Podcasts about Madrona Venture Group

Send us a textIn this episode of the HealthBiz Podcast, host David Williams sits down with Terry Myerson, CEO and co-founder of Truveta, to explore how aggregated electronic medical record (EMR) data can drive groundbreaking insights in clinical research, drug development, and healthcare innovation. Terry shares his journey from mechanical engineering to tech entrepreneurship, his years at Microsoft, and how Truveta is using data to improve patient outcomes and save lives.

Molham Aref's journey as an entrepreneur is nothing short of fascinating. With multiple successful ventures, big exits, and a deep history in AI, his story offers insights into the trials, triumphs, and evolution of the tech world, especially around the rise of AI. Molham's latest venture, RelationalAI, has attracted funding from top-tier investors like Madrona Venture Group, Addition, Tiger Global Management, and Menlo Ventures.

Parag Mallick discusses the role of AI and machine learning in biotech with special guests Vijay Pande from Andreessen Horowitz and Matt McIlwain from Madrona Venture Group. Their fascinating conversation covers:Advances that have enabled biotech to make use of AI and machine learningHow founders are applying AI and machine learning in biotechThe future of AI and machine learning in biotechChapters00:00 - Introduction04:37 - How did Vijay and Matt get into AI and ML07:33 - The importance of structured data, advances in compute, and algorithmic advances in driving the boom in machine learning18:44 - The Intersection of AI and biology21:57 - The evolution of biological models31:55 - The Complexity of biological data39:42 - Ways founders and biotech startups are using AI43:25 - Favorite/Impactful applications of AI/ML47:00 - AI for experimental design50:13 - The future of AI in bio/healthResourcesLearn more about Matt McIlwainLearn more about Vijay PandeFolding at HomeLearn about various types of machine learning on IBM's websiteLearn about autoencoders on IBM's websiteLearn more about transformers on NVIDIA's blogTranslating Proteomics Episode 6 - The Future of AI in Biomedicine

How do you craft a story that resonates with both investors and customers? In this episode of North Star Leadership podcast, Erika Shaffer - a Director for Strategic Communication for Madrona Venture Group, shares her insights on the art of storytelling in business. She highlights the importance of tailoring the narrative for different audiences—investors versus customers—and the key role of authenticity and empathy in making a lasting impact. Storytelling for investors often focuses on trends, technology, and potential returns, with AI being a recurring theme. When communicating to customers, the focus shifts to the value they will receive, with less emphasis on technology like AI unless it directly benefits them. Authenticity in communication builds trust, while using buzzwords like AI without clear explanation can lead to distrust. Founders must be clear about what the market needs and how their product serves that need, aligning their communication with the audience's values. Erika shares her experience with writing content for Madrona, emphasizing the importance of balancing expert insights with actionable advice for founders. Resources Erika Shaffer on Madrona Website I LinkedIn I Email: erika@madrona.com Lindsay Pedersen - Contact me to tell me who you'd like to hear as a guest! I Connect with me on LinkedIn

Our guest this week on the GeekWire Podcast is computer scientist and entrepreneur Oren Etzioni, assessing the past year in AI, and looking ahead to what's next. Etzioni, an AI leader for many decades, is professor emeritus at the University of Washington, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence board member, AI2 Incubator technical director, and Madrona Venture Group venture partner. In the first segment of the show, GeekWire's John Cook and Todd Bishop discuss the big AI news of the week: The New York Times Co.'s landmark lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI over their use of the newspaper's articles in AI models. The New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft for training AI chatbots on its copyrighted work NYT v. GPT: Microsoft finds itself on the other side of an industry-defining copyright dispute Francesco Marconi in the WSJ: AI and Journalism Need Each Other Audio editing by Curt Milton. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The surprise removal of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is the buzz of the tech industry — raising questions about the company's role in the AI revolution, the ambitions of Altman and his team, the impact of his exit on the rest of the tech industry, OpenAI's complex corporate structure, and its unusual partnership with Microsoft. This week, we recap the latest developments in this fast-moving story, and then talk with Matt McIlwain of Madrona Venture Group about the broader implications of Altman's ouster for Microsoft, Amazon, and the tech industry. RELATED STORY: Sam Altman's ouster puts a new twist into OpenAI's complicated relationship with MicrosoftSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Nataraj interviewed veteran VC Matt McIlwain of Madrona Venture Group on Startup Project podcast. Matt shared his insights into the state of venture capital and the impacts of AI, drawn from his 20+ years of experience. Some key takeaways: 1. Venture is a "tale of two cities" now - later stage startups are struggling, earlier stage companies embracing AI are thriving 2. Seattle has unmatched talent but lacks local capital - still over-reliant on Silicon Valley VCs 3. Incumbents have the edge currently in leveraging AI due to data, customers, ability to integrate via APIs - but long term, AI-native startups will win out 4. Partnerships forming between big tech and AI startups provide startups with computing resources while allowing tech giants to take an open, marketplace approach to AI I highly recommend tuning in to hear Matt's take on venture capital, AI, and building an enduring company. Available on all major podcast platforms - link in comments! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/startupproject/message

On this week's GeekWire Podcast, we're featuring an episode of Shift AI, a podcast hosted by Boaz Ashkenazy, CEO of AI solutions provider Simply Augmented, with guest Matt McIlwain of Seattle-based venture capital firm Madrona Venture Group.  A thriving tech hub requires access to ideas, people, and experiments that produce collective lessons sooner and with greater fidelity than anywhere else. This is what made the Seattle area the cloud capital of the world. It also positions the region as one of the world's top centers of excellence for artificial intelligence. That's one of the insights from Matt McIlwain, managing director at Madrona Venture Group, on this episode of Shift AI, a show that explores what it takes to thrive and adapt to the changing workplace in the digital age of remote work and AI. We discuss Matt's background and experience building companies and advising founders, and get his take on the future of AI. Subscribe to ShiftAI and hear more episodes at ShiftAIPodcast.com. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this installment of Shift AI, Matt McIlwain, Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group, discusses the influence of AI on different industries, Seattle's place in the technology landscape, ethical concerns surrounding AI, and the evolving nature of work in the digital era. Matt also delves into the opportunities and groundbreaking advancements created by AI, cloud computing, and associated technologies. In this episode of the Shift podcast, we cover the following topics: Matt's early career, family background and his road to the role he has now at Madrona Venture Group Introduction to Seattle's role as a leader in cloud computing and discussion of his past 10+ years of investment in applied AI. Deep dive into AI, automation, and machine learning, with historical context. Discussion of interacting with predictive capabilities through natural language. Insight into generative AI models and their application in various domains. Seattle's significance as the cloud capital and a center of excellence for AI and discussion of big companies, startups, and the energy of the Seattle tech community. Consideration of how work is changing due to AI, including ethical considerations. Exploration of the importance of keeping humans in the loop in AI-driven processes. Reflection on mentorship and its impact on personal and professional growth. Connect with Matt McIlwain ⁠Twitter⁠ ⁠LinkedIn⁠ Connect with Boaz Ashkenazy ⁠Twitter⁠ ⁠LinkedIn⁠ Email: ⁠shift@simplyaugmented.com⁠ Join the Simply AI Weekly newsletter and leverage AI in your business to scale safely. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/shift-ai/message

Another blowout quarter from Nvidia is sending the stock jumping higher in after hours. Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon, Main Street Research CIO and shareholder James Demmert and AI Squared CEO Benjamin Harvey break down the numbers and how investors should react. JPMorgan's Phil camporeale and Madrona Venture Group's Matt McIlwain talk the broader market action. Earnings from Snowflake, Splunk and Autodesk. Plus, Jason Furman looks ahead to Jackson Hole.

Hope Cochran is currently a Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group. Previously, she served as the CFO of King Digital, the creators of Candy Crush. At King, she not only led the company through an IPO and acquisition to Activision but also became a rockstar Candy Crush player. Prior to that she was the CFO of Clearwire through its sale to Sprint in 2013 and was the founder of her own company, SkillsVillage which she went on to sell to PeopleSoft. In 2013 Fortune named her to the top 10 Most Powerful Women in Gaming and in 2018 Women's Inc named her Most Influential Corporate Director. She is also on the boards of three public companies, Hasbro, MongoDB, and New Relic. Hope has a passion for the arts and holds a B.A. in Economics and a B.A. in Music/Opera from Stanford University.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Another day of gains for the major averages, including the Dow's 12th straight positive session. Vital Knowledge's Adam Crisfulli breaks down the market moves, including earnings from Alphabet, Microsoft, Visa, Texas Instruments, Snap and Teladoc. Wedbush's Dan Ives and Madrona Venture Group's Matt McIlwain on what today's mega-cap tech earnings means for the rest of the week. Keybanc's John Vinh on Texas Instruments report. CFRA's Angelo Zino on Snap's tough day. JPMorgan's Michael Feroli on the Fed's big week. Our Deirdre Bosa talks with Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat. 

Kris Engskov is the Co-Founder & CEO of Rippl, a venture-backed start-up redefining the next generation of mental health for seniors. Leveraging a value-based approach, disruptive technology, and a relentless focus on empowering its clinicians, Rippl is pioneering a new care model to dramatically expand access to high-quality, wrap-around mental and behavioral healthcare for seniors, their families, and caregivers. Most recently, Kris served as President of Aegis Living, one of the nation's leading innovators in providing assisted living, memory care, and wellness services to seniors. Prior to jumping into senior health, Kris spent over 16 years at Starbucks Coffee Company where he held multiple senior leadership roles including President of the company's flagship U.S. Retail division and earlier as President of Starbucks Europe, Middle East & Africa. Previously Kris worked for Madrona Venture Group, LLC, a Seattle-based venture-capital fund, and earlier in his career, he was in public service. From 1993 to 2000, Kris held several positions in the Clinton White House, including Assistant Press Secretary and Personal Aide to the President. He received his B.A. in Public Administration from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. Welcome, Kris!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sign up for the next LLM in production conference here: https://go.mlops.community/LLMinprod Watch all the talks from the first conference: https://go.mlops.community/llmconfpart1 // Abstract In this panel discussion, the topic of the cost of running large language models (LLMs) is explored, along with potential solutions. The benefits of bringing LLMs in-house, such as latency optimization and greater control, are also discussed. The panelists explore methods such as structured pruning and knowledge distillation for optimizing LLMs. OctoML's platform is mentioned as a tool for the automatic deployment of custom models and for selecting the most appropriate hardware for them. Overall, the discussion provides insights into the challenges of managing LLMs and potential strategies for overcoming them. // Bio Lina Weichbrodt Lina is a pragmatic freelancer and machine learning consultant that likes to solve business problems end-to-end and make machine learning or a simple, fast heuristic work in the real world. In her spare time, Lina likes to exchange with other people on how they can implement best practices in machine learning, talk to her at the Machine Learning Ops Slack: shorturl.at/swxIN. Luis Ceze Luis Ceze is Co-Founder and CEO of OctoML, which enables businesses to seamlessly deploy ML models to production making the most out of the hardware. OctoML is backed by Tiger Global, Addition, Amplify Partners, and Madrona Venture Group. Ceze is the Lazowska Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, where he has taught for 15 years. Luis co-directs the Systems and Architectures for Machine Learning lab (sampl.ai), which co-authored Apache TVM, a leading open-source ML stack for performance and portability that is used in widely deployed AI applications. Luis is also co-director of the Molecular Information Systems Lab (misl.bio), which led pioneering research in the intersection of computing and biology for IT applications such as DNA data storage. His research has been featured prominently in the media including New York Times, Popular Science, MIT Technology Review, and the Wall Street Journal. Ceze is a Venture Partner at Madrona Venture Group and leads their technical advisory board. Jared Zoneraich Co-Founder of PromptLayer, enabling data-driven prompt engineering. Compulsive builder. Jersey native, with a brief stint in California (UC Berkeley '20) and now residing in NYC. Daniel Campos Hailing from Mexico Daniel started his NLP journey with his BS in CS from RPI. He then worked at Microsoft on Ranking at Bing with LLM(back when they had 2 commas) and helped build out popular datasets like MSMARCO and TREC Deep Learning. While at Microsoft he got his MS in Computational Linguistics from the University of Washington with a focus on Curriculum Learning for Language Models. Most recently, he has been pursuing his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign focusing on efficient inference for LLMs and robust dense retrieval. During his Ph.D., he worked for companies like Neural Magic, Walmart, Qualtrics, and Mendel.AI and now works on bringing LLMs to search at Neeva. Mario Kostelac Currently building AI-powered products in Intercom in a small, highly effective team. I roam between practical research and engineering but lean more towards engineering and challenges around running reliable, safe, and predictable ML systems. You can imagine how fun it is in LLM era :). Generally interested in the intersection of product and tech, and building a differentiation by solving hard challenges (technical or non-technical). Software engineer turned into Machine Learning engineer 5 years ago.

Lexion is an AI-powered contract management system with a unique pedigree, having emerged out of the Allen Institute for AI, the AI research institute created by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, and having received backing from investors such as Khosla Ventures, a Silicon Valley firm whose portfolio includes companies such as OpenAi; Madrona Venture Group, which helped launch Amazon; and Wilson Sonsini, the law firm known not only for representing tech pioneers, but also for its own tech initiatives. Now Lexion has just raised another $20 million in a Series B round led by Point72 Ventures, with those prior investors again participating.  The company, says its cofounder and CEO Guarav Oberoi, is on a mission to use AI to help corporate operations teams and legal departments close deals faster by accelerating business contracting across sales, procurement, legal, HR, security, and more. His resume includes having been a product manager, engineer, and founder for over a decade, and, before Lexion, he started and sold two software startups, BillMonk and Precision Polling, and founded a large business unit at SurveyMonkey.  Guarav joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the company's founding and growth, its latest fundraising round, and his thoughts on the contracts market overall and the impact that new generations of AI will have on its future development.  Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.  Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Lawmatics, providing legal client intake, law practice CRM, marketing automation, legal billing, document management, and much more, all in one easy-to-use law practice software.   If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.  

Before becoming a partner at Madrona Venture Group, Jon Turow worked as the head of product for computer vision at Amazon Web Services. He spent nine years at AWS in the product organization. Since becoming a venture capitalist, he's invested in promising AI companies like Runway and Numbers Station, along with the buzzy data company MotherDuck.So when Amazon announced a partnership, called Amazon Bedrock, with Anthropic, Stability AI, and AI21 Labs, I asked Turow to come on the show to help me break down Amazon's effort to bring foundation models closer to its cloud customers. Turow is someone who has helped me think through everything that's happening in artificial intelligence broadly. So we had a fun conversation about open source and the excitement around AI agents — like BabyAGI. This episode of Newcomer is brought to you by VantaSecurity is no longer a cost center — it's a strategic growth engine that sets your business apart. That means it's more important than ever to prove you handle customer data with the utmost integrity.But demonstrating your security and compliance can be time-consuming, tedious, and expensive. Until you use Vanta.Vanta's enterprise-ready Trust Management Platform empowers you to:* Centralize and scale your security program* Automate compliance for the most sought-after frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR* Earn and maintain the trust of customers and vendors alikeWith Vanta, you can save up to 400 hours and 85% of costs. Win more deals and enable growth quickly, easily, and without breaking the bank.For a limited time, Newcomer listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Go to vanta.com/newcomer to get started.Find the Podcast Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Before becoming a partner at Madrona Venture Group, Jon Turow worked as the head of product for computer vision at Amazon Web Services. He spent nine years at AWS in the product organization. Since becoming a venture capitalist, he's invested in promising AI companies like Runway and Numbers Station, along with the buzzy data company MotherDuck.So when Amazon announced a partnership, called Amazon Bedrock, with Anthropic, Stability AI, and AI21 Labs, I asked Turow to come on the show to help me break down Amazon's effort to bring foundation models closer to its cloud customers. Turow is someone who has helped me think through everything that's happening in artificial intelligence broadly. So we had a fun conversation about open source and the excitement around AI agents — like BabyAGI. This episode of Newcomer is brought to you by VantaSecurity is no longer a cost center — it's a strategic growth engine that sets your business apart. That means it's more important than ever to prove you handle customer data with the utmost integrity.But demonstrating your security and compliance can be time-consuming, tedious, and expensive. Until you use Vanta.Vanta's enterprise-ready Trust Management Platform empowers you to:* Centralize and scale your security program* Automate compliance for the most sought-after frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR* Earn and maintain the trust of customers and vendors alikeWith Vanta, you can save up to 400 hours and 85% of costs. Win more deals and enable growth quickly, easily, and without breaking the bank.For a limited time, Newcomer listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Go to vanta.com/newcomer to get started.Find the Podcast Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Former executive Soma on how to unlearn your Microsoft ways    Pioneer Square Labs managing director T.A. McCann sat down with former Microsoft executive S. “Soma” Somasegar to discuss his work as a partner at Madrona Venture Group. A 27-year veteran of Microsoft, Soma is a legend, especially amongst Microsoft developers. He became corporate vice president of Microsoft's developer division and is credited with reigniting Microsoft's relationship with the developer community. After much reflection on his next chapter, Soma joined Madrona Venture Group based in Seattle. This was not an easy decision. In the latest episode of Beyond the Blue Badge, Soma talks about the decision-making process he went through when leaving Microsoft, the transition from operator to investor, and the essential qualities every entrepreneurial CEO should possess.  

Every leader is at mercy of macroeconomic conditions these days, but still expected to hit an even bigger revenue target..   This episode is your playbook for realizing the power behind embracing downturns, upturns, and any-which-way turns the economy will throw at your pipeline.   On this episode of The Run Revenue Show, Steve, Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group, shares his learnings from leading his team at Concur through the ‘99 dot com burst, the 2008 financial crisis, and beyond. You'll walk away with a playbook for how to use macroeconomic data to your advantage, keep your team informed and empowered, and solidify you no matter what.   Here's what's inside:  How to grow your revenue —without adding headcount  Why precise forecasting enables you to think more strategically about spending and where to make your investments. What effectively instrumenting your business looks like and why it should be a priority for you.    Grab this week's checklist   Check out RunRevenue.Pro for tips, playbooks, and advice for stopping revenue leak and achieving revenue precision.    See how Clari's Revenue Platform can help you win more deals, protect your customer base, and achieve revenue precision—even in a downturn.  → Clari.com  

In this episode, we talk to Julie Sandler about her psychology background and how that has translated to her work today, especially her relationships with founders. Talking about PSL, she touches on the growth of the fund and the Northwestern region and the venture studio model. She also dives into diversity both within the fund and their investments, serving as a testament to advancements in the industry. She concludes with her observation that the support system among women prominent in VC provides guidelines to help navigate the space. 

In der Rubrik “Investments & Exits” begrüßen wir heute Stephan Jacquemot, Investment Partner bei TS Ventures. Stephan hat die Zusammenarbeit zwischen Mercedes-Benz und Rivian, die Finanzierungsrunde von Stack sowie die neuen Fonds von Bessemer Venture Partners analysiert: Mercedes-Benz und Rivian haben ein neues Joint Venture gegründet, um “bespoke large” elektrische Nutzfahrzeuge zu bauen, teilten die Unternehmen am Donnerstag mit. Die Unternehmen unterzeichneten eine Absichtserklärung zur Gründung einer strategischen Partnerschaft, die in ein neues Werk investieren wird, wobei ein bestehender Mercedes-Benz Standort in Mittel- oder Osteuropa genutzt werden soll. Es wird zwei Transportermodelle geben, von denen eines auf der Vans Electric Architecture (VAN.EA)-Plattform von Mercedes und das andere auf Rivians elektrischer Transporterplattform der zweiten Generation, dem Rivian Light Van (RLV), gebaut wird. Mercedes-Benz baut seit mehr als zwei Jahrzehnten Transporter und verfügt über Produktionserfahrung und Ressourcen, die in Kombination mit der Expertise von Rivians Elektroplattform dem jungen Automobilhersteller helfen könnten, mit seinen begrenzten Ressourcen erfolgreich zu sein. "Wir wollen unsere Position als einziger Hersteller von großen Transportern in Deutschland behalten - trotz der steigenden Kosten, die mit der E-Mobilitäts-Transformation verbunden sind", sagte Mercedes-Benz Transporter-Chef Mathais Geisen. Stack, ein in Seattle ansässiges Startup, das eine Plattform entwickelt, die es Teenagern ermöglicht, in Kryptowährungen zu investieren und mehr darüber zu erfahren, hat 2,7 Millionen US-Dollar aufgebracht, um seine Content-Produktionssparte zu stärken. Die Finanzierung stammt unter anderem von der Madrona Venture Group, The Venture Collective und Santa Clara Ventures. Das globale Risikokapitalunternehmen Bessemer Venture Partners hat zwei neue Fonds mit einem Gesamtvolumen von 4,6 Milliarden Dollar geschlossen. Dazu gehören 3,85 Milliarden US-Dollar für seinen zwölften Flagship-Fonds, BVP XII, und 780 Millionen US-Dollar für den ersten BVP Forge-Fonds. Diese beiden neuen Fonds ermöglichen es dem Unternehmen, Unternehmer und Managementteams in allen Wachstumsphasen zu unterstützen, unabhängig von Entwicklungsstand und Struktur.

MLOps Coffee Sessions #121 with Luis Ceze, CEO and Co-founder of OctoML, Bringing DevOps Agility to ML co-hosted by Mihail Eric. // Abstract There's something about this idea where people see a future where you don't need to think about infrastructure. You should just be able to do what you do and infrastructure happens. People understand that there is a lot of complexity underneath the hood and most data scientists or machine learning engineers start deploying things and shouldn't have to worry about the most efficient way of doing this. // Bio Luis Ceze is Co-Founder and CEO of OctoML, which enables businesses to seamlessly deploy ML models to production making the most out of the hardware. OctoML is backed by Tiger Global, Addition, Amplify Partners, and Madrona Venture Group. Ceze is the Lazowska Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, where he has taught for 15 years. Luis co-directs the Systems and Architectures for Machine Learning lab (sampl.ai), which co-authored Apache TVM, a leading open-source ML stack for performance and portability that is used in widely deployed AI applications. Luis is also co-director of the Molecular Information Systems Lab (misl.bio), which led pioneering research in the intersection of computing and biology for IT applications such as DNA data storage. His research has been featured prominently in the media including New York Times, Popular Science, MIT Technology Review, and the Wall Street Journal. Ceze is a Venture Partner at Madrona Venture Group and leads their technical advisory board. // MLOps Jobs board https://mlops.pallet.xyz/jobs MLOps Swag/Merch https://mlops-community.myshopify.com/ // Related Links Landing page: https://octoml.ai/ The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown: https://www.amazon.com/Boys-Boat-Americans-Berlin-Olympics/dp/0143125478 --------------- ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ------------- Join our slack community: https://go.mlops.community/slack Follow us on Twitter: @mlopscommunity Sign up for the next meetup: https://go.mlops.community/register Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://mlops.community/ Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkm/ Connect with Mihail on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mihaileric/ Connect with Luis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luis-ceze-50b2314/ Timestamps: [00:00] Introduction to Luis Ceze [06:28] MLOps does not exist [10:41] Semantics argument [16:25] Parallel programming standpoint [18:09] TVM [22:51] Optimizations [24:18] TVM in the ecosystem [27:10] OctoML's further step [30:42] Value chain [33:58] Mature players [35:48] Talking to SRE's and Machine Learning Engineers [36:32] Building OctoML [40:20] My Octopus Teacher [42:15] Environmental effects of Sustainable Machine Learning [44:50] Bridging the gap from OctoML to biological mechanisms [50:02] Programmability [57:13] Academia making the impact [59:40] Rapid fire questions [1:03:39] Wrap up

Anshu Prasad has already raised tens of millions of dollars for his tech startup that is working to transform the dynamics of the transportation industry. His venture, Leaf Logistics, has attracted funding from top-tier investors like Madrona Venture Group, Playground Global, REFASHIOND Ventures, and Schematic Ventures.

Linda Lian is the Co-Founder and CEO of Common Room, a community growth platform for today's fastest-growing companies. Linda founded Common Room in 2020 to help bring organisations of all sizes closer to their communities. To date, they've raised over $50M from the likes of Sarah Guo at Greylock, Danny Rimer at Index and Next Play Ventures. Before Common Room, Linda led product marketing for serverless computing at Amazon Web Services. Prior to AWS, Linda was an Associate at Madrona Venture Group. Linda began her career as an investment banking Analyst at Morgan Stanley in New York. Download the Callin app for iOS and Android to listen to this podcast live, call in, and more! Also available at callin.com

What the heck is going on in the economy, and how will the current market gyrations and geopolitical uncertainty impact startups and venture capital? To help answer these questions we invited Tim Porter to join us this week on the GeekWire Podcast. He's a Madrona Venture Group managing director who has invested in early-stage technology startups at the Seattle-based venture capital firm for the past 15 years, in areas including cloud, AI and enterprise software companies. With GeekWire co-founder John Cook. Edited by Curt Milton; Theme Music by Daniel L.K. Caldwell.   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Amazon Way: Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles by John Rossman The 3rd edition of The Amazon Way is one of the rare business leadership books giving actionable insights for innovation and business growth to be the basis for your digital transformation gameplan. The Amazon Way translates Amazon's unique culture and management practices into insights and opportunities, as only an Amazon executive and expert advisor could do for the Amazon Leadership Principles giving readers one of the essential business leadership books for the digital era. Peppered with humorous and enlightening firsthand anecdotes with Jeff Bezos from the author's career at Amazon, this revealing business guide is also filled with the valuable lessons that have served Jeff Bezos' “everything store” so well—providing expert advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, CEOs, and investors. The author was responsible for launching the Amazon Marketplace business and had accountability for the enterprise services business. Since leaving Amazon, Rossman has worked across every industry sector and with companies of all sizes to create business and product strategies, approaches to scale leadership, culture and innovation. It's this combination of Amazon insider experience coupled with a vast portfolio of helping other businesses compete which make The Amazon Way a guide for anyone looking to compete in the digital era. The 3rd edition has many new and updated sections. This includes a new foreword from Tom Alberg, managing partner at Madrona Venture Group. Tom was on the board of directors at Amazon for 23 years. A new preface is included suggesting a vital strategy for Amazon and the leadership teams for all companies. The Amazon Way is on a short list of essential business leadership books and should be a key addition to business leadership programs to develop a culture of growth and innovation. If you are interviewing at Amazon or for current Amazon employees, The Amazon Way will be an invaluable asset for your success. The Amazon Way doesn't just explain the Amazon Leadership Principles, but gives tools, mechanisms and atomic habits to create change in a team or business. The leadership principles and examples include customer obsession, long-term thinking, think big, working backwards and the future press release, bias for action, earn trust and free cash flow. Praise for The Amazon Way "In this new edition, John Rossman provides an updated, in-depth and invaluable view of the principles that are fueling Amazon's extraordinary business success. John's suggestion to add a new principle focused on the Golden Rule is a great one for every company, as, more than ever, we need business to serve the common good!" - Hubert Joly, former chairman and CEO of Best Buy, author The Heart of Business - Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism "In The Amazon Way, John Rossman brilliantly illuminates Amazon's secretive corporate culture, using HIS rare insider's perspective to show how Jeff Bezos has created unique systems that facilitate good decision making at all levels of his company" -- Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store and Amazon Unbound

Before David Rosenthal became a full-time podcaster, he was a full-time venture capitalist. Entering Wall Street at the age of 24, David was one of the last associates hired at Madrona Venture Group before the Great Recession in 2008. Today he's the co-host of the Acquired podcast, which tells the story of great companies. It's also the #1 Tech podcast on Apple, with the likes of Taylor Swift, Warren Buffet, and Elon Musk on its guest roster. In episode 86, David and John T. Meyer dive into entrepreneurship, storytelling, and leadership while unpacking his journey from Wall Street to the podcast studio. Learn how Acquired evolved to tell the story of household names and how you can find your unfair advantage.

Anoop Gupta had his first startup acquired by Microsoft, just 18 months after launching. He has now raised nearly $200M for his current company. The venture, SeekOut has acquired funding from top-tier investors like Tiger Global Management, Madrona Venture Group, Mayfield Fund, and Founders Circle Capital.

Anoop Gupta had his first startup acquired by Microsoft, just 18 months after launching. He has now raised nearly $200M for his current company. The venture, SeekOut has acquired funding from top-tier investors like Tiger Global Management, Madrona Venture Group, Mayfield Fund, and Founders Circle Capital.

Hope Cochran, managing director at venture capital firm Madrona Venture Group in Seattle, was previously the chief financial officer of King Digital, the maker of Candy Crush and other hit mobile games. She led King through its initial public offering in 2014, and its $5.9 billion acquisition in early 2016 by Activision Blizzard. That gives her a unique perspective on Microsoft's deal this week to acquire video-game giant Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion.  We also talk about Cochran's career, including her past role as the chief financial officer of Clearwire leading up to its $15 billion acquisition by Sprint; and her current role at Madrona investing in fintech and gaming companies, including Seattle-based VR gaming company Rec Room, where she's a board member. We also discuss her leadership role in the Onboarding Women group created by Madrona and several other Seattle-area businesses to increase the percentage of women on public company boards. Cochran herself is on the boards of public companies Hasbro MongoDB and NewRelic. Cochran majored in economics and music at Stanford, and she gave a fun and inspiring answer when asked to name the song that best represents her as an investor. Listen to the end of the show for that. More: Hope Cochran on The Room podcast and Madrona's Founded and Funded podcast. Editing and production by Curt Milton; Theme music by Daniel L.K. Caldwell. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode we chat with Kabir Shahani, the CEO of Amperity, a high-growth SaaS company that enables organizations to take control of their customer data, systematically improve customer relationships, and foster brand loyalty. Prior to co-founding Amperity, Kabir led the commercial software division for IMS, following the acquisition of Appature, a company he co-founded in 2007. He's raised over $180 million from notable investment firms including Tiger Global Management, Madrona Venture Group and HighSage Ventures. We hope you enjoy the show.

Greg Gottesman is the co-founder and managing director of Pioneer Square Labs, former managing director at Madrona Venture Group, and is a co-founder of Rover (ROVR), the biggest pet sitting marketplace in the nation. Greg has spent his entire life authoring his journey. At 22 he published a book that became the survival manifesto for the 1980's college student (7 editions), at 24 he became a lawyer which he soon left so he could start working in business, and has been n investor in venture capital ever since. Greg has plenty of noteworthy accomplishments too long for this intro, including a TED talk, getting both an MBA & JD from Harvard, and his cousin being Fred Savage (for reals) This conversation was remarkable; Greg is super generous & a well of knowledge of not only marketplaces, but startups in general. Also, a gifted storyteller. We dive deep into…what spurred Greg's entrepreneurial journey, the genesis of Pioneer Square Labs, how to build a marketplace startup from scratch & what makes it tricky, obsessing over marketplace dynamics, the 80/20 rule for marketing funnels, killing great ideas, and "starting with 1" (and what that means). This episode is particularly valuable for digital marketplace founders, COOs, and CEOs. Greg has both founded AND funded several marketplaces, so he's able to share deep specifics on key principles & secrets. Please enjoy! You can like & subscribe if you like to, but ultimately we'd PREFER to hear your thoughts: so tell us what you think of the episode & leave a review. You can also find show notes @ https://jakubkubicka.com/greg-part-2

Greg Gottesman is the co-founder and managing director of Pioneer Square Labs, former managing director at Madrona Venture Group, and is a co-founder of Rover (ROVR), the biggest pet sitting marketplace in the nation. Greg has spent his entire life authoring his journey. At 22 he published a book that became the survival manifesto for the 1980's college student (7 editions), at 24 he became a lawyer which he soon left so he could start working in business, and has been n investor in venture capital ever since. Greg has plenty of noteworthy accomplishments too long for this intro, including a TED talk, getting both an MBA & JD from Harvard, and his cousin being Fred Savage (for reals) This conversation was remarkable; Greg is super generous & a well of knowledge of not only marketplaces, but startups in general. Also, a gifted storyteller. We dive deep into…what spurred Greg's entrepreneurial journey, the genesis of Pioneer Square Labs, how to build a marketplace startup from scratch & what makes it tricky, obsessing over marketplace dynamics, the 80/20 rule for marketing funnels, killing great ideas, and "starting with 1" (and what that means). This episode is particularly valuable for digital marketplace founders, COOs, and CEOs. Greg has both founded AND funded several marketplaces, so he's able to share deep specifics on key principles & secrets. Please enjoy! You can like & subscribe if you like to, but ultimately we'd PREFER to hear your thoughts: so tell us what you think of the episode & leave a review. You can also find show notes @ https://jakubkubicka.com/greg

In this episode of Intel on AI host Amir Khosrowshahi and Luis Ceze talk about building better computer architectures, molecular biology, and synthetic DNA. Luis Ceze is the Lazowska Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, Co-founder and CEO at OctoML, and Venture Partner at Madrona Venture Group. His research focuses on the intersection between computer architecture, programming languages, machine learning and biology. His current research focus is on approximate computing for efficient machine learning and DNA-based data storage. He co-directs the Molecular Information Systems Lab (misl.bio) and the Systems and Architectures for Machine Learning lab (sampl.ai). He has co-authored over 100 papers in these areas, and had several papers selected as IEEE Micro Top Picks and CACM Research Highlights. His research has been featured prominently in the media including New York Times, Popular Science, MIT Technology Review, Wall Street Journal, among others. He is a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, the 2013 IEEE TCCA Young Computer Architect Award, the 2020 ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award and UIUC Distinguished Alumni Award. In the episode, Amir and Luis talk about DNA storage, which has the potential to be a million times denser than solid state storage today. Luis goes into detail about the process he and fellow researchers at the University of Washington along with a team from Microsoft went through in order to store the high-definition music video “This Too Shall Pass” by the band OK Go onto DNA. Luis also discusses why enzymatic synthesis of DNA might potentially be environmentally sustainable, the advancements being made in similarity searches, and his role in creating the open source Apache TVM project that aims to use machine learning to find the most efficient hardware and software combination optimizations. Amir and Luis end the episode talking about why multi-technology systems with electronics, photonics, molecular systems, and even quantum components could be the future of compute. Academic research discussed in the podcast episode: The biologic synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid Towards practical, high-capacity, low-maintenance information storage in synthesized DNA DNA Hybridization Catalysts and Catalyst Circuits A simple DNA gate motif for synthesizing large-scale circuits A DNA-Based Archival Storage System Random access in large-scale DNA data storage Landscape of Next-Generation Sequencing Technologies Clustering Billions of Reads for DNA Data Storage Demonstration of End-to-End Automation of DNA Data Storage High density DNA data storage library via dehydration with digital microfluidic retrieval Probing the physical limits of reliable DNA data retrieval Stabilizing synthetic DNA for long-term data storage with earth alkaline salts Molecular-level similarity search brings computing to DNA data storage DNA Data Storage and Near-Molecule Processing for the Yottabyte Era

Scott Jacobson is a Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group, where he has spent over 14 years helping early-stage technology entrepreneurs in the Pacific Northwest build and scale their companies. Scott is on the boards of companies like Rover, Flexe, and CommerceIQ, and focuses much of his energy on consumer businesses or business technologies that have a significant consumer component. Prior to joining Madrona, Scott worked at Amazon, where he did two tours of duty, leading product management for Amazon's 3rd-party seller platform and working on the launch of the original Kindle. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Everyone is closely monitoring the implications of remote work as we emerge from the pandemic, so it's no surprise that one of the most widely read stories on GeekWire this week — right behind the Titanic's disappearing bathtub and Facebook's potential name change — was a story on trends in tech salaries.  Two big trends stood out in the report from jobs site Hired: Average tech salaries in Seattle are up 4.6% from last year, to $158,000, second only to the Bay Area, which saw its average dip slightly to $165,000. Nationwide, the average U.S. tech salary fell 1.1% to $152,000. With the shift to remote work, “employers are expanding their addressable candidate pool, filling roles faster and paying lower average salaries,” Hired said. What's going on here? That's our first topic on this week's GeekWire Podcast. Guest commentator: We get a real-world perspective on tech hiring, remote work, and pay trends from Bill Richter, president and CEO of Qumulo. The cloud file storage and management company joined the ranks of Seattle's unicorns with a valuation of $1.2 billion in its latest funding round. Richter was previously a venture partner at Madrona Venture Group, and a leader at Isilon Systems and EMC. "We are far more open to remote locations," he said. "It really doesn't make that much of a difference where they are when they appear on their video conferencing screen. And that opens up a lot of new talent pools." It also opens up new opportunities for people previously based in Seattle to relocate and continue working for the company. For its remote work policy, Qumulo's executive team has delegated decisions to its functional leaders, with a plan to learn and adjust as it goes, adopting an Amazon-like policy before Amazon did. "So we're definitely approaching things differently," he added. "That's not a temporary state for us; that will be the future of the way we go as a company." What does that mean for pay? The Hired survey shows that new employees in far-flung locations might not command as much as those in tech hubs. But unlike some other tech leaders, Richter, whose background is in accounting and finance, doesn't see much merit in attempting to adjust salaries when existing employees relocate. "It's a global market for talent. And in exchange for the talent and the impact that the individual provides the organization, they shall be compensated," Richter said. "All the micro-tuning of things like location and that sort of thing, that might work in the short run. In the long run, what we'll see is a market clearing for compensation in return for talent." Other topics this week The boom in unstructured cloud data, which is fueling Qumulo's business. My colleague John Cook makes his best effort to get Richter to disclose Qumulo's financial data and IPO plans. Richter does share some insights into which sectors are seeing the biggest increase in data, and thoughts on how companies are viewing Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform in this environment. The home debut of the new Seattle Kraken NHL franchise Saturday. Our colleagues Kurt Schlosser and Kevin Lisota got to tour Climate Pledge Arena this week. Check out their story and video. We reminisce about John's run-in with the Pittsburgh Penguins mascot, Iceburgh, during GeekWire's 2018 stint in the Steel City, and wonder if he'll have a similar altercation with the Kraken mascot. We'll soon find out. The future of self-driving cars, and the news that Amazon's Zoox will test its technology in Seattle's "different driving culture." John is a skeptic of autonomous vehicles, based on part his terrifying ride in one of Uber's self-driving cars. Richter is an optimist. We can only imagine what will happen when four-self driving cars arrive simultaneously at a four-way stop in Seattle. Produced and edited by Curt Milton; Music by Daniel L.K. Caldwell. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Matt McIlwain, one of the northwest's top venture capitalists, discusses traits of great entrepreneurs and startups, triangulating feedback as part of the learning loop, being there at day one and for the long run, tough decisions along the startup journey, his personal journey of investment, consulting, and operating experience before becoming a venture capitalist, and the importance of curiosity, humility, and listening. Listen to the end to gain insight into practicing essentialism, as well as his advice to make decisions based on the topics and people that you resonate with. Top Three Takeaways: #1 Matt advises young people to make decisions for early jobs based on the topics and people they resonate with rather than the prestige or salary of the position. You have to know yourself and the things you love to get out in the world and find people you can learn from. He did this early in his career, choosing a role where he could learn more about the relationship between the private and public sector over a prestigious job involving real estate. Relating back to what David Zapolsky said, being in these types of roles allows you to do your best work, which leads to people thinking of you for promotions or exciting opportunities. #2 Matt mentioned curiosity, humility, and listening in multiple contexts. He and his team at GPC approached the idea of a joint venture with curiosity, which ultimately lead them to not pursue the idea. Great founders have curiosity and the humility and active listening that it embodies, to listen to customers, carry strong hypothesizes that are loosely held, and triangulate advice. The notion of a founder-market fit also stems from curiosity around a particular market and problem. #3 Investible ideas, at the very basic level, identify a problem that isn't being solved as well as it can be. A company has to have a team that's passionate about solving that problem and understanding the market changes that could help them solve it at scale, helping give a startup the potential to be meaningful and large. Link to Matt's post on the Learning Loop: https://www.madrona.com/the-learning-loop/ & recommended books Essentialism, by Greg McKeown + Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke Connect with Voyager Talks on Instagram: www.instagram.com/Voyager.Talks or LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zevcarlyle/ Podcast Home: https://bit.ly/VoyagerTalksHome Guest bio: Matt McIlwain is a Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group, an early-stage venture capital firm based in Seattle, Washington. He has been a venture capitalist since 2000, and currently invests in a broad range of software and data driven companies with a focus on cloud computing, dataware, intelligent applications and the intersections of innovation. Matt currently serves on several boards including ExtraHop, Qumulo, Smartsheet, Suplari and Terraclear. He has been named several times to both the list of Top 100 Venture Capitalists by CB Insights and The New York Times and the Forbes Midas list. Before joining Madrona in 2000, Matt was Vice President of Business Process for the Genuine Parts Company (NYSE:GPC). He also was an engagement manager at McKinsey & Company, concentrating on strategy and marketing in technology-driven sectors and prior to that worked in investment banking at Credit Suisse. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College, holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a Master's in Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/zev-carlyle/message

Matt McIlwain, Managing Director of Madrona Venture Group moderates a discussion of when we can expect super AIs with Dr. Robert J. Marks II, Director, Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence; Dr. Oren Etzioni, CEO, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence; and Dr. George Montaez, Professor of Computer Science, Harvey Mudd College. Read More: Is […]

Dr. Oren Etzioni is Chief Executive Officer at AI2, the Allen Institute for AI, a non-profit that offers foundational research, applied research and user-facing products. He is Professor Emeritus at University of Washington and a Venture Partner at the Madrona Venture Group. He has won numerous awards and founded several companies, has written over 100 technical papers, and provides commentary on AI for The New York Times, Wired, and Nature. In this episode, Oren explains why “machine learning” is a misnomer and some of the exciting AI innovations he is supporting that will result in greater inclusivity. ----- To learn more about EqualAI, visit our website: https://www.equalai.org/ You can also follow us on Twitter: @ai_equal

Today's guest followed her passion for persuasive writing from the courtroom to legal technology. Jackie Schafer is a former Paul Weiss litigator, in-house counsel, assistant attorney general, and serial entrepreneur. Today, she is the founder of Clearbrief, an AI-powered legal writing tool, which recently received $1.2 million in outside funding from big venture capital names Sequoia Capital and Madrona Venture Group. Her company has also received backing from Avvo founder Mark Britton and a number of other investors associated with companies as diverse as Grubhub, Workday, and Tableau. Listen in to today's conversation to learn more about Jackie's path, how her work on an immigration asylum case led to her passion for evidence-based storytelling, and her vision for how Clearbrief can transform the legal writing process and the justice system.

Limeade, an employee engagement software provider, has announced the acquisition of Seattle-based TINYpulse, a SaaS employee listening provider, to create healthy employee experiences. Under the terms of the deal, likely to close by the end of July 2021, Limeade would merge with TINYpulse in an all-cash deal of $8.8 million for 100 percent of the issued capital of TINYpulse. In a press release, Henry Albrecht, founder and CEO of Limeade, stated that the Covid 19 pandemic had reinforced the company's vision of creating healthy employee experiences, generating better business results for customers.Go1, a platform helping companies upscale their workforce via on-demand training, has turned unicorn, raising $200 million in Series D at a valuation of $1B in a round co-led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, AirTree Ventures and Salesforce Ventures. Go1's Series C funding round came last year where it netted $40 million from Madrona Venture Group. The total funding raised by Go1 crosses $283 million as per Crunchbase. Other and existing investors - Blue Cloud Ventures, Larsen Ventures, Scott Shleifer and John Curtius from Tiger Global, TEN13, Microsoft's venture fund M12, Madrona Venture Group, SEEK, and Y Combinator participated in the funding round.Kdan Mobile, a Taiwanese startup, has raised $16 million in a Series B funding round led by Dattoz Partners. Yeon Su Kim, CEO of Dattoz Partners, will be joining Kdan's board. Other participants in the round include Taiwania Capital, Golden Asia Fund Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and WI Harper Group. Kdan Mobile specializes in cloud-based applications for workplace mobility. Kdan Mobile's enterprise products, such as Document AI, its data processing and filtering technology, and SaaS products like e-signature service DottedSign, PDF software Document 365, and Creativity 365 for multimedia content creation, including animations and video editing, will receive part of the funding.Productiv, an enterprise SaaS management platform, has announced it is collaborating with Miro, an online whiteboard tool. This collaboration will enhance how people communicate inside the organization and maximize the usefulness of communication apps like Miro.The partnership will provide corporate teams more visibility into how they're using Miro for new collaborative practices, such as real-time feature utilization.Dover, a recruiting platform, has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by Tiger Global Management. Other participants include Founders Fund, Abstract Ventures, and Y Combinator. Dover, which has created a "recruitment orchestration platform" geared at recruiters, lets them juggle and combine numerous applicant pools to automatically locate appropriate job prospects and then manage the outreach process, according to CEO and co-founder Max Kolysh.Treblle, a real-time Application Program Interface (API) monitoring and analytics platform provider, has raised €1.2M ($1.4 million) in seed funding from Pan-European Venture Capital firm, Nauta Capital that predominantly invests in early-stage tech companies.

SimplyDelivery secured €10 million in a Series A funding round led by Cusp Capital (about USD 11.8 million). SimplyDelivery software reintroduces restaurateurs to direct contact with customers, and it identifies repeat clients. In the previous three years, SimplyDelivery's annual revenues have tripled while remaining profitable. Logical Clocks secured €5M (approx. USD 5.9M in a Series A round sponsored by Industrifonden. The money will go toward expanding the company's commercial activities and footprint, particularly in the United States. Hopsworks, the world's first enterprise and open-source Feature Store with a full machine learning platform, was established and is operated by Logical Works.Fortive Corporation, a technology provider for connected workflows, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire ServiceChannel, a leading SaaS-based multi-site facilities maintenance service provider. The deal, approximately worth $1.2 billion, would primarily be funded with available cash, Fortive said in a press release.In a series of seed and Series A investment rounds, Endgame has raised a total of $17 million. Endgame is up against in-house developers who are splicing together various apps to create a solution that works for them. Endgame is currently in the early phases of development and is pre-revenue, but it already has a group of beta clients.In a Series D financing led by Warburg Pincus, Quantexa raised $153 million. Quantexa plans to use the cash to enhance its product line and expedite its regional market growth plans. Quantexa works with blue-chip banks, insurers, and government agencies worldwide, including seven of the top ten banks in the United Kingdom and Australia.Sourcegraph has raised $125M in Series D from a16z and others. The total funding raised by the company crosses $225M with this round and it aims to make its search engine easier to set up and add more features to help developers with the funding.Eka Ventures, a UK-based venture capital firm, has completed its $95 million (£68 million) fund. Eka's goal is to invest in consumer technology firms that promote sustainable consumption, consumer health, and the “inclusive economy.” Eka also has the backing of 24 entrepreneurs, 12 of whom were previously supported by Eka Ventures, either through a fund or directly.Pantheon, a SaaS platform for WebOps developers, marketers and designers, attains the unicorn tag, raising $100 million in Series E funding from SoftBank Vision Fund 2 at a valuation of over $1 billion. This round takes the company's total funding raised to over $200 million.Motorola Solutions has announced its entry into a definitive acquisition agreement to acquire Openpath Security solutions, a mobile and cloud-based access control system provider for businesses. The financial details of the deal were undisclosed but Motorola expects the deal to close by the end of July 2021.San Diego-based AttackIQ, a security optimization platform and a Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) system vendor, has raised $44 million in a Series C funding round led by Atlantic Bridge, taking its total funding raised to over $79 million.Impact, a global management platform, has raised $105 million in a $1.5 billion funding round led by Qatar Investment Authority. The additional funds will be used to increase partnership automation, strengthen channel relationships, and expand Impact's go-to-market operations. Leading companies such as Shopify, Uber, and Walmart use Impact's marketplace.Miami-based Marco Financial, a trade finance platform providing access to working capital for LATAM small and medium enterprises, has raised $82 million in a combination of seed and debt financing round, reports state.Discord, an online voice, video and text service platform, is set to acquire Sentropy, an AI-powered tool preventing digital communities from harassment for an undisclosed amount. It is reported that Discord would integrate Sentropy's products into its existing toolkit, also bringing the latter's leadership aboard its platform. Arctic Wolf, a cybersecurity operations firm, has raised $150 million in a Series F funding round, valuing the firm at $4.3 billion. The additional funds will be utilized to keep the company on track and improve its mergers and acquisitions strategy. Arctic Wolf's cloud security operations platform provides small and mid-sized enterprises with round-the-clock security monitoring.Remote has raised $150M in a Series B funding round led by Accel at a valuation of over $1 billion. Other participants include Sequoia, Index Ventures, Two Sigma, General Catalyst, and Day One Ventures. Employees and contractors can use Remote's worldwide payroll, benefits, and compliance services. With this round, Remote attains the unicorn status.Amperity, an intelligent customer data platform (CDP) for consumer brands, has turned a unicorn, raising $100 million in Series D funding at a valuation of over $1 billion in a round led by HighSage Ventures. Other investors – Tiger Global Management, Declaration Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Madera Technology Partners – participated in the round. Bookee, a SaaS platform for the fitness industry, has announced the raise of its pre-seed funding (amount undisclosed) from Antler India. Pallav Nadhani, founder of Charts.com and FusionCharts, and Abhishek Rungta, founder and CEO of Indus Net Technologies, participated in the round, reports state.ZoomInfo is set to acquire conversational intelligence provider Chorus.ai in a $575M all-cash deal. The move is aimed to allow customers to make excellent, data-driven decisions through their sales funnel by combining ZoomInfo's top-of-the-funnel strength with insights, driven from customer conversations that Chorus captures.The $57 million Fund III of the Female Founders Fund (FFF) has been completed. The new fund expands on FFF's current investing approach in women, women of color, and LGBTQ+owned businesses. Climate change and education are two topics that have recently gotten a lot of attention.

The 2021 virtual GeekWire Awards were held this week, recognizing the top companies, innovators, entrepreneurs and technologies in the Pacific Northwest, as nominated and chosen by the GeekWire community — along with  celebrity cameos. On this special episode of the GeekWire Podcast, we’re featuring highlights from a behind-the-scenes conversation with former Docker and Concur CEO Steve Singh, managing director of Madrona Venture Group, which was hosted for finalists in advance of the awards by GeekWire co-founder John Cook. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Chicago-based Spot Meetings raises $5 million in seed funding led by Ilya Fushman at Kleiner Perkins. That follows a $1.9 million pre-seed round led by Chapter One earlier this year. Spot Meetings wants to reinvigorate our meetings and displace Zoom as the default meeting medium at the same time.Esper, raises  $30 million in Series B round. Esper builds tools to enable developers and engineers to deploy and manage fleets of Android-based edge devices. The round was led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from Madrona Venture Group, Root Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures and Haystack.Portside, an aviation startup that is building a platform for managing the backend of a corporate flight department, charter operation, government fleet and fractional ownership operation, raises  $17 million funding round led by Tiger Global Management. Alek Vernitsky, co-founder and CEO of Portside stated that the new capital will be used to accelerate investment in product innovation, support further engagement with large enterprise customers and grow their global engineering and customer success teams.Enterprise app configuration platform Salto today raises $42 million in series B funding, bringing its total raised to $69 million. The company says the funds will be used to expand its capacity while growing the size of its workforce.Cognite, an industrial software-as-a-service  company raises $150 million in an equity funding round led by TCV at a $1.6 billion post-money valuation. Cognite says this investment marks one of the largest funding rounds for a SaaS company in Europe and will be used to expand its platform and support hiring efforts.

In this episode of Beyond the Blue Badge, host T.A. McCann talks with his former Microsoft colleague, Terry Myerson. Terry is the CEO of Truveta, a new health tech startup that’s building a data platform to better study U.S. health using de-identified patient data. Terry was an executive vice president at Microsoft for more than 21 years before joining Madrona Venture Group and The Carlyle Group and subsequently launching Truveta. He also is part of the Seattle Sounders FC ownership group. In this episode, Terry dishes on his time at Microsoft, the opportunities that followed, utilizing his connections to soar, and how his new mission is using data to save lives.  

PlexTrac, a Boise, ID-based security service that aims to provide a unified workflow automation platform for red and blue teams, today announced that it has raised a $10 million Series A funding round led by Noro-Moseley Partners and Madrona Venture Group. StageDot0 ventures also participated in this round, which the company plans to use to […]

On this episode, I speak with Rebecca Lovell. Rebecca holds an MBA from Foster, since she graduated her career has included roles with the City of Seattle office of economic development, Geekwire, the Northwest Entrepreneur's network, and Alliance of Angels. She teaches in the Technology Management MBA program at Foster, is a mentor for Techstars and the Female Founders Alliance and is a board director for the Washington Technology Industry Association.  She also currently serves as the Chair of the national Center for American Entrepreneurship.  When Rebecca and I sat down for this conversation in late February of 2020 -- as the threat of Coronavirus was beginning to become apparent but before the pandemic was declared and so much in-person work went remote -- she was the Executive Director of Create33, a membership organization and "founder-center" for high-growth technology entrepreneurs backed by Madrona Venture Group.  She has since been named the CEO of Denali Financial Consulting which  provides experienced, strategic, financial and operating leadership for growing companies.  Because of the rapid shift to everything-from home, this was a conversation that got stuck in my edit queue. Rebecca and I discussed her work at Create33 along with other in-person activities and I wasn't quite sure how much would be relevant amidst the pandemic shutdowns.  As I worked on editing it, I realized that so much of Rebecca's insights and advice are valuable to anyone interested in the venture and startup ecosystem here in Seattle. I did edit out some parts of the conversation that were no longer relevant. Rebecca and I talked about her experience in the MBA program, with the venture and startup community, and advice for students interested in pursuing a career that may involve working with startups. I hope you'll enjoy my conversation on careers and professional life with Rebecca Lovell. Rebecca shared the following events: Founders Live F-Bomb Breakfast Club WTIA Collaboration Institute - Ion And we both talked about the tremendous resource that is Geekwire, especially the Geekwire 200, a list of Pacific Northwest startups that are popular and trending among key online communities, and their Recent Fundings list. Rebecca shared so much great advice for students looking to engage with start-ups in Seattle. As we've heard so many of my guests say, "coffee meetings" are critical to building your network, and while we may still be a few months away from resuming in-person meetings, our students are having plenty of luck connecting with people over video conference for these informational interviews. Volunteering and getting involved in events that cater to the startup community, from conferences to meetups, again, many being held virtually because of the pandemic is a great way to meet and connect with people in the startup community. Thinking about the right time in a startup's life to engage with the company, for many tech startups, most of their hires are going to be on the engineering team until they get some seed or series a funding and have a headcount that has crossed into the double digits. And that hiring is likely going to be just-in-time. We also talked about how to assess startups as a prospective intern or employee, the importance of considering the type and quality of experience you will get, along with the executive mentorship opportunities, so you want to interview the company as much as they are interviewing you.

Criteria, a market-leading SaaS people analytics platform, announced that it has acquired Australian-based Alcami Interactive, an on-demand video interviewing platform.  There has been a substantial increase in demand for advanced video interviewing since the beginning of 2020, and Criteria will offer its 4000+ customers Alcami’s video interviewing service through its platform. Alcami will also offer Criteria’s portfolio of assessments to its APAC customers. Criteria plans to fully integrate the companies in 2022. “It’s no secret that the rise of remote work has created increased demand for video interviewing tools,” said Josh Millet, founder and CEO of Criteria. “Our own benchmark report identified a 159% increase in video interviewing after COVID-19 hit, and many of our customers have asked us for a video interviewing solution. After an extensive market review, we are confident that we’ve selected the best video interviewing solution in the market today. What we love about Alcami is that they built their technology with priorities that mirror ours: creating a user-friendly interface that caters to an outstanding candidate experience, and building advanced functionality around diversity and inclusion. We believe Alcami will complement our pre-hire assessment portfolio and will enable us to add even more value to our customers’ hiring process by enabling structured interviews, which research shows work much better than unstructured ones.” Alcami has a unique technology that drives an outstanding customer and candidate user experience, advanced functionality around diversity and inclusion, and the ability to cater for both pre-recorded and live structured video interviews. The company was founded on the belief that the hiring process could be made much better for both the employer and the candidate, and that smart technology could help employers make smart hiring decisions. https://hrtechfeed.com/criteria-acquires-video-interviewing-platform-alcami-interactive/   Job site Indeed announced the launch of Indeed Hiring Platform, a new solution that allows employers to manage the hiring process – from posting through interview – directly on Indeed, with no additional software.    With Indeed Hiring Platform, employers can reach 80% of US job seekers through the combined networks of Indeed and its sister company Glassdoor. In one integrated experience, employers can automate the process of sourcing, screening and scheduling interviews with quality candidates into Indeed’s video interviewing technology, Indeed Interview.   “At Indeed, our mission is to help people get jobs, and this past year that mission has been more vital than ever,” said Chris Hyams, CEO of Indeed. “In response to the pandemic, last year we launched Indeed Interview to make it safe and effective for job seekers to interview over video. Now we’ve connected the dots from job search directly to interview, making hiring simpler, faster, and more human. Our vision is to make getting a job as easy as pushing a button, and Indeed Hiring Platform gets us one step closer.”   https://hrtechfeed.com/indeed-is-ready-to-help-companies-ramp-up-hiring-with-new-indeed-hiring-platform/   SeekOut, the AI-powered Talent 360 platform, today announced $65 million in Series B funding led by Tiger Global Management, with participation from existing investors Madrona Venture Group and Mayfield. This capital raise brings SeekOut’s total funding to $73 million and reflects 10X growth in the 21 months since the company’s Series A round, while still being profitable. This funding round values SeekOut at close to half a billion dollars. With this Series B funding, SeekOut will continue to innovate and build the team to deliver more value to our customers. SeekOut will expand its Talent 360 platform to encompass internal and external talent – helping companies better retain employees, enable development & growth through internal mobility, and improve diversity and inclusion efforts. SeekOut will also invest in sales, marketing, and customer success to reach new customers. “Talent acquisition professionals and hiring managers are looking to go beyond the outdated resume when they do a candidate search. They are seeking a deeper and broader view of skills, experiences, and diversity,” says Lisa Rowan, VP HR, talent, and learning research for IDC. “SeekOut’s Talent 360 solution offers a compelling set of capabilities that is supporting hiring organizations with a fresh, modern approach to candidate search.” https://hrtechfeed.com/seekout-raises-65-million-in-series-b-funding/   ProvenBase is a new sourcing platform built solely to address the business need for diverse talent, is announcing their launch at Sourcecon Digital 2.0 on March 9th, 2021.  “ProvenBase’s unique approach ensures candidates are contacted based on their skills and experiences, which ensures under represented groups are not just part of a recruiter’s pipeline, but they are actually contacted.” said Ravi Tandra – ProvenBase Founder & CEO. “Our templates have been created by experts leveraging powerful analytics around diversity and candidate communication so users can see what their talent pool is comprised of and what messages and mediums are most effective.” Learn more about ProvenBase’s Sourcing Technology at https://www.provenbase.com/ Jobandtalent – a workforce marketplace that matches workers with temporary roles – announced it secured a €100 million investment from SoftBank Vision Fund 2[1] via its Series D round. In addition, the company has secured €83 million in debt financing from BlackRock. This comes after Jobandtalent closed a successful €88 million round in December. The funding will accelerate Jobandtalent’s expansion into new markets, including the US, and the consolidation of its leadership position in existing territories. Jobandtalent has developed technology to provide tailored matches between workers and companies in a range of sectors including logistics, e-commerce, warehousing, and manufacturing. As the marketplace grows, the technology is able to learn and make even better matches – meaning more workers in good jobs, and happy companies. The goal is to make it easy for people to find regular, dependable work and have the security and perks typically associated with full time employment – including pensions, sick and holiday pay, health insurance in some markets, and training courses. Workers can apply for roles, submit paperwork, and sign contracts entirely within the Jobandtalent app. In the past year alone, more than 80,000 workers have used Jobandtalent to find temporary roles.  More than 850 companies – including XPO, Ceva Logistics, eBay, Ocado, Sainsbury’s, Bayer, and Santander – use the Jobandtalent platform to easily and efficiently match temporary roles with the right workers. Jobandtalent employs the workers directly and manages all of the back-end administrative processes including payroll, timesheets, and legal compliance. Through the platform, companies can monitor worker satisfaction, which helps reduce attrition, and follow metrics like absences or late arrivals.  https://hrtechfeed.com/madrid-based-jobandtalent-secures-e100m-for-expansion/

In this edition of 2025: Tomorrow/Today, we kick off a series of conversations with leading venture capitalists about the unconventional investment areas that interest them. Dan Li, a partner with Madrona Venture Group, joins hosts John Cook/Co-Founder of GeekWire, and Jordon Voss/Sr. VP Northern Trust to discuss the future of online communities ranging from Tik Tok to YouTub, Roblox to GitHub, including the investment opportunities and implications of their ever growing reach.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Madrona Venture Group has been a mainstay of the Seattle and northwest United States startup ecosystem for years now, and it looks like it is going to continue that legacy going forward. In a filing with the SEC, the firm announced its eighth venture capital fund, raising $320 million. That's up slightly from the firm's […]

Against Gravity, the startup behind the social gaming platform Rec Room, has scored some new funding as it brings its once VR-centric platform to every major gaming platform out there. The startup has closed a $20 million Series C led by Madrona Venture Group . Existing investors including First Round Capital, Index, Sequoia and DAG […]

Against Gravity, the startup behind the social gaming platform Rec Room, has scored some new funding as it brings its once VR-centric platform to every major gaming platform out there. The startup has closed a $20 million Series C led by Madrona Venture Group . Existing investors including First Round Capital, Index, Sequoia and DAG […]

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Salesforce strikes a deal to acquire Slack for $27.7 billion; Amazon Web Services makes some surprising news at its annual re:Invent cloud conference; and a new tech giant arrives in our backyard. Joining us on this episode is Matt McIlwain, managing director at Seattle-based venture capital firm Madrona Venture Group, offering his commentary on the implications of these developments in the world of cloud and enterprise technology. Special bonus: Listen to the end of the show for a new installment of our GeekWire Podcast trivia contest, with a chance to win a GeekWire mask or socks. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week on The Room, we interview Hope Cochran, managing director at Madrona Venture Group. It's probably easier to ask, what hasn't Hope done? Music and economics at Stanford. Founder and CFO of SkillsVillage, bought by Peoplesoft in 2001. CFO of Clearwire and King Digital. Board member of three public companies, Hasboro, Mongo DB, and New Relic. Today we explore colorful stories of her time in C-suites and boardrooms discussing insights and themes such as advocating for yourself at work, what makes a good board, and the little moments that matter.

Here’s what we’re talking about on the GeekWire Podcast this week: OthersideAI thinks it can help you be more productive by using artificial intelligence to write your emails for you. But is that really a good idea? The months-old firm announced a $2.6 million seed round this week. It's one of several startups creating email products based on OpenAI's GPT3 language processing technology. We talk about the long-term implications for the industry and for humanity. Tom Alberg was an internet financial pioneer when he became one of the first investors in Amazon in 1995. He didn't stop there. He was also one of the founders of Madrona Venture Group, a venture capital firm that has backed some of the Northwest's biggest tech companies. But what's especially notable about Alberg, at age 80, is his continued focus on what's next. We share highlights and takeaways from this new GeekWire profile of Alberg by journalist Lisa Stiffler. And the GeekWire Trivia Challenge is back! Listen to the third segment of the show for the question, and details on how to enter the contest. From the pool of correct answers, we'll pick one person at random to win a rare and special GeekWire face mask. With GeekWire’s Todd Bishop and John Cook. Produced by Curt Milton. Theme music by Daniel L.K. Caldwell. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Julie is a managing director at Pioneer Square Labs, and runs the firm's venture capital arm, PSL Ventures. Prior to PSL, Julie was a partner at Madrona Venture Group, where she led the firm’s investments in Integris, Poppy, and Julep. In 2013, Julie launched the Seattle Entrepreneurial Women’s Network, an informal forum for women entrepreneurs and startup executives to connect in the Greater Seattle area. She currently resides in Seattle with her husband, Alejandro, and their toddler son and newborn daughter. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 

On this episode of The Built in Seattle Podcast, I talked with  Matt McIlwain, a Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group.For extras from this interview, subscribe to my weekly emailEpisode HighlightsAssessing  founder/market fit and why it matters.Lessons from the dot-com boom and bust.Why Madrona wants to build a bigger pie of success in the community.How a multigenerational team has defined Madrona's values for 25 years.Why founders explaining complex ideas simply is an investor signal.How founders become the Chief Sales OfficerHow "the learning loop" works for the best founders.Why selling a vision starts with humility and curiosity. What it takes to get through the low points in company building.How Madrona decided to stick with Smartsheet in their hardest times.The intersection of computer science with biological and chemical sciences.What Matt is excited about next.Guest Bio:Matt McIlwain is a Manager Director at Madrona Venture Group where he invests in a broad range of software and data-driven companies with a focus on cloud computing, intelligent applications, and the intersection of the digital and physical world. He believes in the Learning Loop for entrepreneurs who journey from curiosity to triangulation and decision making. This leads to outcomes and ongoing learnings.Before joining Madrona in 2000, Matt was vice president of business process for the Genuine Parts Company (NYSE: GPC). He also was an engagement manager at McKinsey & Company, concentrating on strategy and marketing in technology-driven sectors and prior to that worked in investment banking at Credit Suisse.Matt is the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and a board member of Washington Policy Center. Matt enjoys going on adventures with his family, discussing public policy issues, and trying out new technologies. He is also an avid runner, Peloton biker, and a major Sounders and Seahawks fan.In 2017, Matt was named Emerging Company Director of the year by the Puget Sound Business Journal, in partnership with the prestigious National Association of Corporate Directors’ (NACD) Northwest chapter. In 2011, he received the Washington Policy Center’s Champion of Freedom Award. He has also been named several times to both the list of Top 100 Venture Capitalists by CB Insights and The New York Times and the Forbes Midas list.Matt is a graduate of Dartmouth College and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.Where to follow Matthttps://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-mcilwain-692522/https://twitter.com/mattmcilwainWhere to follow Adam:https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamschoenfeld/https://twitter.com/schoenyFeedback? Suggestions on who to interview? Email me anytime - adamseattlepodcast@gmail.com

Here’s what we’re talking about on the GeekWire Podcast this week: Snowflake, the data warehousing company, came out with a bang this week in its public debut, raising $3.4 billion in the largest software IPO ever. It reignited a debate over the the IPO process and inequality in the allocation of shares when a company goes public. Snowflake's IPO was also a successful outcome for Seattle's Madrona Venture Group, resulting from a departure from its normal investing strategy. We'll explain what happened, and what it could mean for the future. When Bill Gates Sr. died this week at age 94, he was mourned in Seattle and around the globe, not just because he was the dad of the Microsoft co-founder, but because of his profound impact on his community. Microsoft, the Gates Foundation and many other institutions wouldn't be what they are without him. He always said the three most important things in his life were family, friends and public service ... in that order. Bill Gates Sr., 1925-2020: Microsoft co-founder’s father made his own mark on Seattle and the world Bill Gates Sr. at 90: A giant impact on technology, philanthropy and the Seattle region[2015 GeekWire profile] How Bill Gates Sr., late father of the Microsoft co-founder, helped Howard Schultz buy Starbucks The new Apple Watch Series 6 will be able to check your blood oxygen level while you wear it. Apple and University of Washington researchers plan to launch a study later this year to determine if the device can detect early signs of acute respiratory infection such as the flu or COVID-19. With GeekWire’s Todd Bishop and John Cook. Produced by Curt Milton. Theme music by Daniel L.K. Caldwell. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The run down on the DL with Dan Li and Chris Picardo from Madrona.  Recording SNAFU last week meant we missed a great Tic Tok discussion ( we expect that will happen again) but we are back!  The DL is a weekly newsletter that covers startup news and other fun stuff from Madrona Venture Group investor, Dan Li. August 10 edition - https://bit.ly/3kx4o8e 

Qumulo, a Seattle storage startup helping companies store vast amounts of data, announced a $125 million Series E investment today on a $1.2 billion valuation. BlackRock led the round with help from Highland Capital Partners, Madrona Venture Group, Kleiner Perkins and new investor Amity Ventures. The company reports it has now raised $351 million. CEO […]

Sujal Patel is the cofounder and CEO of Nautilus Biotechnology which offers a high-throughput, low-cost platform for analyzing and quantifying the human proteome. The company has raised over $100 million from top tier investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Madrona Venture Group, AME Cloud Ventures, Vulcan Capital, Perceptive Advisors, Bezos Expeditions, Bolt Ventures, and Defy Ventures to name a few.  Prior to this, he cofounded Isilon which he sold to EMC for $2.6 billion. 

Sujal Patel is the cofounder and CEO of Nautilus Biotechnology which offers a high-throughput, low-cost platform for analyzing and quantifying the human proteome. The company has raised over $100 million from top tier investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Madrona Venture Group, AME Cloud Ventures, Vulcan Capital, Perceptive Advisors, Bezos Expeditions, Bolt Ventures, and Defy Ventures to name a few.  Prior to this, he cofounded Isilon which he sold to EMC for $2.6 billion. 

Matt McIlwain, one of the Managing Directors at Madrona Venture Group, explains the most important quality he looks for in a CEO before investing, Madrona’s new accelerator fund, how he spends his time as an investor and his passion for public policy on the What Fuels You podcast. On COVID-19, Matt brings up some interesting points about the “natural tension between freedom and boundaries” and how “barriers have been broken down to find sustainable preventions, cures and tests.” Listen to hear what he believes will be the business opportunities that come out of this pandemic.

Here’s what we’re talking about this week on the GeekWire Podcast. Word leaked out this week that Uber is considering buying food-delivery service Grubhub, and it turns out there are many Seattle connections behind the possible deal, including links to Expedia and several other companies. Food delivery is a tough market to make a buck in, for companies and their drivers, so what's in the deal for Uber? Uber Eats is #2 and Grubhub is #3 in food delivery services, behind leader DoorDash. DoorDash grew its market share 42% in March while Grubhub stayed flat. Uber Eats grew 20% (it has a Starbucks contract). Seattle connections: Brian McAndrews, Grubhub board chair, is the former CEO of aQuantive and also served as a managing director at Seattle venture capital firm Madrona Venture Group. Zillow Group co-founder Lloyd Frink is also on Grubhub’s board. Frink had executive roles at Expedia where Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi cut his teeth. Australian hedge fund Caledonia Investments owns 16% of Grubhub and has large ownership in Zillow. Thousands of Jump ride-share bicycles vanished from Seattle streets recently in thelatest shakeup in the troubled mobility service field. The pandemic isn't making it easy for bike- and scooter-share companies. Will their rides return to Seattle once the pandemic is over? Thousands of brightly colored ride-share bikes have disappeared from Seattle streets as companies post losses and lay off staff. Not sure when they’ll be back but industry will look very different on other side of COVID-19 crisis: Industry will become more consolidated. Not clear if demand will return to pre-pandemic levels. Micro-mobility companies will focus on profitability. There were more than 2.2 million bike-share rides in Seattle last year, averaging more than 6,000 per day, according to the Seattle Department of Transportation. Last week, Uber invested $170 million in Lime and said it would hand its bike-share program off to Lime. Before the pandemic, Uber, Lyft, Lime, Spin, Bird, Ojo, and a handful of other companies were interested in launching electric scooter services in Seattle and elsewhere but now those plans are in limbo. Amazon unveiled a virus-zapping robot on "60 Minutes" last Sunday, but it's possible they were just trying to distract from the rest of the report, which focused on working conditions in the company's warehouses during the pandemic. We get our first look at Microsoft's new $199 Surface Earbuds and their appearance provokes some interesting reactions. Did someone say "Frankenstein's bolts?" Plus, we raise a toast to Seattle allowing restaurants to sell takeout cocktails during the pandemic. With GeekWire’s Todd Bishop, Monica Nickelsburg, Taylor Soper and John Cook. Produced by Curt Milton. Theme music by Daniel L.K. Caldwell.

Executive Director of Client Services at Corum Group, Joel Espelien hosts a discussion with some of the biggest investors today covering the topics on everyone's minds.     What does it really mean when investors say they are, "open for business?" What are they looking for with companies. And, what are they looking for in CEOs.  Panelists:  Vladimir Besprozvany, Greater Sum Ventures Gillian Muessig, Outlines Venture Group James Newell, Voyager Capital Tim Porter, Madrona Venture Group Vani Rao, Lighter Capital Stacy Tatem, Women in Cloud Check out other podcast episodes, webcasts, and videos at WFS.com. 

Here’s what we’re talking about this week on the GeekWire Podcast: Amazon's sales rose 26% in the first quarter as the COVID-19 crisis made the online retailer an even bigger part of many lives, but profits were down 30% due to expenses from dealing with the virus. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos gave a clear message to shareholders, saying they "may want to take a seat," because there are big challenges ahead and they won't be easy or cheap to overcome. The company says it will spend $4 billion this quarter on initiatives related to the pandemic. With Amazon biggerand more powerful than ever, federal lawmakers want Bezos himself to testify before Congress. Pressure is mounting from Amazon warehouse workers who fear for their safety and are unhappy with how the retailer is responding to the coronavirus pandemic. Protecting workers from COVID-19 will be one of the biggest challenges for Bezos and Amazon in the months and year ahead. People will eventually return to their offices to work, but how will they do that safely?Madrona Venture Group compiled a "toolkit" with input from 15 major employers in the Seattle region, including Amazon, Microsoft and Starbucks. One big finding: Communication is key to making employees feel safe at work. Meanwhile, funding for startups in the Pacific Northwest is taking a hit from the COVID-19 crisis, which may be bad news for young companies that don't have money in the bank.  With GeekWire's Todd Bishop, Monica Nickelsburg and John Cook. Our podcast producer is Curt Milton. Our theme music is by Daniel L.K. Caldwell.

On this episode of The Built in Seattle Podcast, I talked with Julie Sandler, Managing Director at Pioneer Square Labs (PSL). Links Mentions:Brad Feld on "The Thee Crises" https://feld.com/archives/2020/03/the-three-crises.htmlThe Founder's Dilemna by Noah Wasserman: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007AIXKUM/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0The Intentionalist: https://intentionalist.com/Shipium: https://www.shipium.com/Guest BioJulie Sandler joined PSL as a managing director in June 2017, and spends most of her time running the venture capital arm, PSL Ventures.  Prior to PSL, Julie was a partner at Madrona Venture Group, where she led the firm’s investments in Integris, Poppy, and Julep. She is an adjunct lecturer at the University of Washington Foster School of Business and teaches an MBA course on Entrepreneurship for which she has been named a UW “Star Teacher” several years running. She is a member and Board Director of the Washington Roundtable, and was appointed in 2016 by Washington State Governor Jay Inslee to the board of directors of the Washington State Opportunity Scholarship. In addition to serving on several not-for-profit boards, she has also served on the boards of privately held companies, industry associations, and several advisory boards. In 2013, Julie launched the Seattle Entrepreneurial Women’s Network, an informal forum for women entrepreneurs and startup executives to connect in the Greater Seattle area.  Julie was also one of 60 Americans selected as a Presidential Leadership Scholar in 2016 by the Clinton Foundation, LBJ Foundation, and the two Bush Presidential Centers.  She was voted Geekwire’s 2014 “Geek of the Year” for her work supporting women innovators, was selected to Puget Sound Business Journal’s 40 Under 40, and was named a Rising Star to Seattle Magazine’s Seattle Hall of Fame for her work with local entrepreneurs in 2016. She was also voted Geekwire’s 2018 “Hire of the Year” for joining PSL.  She is a regular speaker at technology conferences and has appeared on CNBC, Bloomberg, and at WE Day.  Where to Follow Julie:https://twitter.com/juliesandlerhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/juliesandler/Where to follow Adam:https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamschoenfeld/https://twitter.com/schoenyFeedback? Suggestions on who to interview? Email me anytime - adamseattlepodcast@gmail.com

Shannon Anderson, Madrona Venture Group’s Talent Director, joins us to discuss COVID-19’s impact on the Seattle community. Shannon shares how she’s advising their portfolio companies during this unique time and gives examples of CEOs who are truly living their values in the midst of this crisis. She also weighs in on best practices for leadership communication and provides details on Silver Lining, the new, free resource for connecting laid off employees with companies that are hiring. Hear why Shannon is fueled by "creating opportunities out of problems" and why she sees “tremendous opportunity once we get through the current situation" on this special episode.

I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time. Just interviewed Shannon Anderson. She is Director of Talent with the legendary VC firm Madrona Venture Group. Based in Seattle, Madrona specializes in seed, startup, and Series A deals. They’ve made over 300 investments in 110 companies since its inception. In this role, Shannon is the center of Madrona’s talent network, identifying rising stars for their portfolio companies & the Pacific NW startup ecosystem. She also serves as the strategic HR advisor to portfolio CEO’s. Prior, she served a similar role as Founding Talent Partner at Ignition Partners. And she spent 9 years at Microsoft, where she built the recruiting function that scaled the company from 8,000 to 40,000 people. Shannon knows as much as anyone I’ve met on hiring for early-stage companies. During this 20-minute conversation, I learned a ton. You will too.

Tim Porter, Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group, discusses how the venture capital firm operates, what a day in the life of a VC looks like, what he looks for in a founder, and funding female founders. Prior to joining Madrona in 2006, Tim attended MIT and Stanford Business School and worked at Teledesic and Microsoft. His passion about very early stage companies makes him a perfect fit for his current role, where he focuses on investing in B2B software companies in the Pacific Northwest. Some of Tim’s companies include Heptio, Highspot, Algorithmia and Lattice Data. Beyond talking about his work, Tim shares the lessons he wants to pass on to his children, what growing up in the Midwest was like and what he’s focusing on improving about himself. This episode is great for anyone thinking about a startup, looking for funding or curious about venture capital and learning more.

Matt is the MANAGING DIRECTOR of Madrona Venture Group, a Seattle based Venture capital firm. We spent today talking about Venture investments, being a good board memeber,  business in the Pacific Northwest and the future of Seattle. Matt invests in a broad range of software-driven companies with a focus on cloud computing, intelligent applications and the intersection of the digital and physical world.Before joining Madrona in 2000, Matt was vice president of business process for the Genuine Parts Company (NYSE:GPC). He also was an engagement manager at McKinsey & Company, concentrating on strategy and marketing in technology-driven sectors and prior to that worked in investment banking at Credit Suisse.Matt has been named several times to both the list of Top 100 Venture Capitalists by CB Insights and The New York Times and the Forbes Midas list.Matt is a graduate of Dartmouth College and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Matt is the MANAGING DIRECTOR of Madrona Venture Group, a Seattle based Venture capital firm. We spent today talking about Venture investments, being a good board memeber,  business in the Pacific Northwest and the future of Seattle. Matt invests in a broad range of software-driven companies with a focus on cloud computing, intelligent applications and the intersection of the digital and physical world.Before joining Madrona in 2000, Matt was vice president of business process for the Genuine Parts Company (NYSE:GPC). He also was an engagement manager at McKinsey & Company, concentrating on strategy and marketing in technology-driven sectors and prior to that worked in investment banking at Credit Suisse.Matt has been named several times to both the list of Top 100 Venture Capitalists by CB Insights and The New York Times and the Forbes Midas list.Matt is a graduate of Dartmouth College and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

CHICAGO—humanpredictions.io, a machine learning technology company whose product helps recruiting companies and enterprises identify and build relationships with tech talent, today announced a $1.16 million funding round led by Network Ventures with additional investment from Hyde Park Angels, SaaS Ventures, and M25. This capital will help humanpredictions further grow and invest in its team of engineers and data scientists. The firm says it has a database of more than 44 million profiles of tech workers around the world. Recruiting for tech roles can be difficult. Because of the competitive nature of tech, it is often challenging for recruiters to find people who both have the right skills the company needs and are ready to pursue a new job opportunity. Once they have identified people of interest, recruiters may struggle to start the conversation in terms that prospects will respond to.   To address those problems, humanpredictions provides organized data-search tools and gathers public data to create profiles of people in the tech industry, specifically Technology Leaders, Software Engineers, DevOps, Data Science, Product, iOS/Android, Designers/UI/UX, and QA. The platform then uses machine learning to predict which individuals are more likely to leave their current roles. In addition, humanpredictions facilitates the conversation with people by indicating when and how to reach out. By accessing these insights, recruiters can better target their outreach, find the right matches more easily, and improve the flow of the interviewing process. https://recruitingheadlines.com/tech-recruiting-database-secures-1-million-in-funding/ CHARLESTON, S.C.– MAY 15, 2019 — ENGAGE Talent has raised $3.5 million to accelerate the innovation and scaling of its groundbreaking AI Talent Intelligence technology that powers both the recruitment and retention of key talent.   High Alpha Capital and Grand Ventures led the raise, with participation from other existing investors, new strategic investor Engage venture fund, and Silicon Valley Bank. The funds come from a mix of equity and debt. With this recent raise, the total investment in the company has reached $10M.   “We’re thrilled to support ENGAGE Talent’s continued growth and innovation,” High Alpha partner Eric Tobias said. “Employers everywhere know that their ability to recruit and retain talent in today’s extraordinarily competitive labor market directly impacts their ability to be successful as businesses.”   ENGAGE Talent listens to more than 30,000 data sources and processes more than a billion data points monthly to map and predict people movement–empowering it to provide unrivaled talent acquisition and retention insights and recommendations. Customers like Allstate, Dell, Transamerica, and Harris Healthcare experience quantifiable improvements, such as 200 to 700 percent increases in candidate engagement rates. https://recruitingheadlines.com/engage-talent-raises-3-5m/ SEATTLE, May 15, 2019 — Karat, the leader in conducting technical interviews on behalf of companies, today announced that it has raised $28 million in funding led by Tiger Global Management, with participation from existing investors Norwest Venture Partners and 8VC. Karat will deploy the Series “B” financing to globally to scale its category-defining solution and its community of Interview Engineers. The company will also invest in R&D to leverage its robust body of structured-interview intelligence to continuously improve its highly predictive and fair technical interviews for hiring software engineers. “Tiger’s investment in Karat is a watershed moment for the profession and science of Interview Engineering,” said Mohit Bhende, co-founder of Karat. “Just like Back-End engineers do Back-End work and Front-End engineers do Front-End work, companies need Interview Engineers who focus on interviewing with consistency, rigor, and empathy.   As every company becomes software-driven, we are seeing the demand for Interview Engineering grow exponentially. Karat is uniquely positioned to address this universal trend and set the gold standard for technical interviewing. In 2019 alone, Karat’s clients will gain over one million engineering hours by accelerating hiring and unlocking developer productivity.”   https://recruitingheadlines.com/technical-interview-platforms-nabs-28-million/ SEATTLE—SeekOut today announced Series A funding of $6 million led by Madrona Venture Group, with participation from existing investor Mayfield. As the world becomes increasingly digital, companies in every industry have an urgent need to find tech talent to thrive. SeekOut offers companies a competitive edge in hiring tech talent and to support their diversity goals. Launched in early 2018, the company has quickly gained ground with more than 75 enterprise customers spanning multiple industries, including technology, defense, finance, pharma, consumer packaged goods, food & beverage. Tech talent is hard to find because developers, engineers, and scientists don’t bother to keep an updated profile on sites like LinkedIn. Even worse, these sites provide a very narrow view of a candidate’s skills and abilities. Recruiters who limit themselves to traditional talent pools miss out on millions of quality, untapped candidates. SeekOut significantly expands the talent pool available by scouring public data and using natural-language (NLP) and machine-learning (ML) technologies to understand the expertise of each candidate and build a complete 360-degree view of each potential employee. SeekOut’s AI-powered search engine gives recruiters the tools to find the best fit matches in the talent pool. By automating the candidate search and understanding past hiring patterns, SeekOut makes every recruiter a search expert and simplifies the task of zeroing in on the right candidate. https://recruitingheadlines.com/seekout-gets-6-million-for-its-sourcing-platform/   Upwork ($UPWK), the largest freelancing website, today released its newest quarterly index of the hottest skills in the U.S. freelance job market. The Upwork Skills Index ranks the site’s 20 fastest-growing skills in a quarterly series. It sheds light on new and emerging skills and provides real-time validation of current trends in the labor market and tech industry. The top 20 fastest-growing skills, Q1 2019: U.S. Taxation Hadoop Robotic process automation Explainer videos Computer aided manufacturing Financial planning Urban design Software documentation Salesforce Commerce Cloud Geospatial Julia development Kubernetes Magento Employee training Shopify templates Certified Public Accountant (CPA) Vue.js framework Leadership development Architectural rendering Podcasting https://recruitingheadlines.com/upwork-names-the-20-fastest-growing-skills-for-freelancers/  

Matt is the managing director at Madrona Venture Group. Matt invests in a broad range of software-driven companies with a focus on cloud computing, intelligent applications and the intersection of the digital and physical world. His words of advice to would-be entrepreneurs: “Truly understand the customer and their needs first and work your way back to a modern, technology-differentiated solution to their needs.” EXTRACURRICULAR Matt is the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and a board member of Washington Policy Center. Matt enjoys going on adventures with his family, discussing public policy issues and trying out new technologies. He is also an avid runner and a major Sounders and Seahawks fan. In this episode of the Million Dollar Body Podcast Matt talks about what makes makes a new venture take off, and what the #1 predictor of success is for entrepreneurs. He talks about how his post college fitness journey started in central park, and what a difference it's made on his career and family. Matt also drops wisdom about pursuing your passions and how sometimes the best remedy is just to get out and hustle. As a bonus, hear about Matt's first business venture creating a board game at Dartmouth college and what that taught him about life and business. See more about Matt and Madrona here: https://www.madrona.com/team-profiles/matt-mcilwain/

Erika Shaffer, Director of Strategic Communications for Madrona Venture Group, plays a very stragic role in the media exposure for startups lucky enough to have the backing of Madrona. Today Erika shares tips on how to attract venture capital and why your story and team matter most to your business.

Greg Gottesman, a major influencer in the Seattle startup community, sits down and shares his knowledge about entrepreneurship, his passion for the early stage of building companies, and the story behind what sparked the idea for Rover, where Greg is a co-founder. Greg serves as a Managing Director and co-founder of Pioneer Square Labs, both its studio and fund. He was a partner of Madrona Venture Group for 20 years and founder of Madrona Venture Labs. In this episode, he also discusses the entrepreneurship class he teaches at the University of Washington, what he looks for in entrepreneurs’ pitches, and why he would choose Seattle “if you could choose one place in the world to start a company now.

Matt McIlwain is a Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group, an early-stage venture capital firm based in Seattle, Washington. He invests primarily in software-driven companies and currently serves on several boards. He co-teaches a course on venture capital in the University of Washington Computer Science Department and is a board member of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer... The post The China Startup and Venture Capital Revolution and Future of Mobile Only Businesses with Matt McIlwain of Madrona VC appeared first on The Syndicate.

  Crowd Cow founder Joe Heitzeberg is our interview guest today in Episode 1467 of “The Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb Show”. Joe Heitzeberg is the CEO and co-founder of Crowd Cow. Crowd Cow's mission is to help people discover and access the highest quality craft meats, and to bring people together — farmers and consumers, families and friends. Prior to Crowd Cow, he was the co-founder and President of Madrona Venture Labs, the in-house startup incubator of Madrona Venture Group which produced venture-backed high tech startups including Mighty AI and ReplyYes. Before that, he was the co-founder and CEO of MediaPiston (acquired by UpWork in 2012, IPO in 2018) and Snapvine (acquired by WhitePages in 2008). Joe was raised in Seattle, graduated from the University of Washington and has an MBA from MIT. Some of the topics covered in today's show include: Why it is important to know where our food comes from Why most big food companies want to keep you ignorant of where their food comes from Crowd Cow's unique way of sourcing 100% of their products from individual farms Find the full show notes here http://www.livinlavidalowcarb.com/crowd-cow-founder-joe-heitzeberg-started-crowd-cow-to-bring-quality-meats-to-your-table   CROWD COW Official Site Joe Heitzeberg (@jheitzeb) | Twitter  

Today's episode is a special event, a crossover episode with the Acquired Podcast, which you can find in your podcast directory by searching for the word Acquired, or by going to Acquired.fm. Acquired is hosted by Ben Gilbert, the Co-Founder of Pioneer Square Labs and David Rosenthal a Principal at Madrona Venture Group out in Seattle. To mash up our two models, we're going to talk about Yahoo's acquisition of Overture, and how that related to Google's ultimate success with Adwords. We talked about a lot of this with Gary Flake in episode 133, so, for a bit of context, here is that entire story. Please enjoy, and please, do check out the Acquired podcast at Acquired.fm See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Much has changed about Venture Capital in the last few decades, and Greg Gottesman has witnessed it up close and personal as a founder of Madrona Venture Group, then of Madrona Labs, and now of Pioneer Square Labs (PSL). And while he’s still involved at… Read more The post @techvitamin 2.2: Greg Gottesman, Pioneer Square Labs appeared first on @techvitamin.

Discussion on Google XSS, the recent Google algorithm change, BuddyTV Raises 6 Million dollars from Madrona Venture Group, plus Do Domain Ages Affect Search Rankings.