Send us a text Yashovardhan Wagh is the co-founder & CEO of Gone.com, a Seattle-based circular commerce company giving quality goods a second life through local supply chains. He previously built supply chains for Amazon and other Fortune 100 companies. His mission: to build a national circular economy so future generations can thrive on a healthy planet. Brought to you by TiE Seattle Hosts: Shirish Nadkarni and Gowri Shankar Producers: Minee Verma and Eesha Jain YouTube Channel: https://...

Send us a text In this episode, we talk to Sabrina Wu who is an Investor at the famed VC firm Madrona Ventures. Sabrina shares her thoughts about closed source vs open source, agentic applications and the emergence of multi modal applications. Sabrina joined Madrona’s investment team in 2021 and focuses on sourcing and evaluating new investment opportunities from Seed through Series C across Madrona’s core investment themes. She also supports the growth and strategy of current portfolio...

In the final installment of the Microsoft@50 series, we interview Laura Jennings, who was the Vice President in charge of MSN and one of the senior most female executives at Microsoft in her time. Laura was the Microsoft executive who shifted MSN's strategy as a proprietary online service to becoming one of the top portal's on the internet. I worked for Laura and together we bought Hotmail and got into the search business in partnership with Inktomi. In 1999, Laura Jennings launched a new ver...

In the 5th installment of the Microsoft@50 series, we interview Brad Chase, who was the SVP in charge of the launch of Windows 95. Later on, he took over the reins for MSN. Brad joined Microsoft in 1987 and was the first product manager responsible for the launch of the Microsoft Office on the Mac. Later he became the Group Product Manager for MS D0S 5.0. Brad negotiated the licensing of the famous Start Me Up song by the Rolling Stones that was used in Microsoft ads for Windows 95. Brought t...

In this 4th installment of the Microsoft@50 series we bring you Steve Wood who was the sixth employee at Microsoft. He was recruited out of Stanford where he completed his Masters in Electrical Engineering. He went on to work at Microsoft's Albuquerque office in 1976 where he had the opportunity to work closely with Bill Gates and Paul Allen. He worked on the FORTRAN compiler before becoming a General Manager. He left Microsoft in 1980 and later joined Asymetrix and found Starwave with Paul A...

This is the 3rd installment of the Microsoft@50 series. We interview Robbie Bach, who was the Chief Xbox Officer at Microsoft and the founder of Xbox at Microsoft. Before founding Xbox, he ran Microsoft Office and made it into the standard it is today. After 22 years at Microsoft, Robbie announced his retirement from Microsoft effective in the fall of 2010. Robbie has spoken to corporate, academic, and civic groups across the country and in 2015 completed his first book, Xbox Revisited: A Gam...

This is the 2nd installment of the Microsoft@50 series. We interview Jeff Raikes, who was President of the Business Systems Division at Microsoft. Jeff was the one of the senior most executives at Microsoft after Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Jeff served as a member of the company’s senior leadership team that set the overall strategy and direction for the firm. He began his career with Microsoft in 1981 and was instrumental in creating the Microsoft Office suite of productivity applications....

In this first installment of the Microsoft@50 series, we interview Paul Maritz who was the third most senior executive at Microsoft. From 1986 to 2000, he worked at Microsoft and was on its executive committee. He became executive vice president of the Platforms Strategy and Developer Group and part of the 5-person executive management team. He was often said to be the third-ranking executive, behind Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. He was responsible for essentially all of Microsoft's desktop a...

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

Listen to our 2025 Annual Investment Outlook Panel with four top VCs based in Seattle and the Bay area. Get their perspective on the investment climate in 2025 and their plans to invest specifically in AI-based startups. See how they did with their 2024 forecast and what their big predictions are for 2025. Tim Porter, Managing Director, Madrona Ventures Tim joined Madrona in 2006 and invests in B2B software companies in the Pacific Northwest. He is currently interested in intelligent applica...

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

2024 has been an incredible year for TiE Seattle’s From Startup to Exit podcast – featuring inspiring conversations with entrepreneurial leaders, innovators, and changemakers. As the year ends, we’re excited to share the Top 4 Episodes of 2024 that you don’t want to miss! The Founding of OfferUp - Nick Huzar: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2234096/episodes/13413716 The Founding of Rover & the Vision Behind Pioneer Square Labs - Greg Gottesman: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2234096/episodes/136...

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

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

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

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

On our one year anniversary, we are releasing this terrific episode with Jay Bartot, partner at Madrona Venture Labs (MVL). Jay talks about the model that MVL uses to work with startup founders and vet startup ideas. Like many technology entrepreneurs, over the last 18 months, Jay has been deeply immersed in Generative AI technology, building experimental products, and testing the capabilities as well as limitations of the new AI frontier. Having seen and worked with slowly evolving AI and ma...

Rajeev embarked on his career at Microsoft as a developer after a sabbatical from his Ph.D. to build upon his internship experience in Seattle the previous summer. In this episode, he delves into how his journey and interactions with various leaders have influenced his own leadership style as the CTO of Atlassian. The theme of ‘Developer Joy’ has resonated with Rajeev throughout his tenure at Microsoft, META, and now Atlassian. He elaborates on how Generative AI is being integrated across all...

Generative AI has taken the industry by storm as we all know. Besides Open AI. a number of players like Meta, Google and Anthropic have announced new foundation models. In this episode, we get Vivek's perspective of the competitive landscape and how it will likely evolve. Will open source models start to match Open AI's GPT 4o in terms of capabilities? We also discuss Apple's recent announcements around "Apple Intelligence". Hundreds of millions of VC money have poured into Gen AI startups bu...

Artificial intelligence has the potential to be a powerful tool for human progress if properly trained, harnessed, and deployed. Policies must be created to protect personal privacy, nurture innovation, and foster prosperity. The Transparency Coalition (https://www.transparencycoalition.ai/). a non-profit, is focused on creating tools, systems, and policies that hold AI developers and deployers accountable for the legal and ethical creation and operation of AI systems. Listen to the two found...