tip is don’t use the phrase “roll up my sleeves!”

The slightly longer than usual episode ends with how to have a company culture survive and change.  You can come up with great words and values – and he offers some ways to integrate these into everything a company does and thus build the strength of the organization. 

Highspot is the highest rated and most adopted sales enablement platform on the market.  Their customers include Workday, Dun & Bradstreet, Zillow, Starbucks.  Oliver is a founder and the Chief Solutions Architect at Highspot.

In this episode, Director of Talent at Madrona, Shannon Anderson, speaks with co-founder and CEO of Amperity, Kabir Shahani about building a culture in a fast growing company.  Amperity helps corporate customers use their owned data to serve the customer and has a very clear company culture of working for each other, moving quickly and building things that last.   This year they produced a book for their internal team that goes in depth on the culture.  That book inspired this podcast.

Shannon talks with Kabir about how they created Amperity’s culture, how they sustain it and where he thinks it is heading.  The founding team looked to pro sports to create a personal philosophy and were intentional about the direction they pursued for Amperity in terms of building the company they wanted. 

 About Amperity: With a customer base of world-leading consumer brands such as Starbucks, Gap, MGM Resorts, Nordstrom, Lucky Brand, Alaska Airlines, and more, Amperity is revolutionizing the way companies connect, identify, and understand their customers are leveraging AI to deliver a truly comprehensive and actionable Customer 360.

www.amperity.com

The first episode of Founded and Funded is a conversation between Daniel Li and Hope Cochran from Madrona.  Before she became an investor at Madrona, Hope wore a lot of hats and here we talk about her days as an early stage entrepreneur, a CFO helping to build a nationwide data network (for billions), and as an executive and CFO taking a massively popular gaming company public in three months.  She shares great stories including all the mistakes she made along the way for you to learn from.  She and Dan end with the pros and cons of being an investor in early stage companies, which she does as a managing director at Madrona.   And she introduces FTJ – Finish the Job – the importance of getting things done well in your life,  from family to business.