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. 

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.

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.   

Matt McIlwain and Ishani Ummat discuss the vision, methodology and top level insights from the first IA40 list. 

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.  

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. 

Madrona Investor, Ishani Ummat, sits down with Shirish Nadkarni, serial entrepreneur, now angel investor and author of FROM STARTUP TO EXIT, out from Harper Collins Aug 2021.  Ishani and Shirish talk about starting a company, finding your co-founder, product market fit and how to choose your investors. 

Starting a company is a lonely business. Finding co-founders can be the solution to this – but what if you don’t know anyone who fits the bill?  Linda Lian of Common Room set out to build a company and recruited her co-founders one by one.  Hear her story and theirs.  Viraj Mody, Francis Luu, Linda Lian in conversation with Madrona’s Shannon Anderson.

Investor Matt McIlwain speaks with CEO of Accolade, Rajeev Singh.  Rajeev is the CEO of Accolade, a healthcare advocacy company, but this is not his first time leading.  Matt and Rajeev talk about learning resilience, how it's not about directing but more about convincing employees of the road ahead, and how the role of the CEO has changed considerably.  They also talk about what the entrance of big tech companies into healthcare means for consumers and the industry. 

In this episode of Founded and Funded, Anu Sharma continues her deep dive into commercial open source projects and talks to Jeremiah Lowin, the founder and CEO of Prefect, a dataflow automation platform that is trusted to build, run, and monitor millions of data workflows and pipelines. Jeremiah talks about how he and his team built this open source community from zero to 5,000, and how the community helps the team at Prefect reach their users and intentionally break out of internal echo chambers that often trap early stage products.