Founded & Funded

Get to know Madrona Investor Maria Gilfoyle. Learn how she pivoted from wanting to become an artist into venture capital, her design-first mindset focus, what she looks for in founders, and what she enjoys doing outside the office.

Today, managing director Steve Singh sits down with Troop Travel Co-founders Dennis Vilovic and Leonard Cremer. Madrona invested in Troop and its corporate travel meeting management platform in 2021. These three talk about looking for the right problem to solve, to launch a company, and how you decide if it's the right time. They also discuss when you need to switch from bringing on generalists to bringing on experts, how to identify the right investors to work with, why working closely with customers and potential customers is so important, and so much more. So I'll go ahead and hand it over to Steve to take it away.

You can read the transcript of this conversation here: https://www.madrona.com/troop-travel-founded-funded/

Get to know Madrona Managing Director Karan Mehandru. Learn what drew him to venture capital and working with founders, what he looks for in founders, what he thinks founders should look for in VC partners, and what he enjoys doing outside the office.

(00:00:00) Introduction (00:01:00) Madrona Managing Partner Karan Mehandru's background (00:01:33) Why venture capital (00:02:50) Founders: Become the best version of yourself (00:04:58) Understand the person behind titles and roles (00:05:44) What Karan looks for in founders (00:06:52) Visionary founders (00:07:34) The role of grit and intellectual honesty (00:08:50) How Founders should select partners/investors (00:11:36) Biggest changes Karan's seen over his career (00:13:56) What has stayed the same (00:14:52) Cats or dogs (00:15:46) Karan's book recommendation (00:17:07) What Karan does outside of the office

Today, Madrona Managing Director S. Somasegar talks with Statsig founder and CEO Vijaye Raji, who spent 20 years at Microsoft and Facebook before launching Statsig as a way to bring the powerful tools he was used to using inside Facebook to all builders.

Statsig experimentation platform and automated AB testing helps companies make product decisions in a data-driven way at scale, which means shipping the right products faster. Vijaye and Soma go way back and take a little trip down memory lane, talking about Microsoft's Small Basic. But then they dive into what it's like transitioning from big tech to a founder, the importance of data-driven decision-making, integrating AI into those decisions, identifying the ideal customer profile, and learning how to sell your product. Something that did not come naturally to Vijaye. He and Soma talk about all of this and so much more.

You can read a transcript of this conversation here: https://www.madrona.com/statsig-founder-vijaye-raji-product-building-launching-a-startup-ai/

In this week's episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Managing Director Matt McIlwain hosts NYSE Group President Lynn Martin ahead of our Intelligent Applications Summit on October 10th and 11th. Lynn will be speaking at the Summit, but we thought it would be great to have her on the show to talk more about her background, the NYSE, capital markets, IPOs, and, of course, the role data, AI, and large language models are playing in the markets and in companies broadly! This conversation couldn't come at a better time now that we're seeing a number of tech companies teeing up IPO plans.

Lynn thinks we'll be back to a more "normal" IPO environment in 2024 – but you have to listen to get her full take! You can also read the transcript here: https://www.madrona.com/nyses-lynn-martin-on-capital-markets-ipo-trends-and-the-role-ai-is-playing-in-the-markets/

This week, Vivek Ramaswami talks with Chroma Co-founder and CEO Jeff Huber. Chroma is an open-source vector database, and vector databases have taken the AI world by storm recently, with Chroma quickly emerging as one of the leading offerings in the space. Jeff's background is in machine learning, and for him and his co-founder, starting Chroma was a classic "there has to be a better way moment when it comes to going from demo to production".

Vivek and Jeff talk about why on earth we need another database, the new wave of software engineering happening right now, community-led growth, the competitive landscape, and so much more.

You can read a transcript of this conversation here: https://www.madrona.com/chromas-jeff-huber-on-vector-databases-and-getting-ai-into-production/

In this episode, Madrona Partner Jon Turow and Cohere CTO and Co-founder Ivan Zhang dive into the world of foundation models for the enterprise. Cohere was founded in 2019 — a time when even the most passionate believers did not realize how soon the world would be struck by the capabilities of foundation models. The company announced a $270 million raise in June – which put it at an over $2 billion valuation — and — Ivan's co-founder Aidan Gomez was a co-author of the seminal paper "Attention Is All You Need," which actually introduced the Transformer, the architecture behind foundation models. Notwithstanding the big numbers, Cohere keeps itself scrappy and hungry, having still only raised a fraction of what others in the space have to date.

In this episode, Ivan shares about his decision not to finish school and instead gain practical experience working in startups and publishing research to basically prove that he could without a degree. He dishes about applying that same renegade spirit to hiring, shares his thoughts about the importance of feedback loops with customers as well as the difference between fine-tuning and teaching a model how to retrieve the right knowledge, and so much more.

You can read a transcript of this conversation here: https://www.madrona.com/cohere-ivan-zhang/

This week we have the pleasure of having former Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia on the show again. Bob is an active investor and sits on the boards of many next-generation data platform companies, and more recently, he launched his first book — "The Datapreneurs." Given the long history between Bob and Madrona Managing Partner Soma, we had to have Bob joins us again to talk about his new book and dive into the world of data and AI. These two old friends discuss what exactly a datapreneur is and the Arc of Data Innovation concept Bob wrote about in his book. They also talk through how companies can add value with AI through copilots and agents and what white spaces and opportunities there are for entrepreneurs right now — especially when it comes to semantic models.

You can read a transcript of this episode here: https://www.madrona.com/bob-muglia-datapreneurs-podcast/

This week, investor Aseem Datar is possibly making app dev and product development history with his guests. We've got former Tableau CEO Mark Nelson and James Phillips, the former president of Microsoft who drove the creation of many of the company's most successful products, including, of course, Tableau's number one competitor — Power BI. James was also just named the VP of Google Cloud. Mark and James are both part of the Madrona family, as venture partner and strategic director respectively. And today, we have the rare treat of them together sharing their learnings and experiences about modern app development, data and analytics, product-led growth, and scaling in the face of stiff competition. You won't want to miss this.

You can read a transcript of this episode here: https://www.madrona.com/james-phillips-mark-nelson-produce-led-growth-and-scaling/

In this episode, Madrona Managing Director Soma Somasegar talks with Typeface Founder and CEO Abhay Parasnis. Typeface combines generative AI platforms with its own brand-personalized AI, so all businesses can create content that is multimodal and on-brand. Typeface just announced $100 million in new funding, and Madrona couldn't have been happier to participate in the round.

Abhay and Soma have known each other for almost 20 years from their time at Microsoft. But In 2022, Abhay left Adobe, where he was CTO and CPO, because he saw an inflection point coming that he wanted to be a part of. This was, of course, before ChatGPT and all the other popular GenAI tools that we've all been playing with this year even came out. Typeface has made waves quickly, attracting Fortune 500 customers and partnering with Salesforce and Google Cloud.

In this week's episode, Abhay shares about the need to balance your passion and recklessness for going after a dream with a product that you know will resonate with customers. He explains that people relationships are the real currency when launching a new company, and how advisers are just as important as what he calls the flag planters and road builders that founders need to seek out, to help them on their startup journey.

These two industry veterans share all of this and so much more.

You can read a transcript of this episode here: https://www.madrona.com/typeface-abhay-parasnis-shaping-enterprise-genai-strategy/

Chapters:

(00:00:00) Origin of Typeface

(00:00:32) Welcome and summary by Coral Garnick Ducken

(00:02:02) Introduction to Abhay Parasnis

(00:03:15) Build products customers want

(00:05:05) Maintain a beginner's mindset

(00:06:21) How experience at "Big Tech" prepares you to become a founder

(00:06:54) Leaving Adobe before ChatGPT launched

(00:09:21) Genesis of Typeface

(00:14:18) Generative AI vs. previous waves - mobile, cloud, etc.

(00:15:55) "Escaping the glass"

(00:19:15) Strategic partnerships to innovate faster

(00:22:35) Iterating on a product for a customer

(00:26:25) Building a team and culture

(00:29:40) Advisers are equally important as team

(00:31:15) Saying no to good ideas is an important skill!

(00:32:48) GenAI Scouts