Learn about Simbian,  an AI security company. Simbian is the first security company to accelerate security by empowering every member of a security team, from the C-Suite to frontline practitioners, to craft tailored insights and workflows for their unique security needs - ranging from complex investigation and response to governance and reporting. Learn how they pivoted from providing security for Gen Ai to leveraging Gen AI to creating agents that speed up security workflows and investigations.

Sumedh is the Chief Product Officer at Simbian, a cybersecurity startup that builds AI Agents to autonomously handle security operations such as investigating security alerts, hunting for threats, and filling questionnaires. Previously Sumedh was Director of Security programs at Meta, where his favorite project was to measure business outcomes of security. Earlier he was Partner GPM at Microsoft, where he led the product teams for data security products for cloud customers. Sumedh did his B.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Bombay and MS in Computer Science at University of North Carolina. Sumedh lives near Seattle and enjoys the beautiful Pacific Northwest outdoors.

Brought to you by TiE Seattle
Hosts: Shirish Nadkarni and Gowri Shankar
Producers: Minee Verma and Eesha Jain
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@tieseattle567

Listen to our 2025 Annual Investment Outlook Panel with four top VCs based in Seattle and the Bay area. Get their perspective on the investment climate in 2025 and their plans to invest specifically in AI-based startups. See how they did with their 2024 forecast and what their big predictions are for 2025.

Tim Porter, Managing Director, Madrona Ventures
Tim joined Madrona in 2006 and invests in B2B software companies in the Pacific Northwest. He is currently interested in intelligent applications and SaaS, cloud-native software infrastructure, the modern data stack, machine learning, DevOps, and cybersecurity. He is also a board member of numerous Madrona portfolio companies.

Sudip Chakrabarti, Partner, Pruven Capital
Sudip is a partner at Pruven Capital where he works with companies that are transforming the enterprise, cloud and infrastructure markets.  Sudip's past investments include Exabeam, Heptio, Serverless.com, Datacoral, Spotnana, Temporal, Tesorio and Polly. He had also been a board observer at Databricks, Digital Ocean, Actifio, Mesosphere and Samsara.

Kellan Carter, Founding Partner, FUSE Ventures
Kellan Carter is a founding partner of FUSE where he focuses on early-stage investments in intelligent software in both horizontal and vertical categories.  He currently sits on the Boards of Zuper, Pictory, Avante, Owl, Xemelgo and PDM Automotive.

Suman Natarajan, Senior Principal, B Capital
Suman Natarajan is a Senior Principal at B Capital’s San Francisco office, where she invests in startups powering the enterprise, across domains such as cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, DevOps, data and ML/AI, and B2B SaaS.

Brought to you by TiE Seattle
Hosts: Shirish Nadkarni and Gowri Shankar
Producers: Minee Verma and Eesha Jain
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@tieseattle567

Learn about the founding of Otto from Mike Fridgen, the Managing Director of Madrona Venture Labs where this concept was incubated. Otto is your personal AI travel agent that seeks to be as valuable and insightful as a dedicated personal assistant. Otto offers enterprise-grade travel booking and servicing capabilities through an easy-to-use AI travel agent that autonomously plans, books, and manages your travel, even during your trip.

As Managing Director of Madrona Venture Labs (MVL), Mike Fridgen leads the studio's mission to partner with founders from day one to create extraordinary companies. Mike co-founded multiple MVL studio funds that have created and invested in 30+ companies with aggregate funding of $270m+ and a total valuation of $700m+.

Before MVL, Mike was the founding CEO of Decide, which was acquired by eBay in 2013. At eBay, Mike was the General Manager of the Seattle-area office and the global product leader for professional selling experiences. Prior to that, he was the founding head of product at Farecast, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2008. Since the late 90s, he has been a founding member of three venture-backed consumer technology companies.

Mike is an active advisor and board member of dozens of startups. He is on the LPAC of Pack VC and has served on the University of Washington's Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship board since 2014. He is a graduate of the University of Washington and Harvard Business School.

Brought to you by TiE Seattle
Hosts: Shirish Nadkarni and Gowri Shankar
Producers: Minee Verma and Eesha Jain
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@tieseattle567

2024 has been an incredible year for TiE Seattle’s From Startup to Exit podcast – featuring inspiring conversations with entrepreneurial leaders, innovators, and changemakers. As the year ends, we’re excited to share the Top 4 Episodes of 2024 that you don’t want to miss!

The Founding of OfferUp - Nick Huzar: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2234096/episodes/13413716

The Founding of Rover & the Vision Behind Pioneer Square Labs - Greg Gottesman: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2234096/episodes/13615903

Mega-Successful Exits: Chronus & Ally.io - Vetri Vellore: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2234096/episodes/13899931

Developer Joy Through Generative AI - Rajeev Rajan: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2234096/episodes/15463924

Brought to you by TiE Seattle
Hosts: Shirish Nadkarni and Gowri Shankar
Producers: Minee Verma and Eesha Jain
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@tieseattle567

Smartsheet is a major success story for the Seattle Tech ecosystem. Smartsheet was founded in 2005 as a workplace management system based on a spreadsheet style architecture. In this episode, Praerit Garg (PG) talks about the early product vision for Smartsheet. How, unlike dedicated product management tools like Asana, Smartsheet is very flexible and adapts to a number of workplace management scenarios. PG discusses the new product innovations that Smartsheet has introduced based on AI. As a startup founder himself, PG shares some of the key lessons that he learned in starting a startup.

Praerit Garg is President of Product & Innovation at Smartsheet. He is passionate about building a product and engineering culture of innovation that scales, finding simpler solutions to hard problems, and delivering great experiences for our customers.

PG has more than 25 years’ experience building large-scale distributed systems and internet services. Prior to Smartsheet, Praerit was a general manager at AWS for identity, access, and directory services. Previously, he co-founded Symform, a distributed internet storage startup which was acquired by Quantum. PG was also at Microsoft for 12 years, where he was responsible for many of the user identity, access, and encryption features in Windows. While there, he led the delivery of distributed systems management capabilities across multiple Microsoft products and was part of the team that built Active Directory. PG is also co-inventor on more than 25 patents. 

PG holds a master’s degree in computer science from Purdue University. He loves to travel with his family, experiencing different cultures and their food, art, architecture, and history.

Brought to you by TiE Seattle
Hosts: Shirish Nadkarni and Gowri Shankar
Producers: Minee Verma and Eesha Jain
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@tieseattle567

Many of the large language model providers have built their LLM models by scraping data from websites and open source sites. Some have licensed the content like Open AI has done with Reddit. Nonetheless, many of these LLM providers have been sued for illegally copying data for which they have no permission. In this podcast, Adam shares his thoughts on the Fair Use doctrine and various legal opinions on the legality of scraping data to build LLM models. Here's also an interesting article that Adam has written for developing, extending and using Generative AI models.

Adam Shevell is a partner in Wilson Sonsini’s San Francisco office, where he co-leads the firm’s technology transactions practice in the city. Adam advises technology companies and their investors at all stages of company development, from pioneering start-ups to leading global enterprises, angel investors, venture capital firms, and other institutions in the start-up ecosystem. 

Adam represents leading Silicon Valley companies on complex and strategic transactions involving cutting-edge innovations and the launch of new products. By understanding his clients’ products, markets, and business priorities, and by building deep and lasting relationships, Adam provides creative and pragmatic advice focused on delivering effective results.

Adam also works closely with Canadian start-ups on their U.S. expansion, fundraising, strategic partnerships, and exit transactions, and with Canadian venture funds investing in U.S.-based companies.

Brought to you by TiE Seattle
Hosts: Shirish Nadkarni and Gowri Shankar
Producers: Minee Verma and Eesha Jain
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@tieseattle567

You may not think of the State of Louisiana as a software innovation hub but it is doing a lot to attract startups to its state. It has a $100 million seed capital fund to match VC investment dollar for dollar. It is willing to rebate 25% of your software development dollars for software development done in its state. It is also
providing sales tax rebates to attract large data centers to its state.

Josh Fleig is responsible for fostering innovation and entrepreneurship across the state, while assisting small businesses with access to award-winning programs and services designed to accelerate growth and elevate Louisiana’s standing as a hub for innovation and high-value jobs.

He is an experienced senior executive with over 20 years at the intersections of technology, economic development and education.

Most recently, Fleig served as the Senior Vice President of Business Development at Greater New Orleans, Inc., where he led his team to developing a project pipeline of over $20 billion. Under his guidance, the team engineered strategies to develop key industries across Louisiana’s Southeast Region, with initiatives ranging from entrepreneurship and innovation to future energy and entertainment.

Before his tenure at GNO, Inc., Josh was a trailblazer in the growth of Louisiana’s technology industry. Starting with the Jindal administration in 2012, he was the architect of a recruitment strategy that sparked dozens of software and digital media project wins at Louisiana Economic Development. His contributions included the co-creation of the state’s Entertainment Development Fund.

Earlier in his career, Josh established a track record of innovation as the Director of Media and Brands at SinglePoint (now Bally’s Corporation). There, he managed publisher relationships for the SaaS business, driving interactive TV engagements that captivated audiences across major broadcasters like CBS, Disney, Viacom and Discovery. His journey into the media industry began at NBCUniversal, where he
thrived as a technical producer in interactive media product design, creating hundreds of groundbreaking fan engagements for NBC Sports, Bravo, Syfy, MSNBC, CNBC and more.

Brought to you by TiE Seattle
Hosts: Shirish Nadkarni and Gowri Shankar
Producers: Minee Verma and Eesha Jain
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@tieseattle567

These days you will often call into customer service for a company whose product you are using and will be connected to an agent with a foreign accent. For many Americans, this can be a challenging experience as they cannot understand what the agent is saying because of their accent. Foreign agents have also complained that it can be a dehumanizing experience. This can result in a low Net Promoter Score for the foreign call center which reduces the revenues they can charge for their services.

Soundwave is an AI application that moderates the accents of foreign call center agents. It works as the agent talks into their microphone. Then, their voice goes through an AI model in real-time and returns with a moderated accent. The caller hears the response in the moderated accent. 

The Soundwave product was conceived of by young high schoolers under the auspices of the TiE Young Entrepreneur (TYE) program. They won the TYE Globals finals in 2024.

TYE is a fantastic year-around program to guide high school students to create and launch their first real business. Students are guided through each step of starting an enterprise, from brainstorming the idea to developing a product prototype to pitching to investors. Classroom learning is blended with real-world experimentation and validation, to obtain product-market fit. This program culminates in the regional finals event being held this year and a global competition.

Brought to you by TiE Seattle
Hosts: Shirish Nadkarni and Gowri Shankar
Producers: Minee Verma and Eesha Jain
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@tieseattle567

On our one year anniversary, we are releasing this terrific episode with Jay Bartot, partner at Madrona Venture Labs (MVL). Jay talks about the model that MVL uses to work with startup founders and vet startup ideas.

Like many technology entrepreneurs, over the last 18 months, Jay has been deeply immersed in Generative AI technology, building experimental products, and testing the capabilities as well as limitations of the new AI frontier. Having seen and worked with slowly evolving AI and machine learning technologies over 25 years, his early experimentation with LLMs (large language models) quickly led to the realization and excitement that difficult problems he grappled with for many years (e.g., robust natural language understanding) are now virtually solved. The essence of his enthusiasm for the advances in capabilities Generative AI technology brings to entrepreneurs and startups was captured when he was recently overheard saying, “I mean, holy shit - these things are fucking awesome!”

Jay Bartot joined MVL in 2016. At MVL, Jay leverages his extensive experience in software engineering and machine learning to develop innovative, AI-driven software solutions. His expertise extends beyond technical execution, encompassing a spectrum of strategic elements of company creation and building.

Journey to MVL

Jay's immersion into computing began in the late '80s when he was swept up in the personal computer revolution, learning to compose and play music on his Apple Macintosh in college. This ultimately sparked his interest in software development, signal processing, and computer graphics. He quickly discovered the joy and power of building and distributing his own software to his friends and family, not to mention being paid to do what he loved. During the internet boom of the mid-90s, Jay joined his first startup, where he was introduced to the value of data, machine learning, and venture capital. Over the next 15 years, Jay co-founded several data-centric machine-learning startups in various verticals, such as e-commerce, online advertising, travel, medical informatics, and consumer video applications. These startups were later acquired by major companies such as Nielsen/NetRatings, Microsoft, Alliance Health Networks, and Hulu.

Brought to you by TiE Seattle
Hosts: Shirish Nadkarni and Gowri Shankar
Producers: Minee Verma and Eesha Jain
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@tieseattle567

Rajeev embarked on his career at Microsoft as a developer after a sabbatical from his Ph.D. to build upon his internship experience in Seattle the previous summer. In this episode, he delves into how his journey and interactions with various leaders have influenced his own leadership style as the CTO of Atlassian.

The theme of ‘Developer Joy’ has resonated with Rajeev throughout his tenure at Microsoft, META, and now Atlassian. He elaborates on how Generative AI is being integrated across all Atlassian products, emphasizing this core theme. Given his background as a developer early in his career, this theme holds a special place in his heart. In this episode Rajeev outlines how Generative AI will shape tools for developers and users, particularly as Atlassian expands its collaboration offerings to all corners of the enterprise

Rajeev Rajan is the Chief Technology Officer at Atlassian where he oversees Atlassian Engineering, IT, Security and Trust, and the Engineering Operations teams. As CTO, he is focused on our Cloud transformation and continuing to grow Atlassian into a world-class engineering organization.

Rajeev previously acted as the Vice President and Head of Engineering for Meta and spent over two decades at Microsoft, where he held a number of roles, including building and leading the team responsible for Office 365's Cloud Infrastructure.

Brought to you by TiE Seattle
Hosts: Shirish Nadkarni and Gowri Shankar
Producers: Minee Verma and Eesha Jain
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@tieseattle567