Today, Madrona is happy to announce that Anu Sharma and Daniel Li have been named Partners. Partners at Madrona source and lead deals independently, create strong investment POVs on industry areas, and are leaders in the firm and the broader tech and entrepreneur communities.
“Anu and Dan are outstanding team members. They bring their curiosity, humility and problem-solving attitude to every interaction. As a longstanding team member, Dan’s energy for working with entrepreneurs and supporting the Seattle ecosystem has expanded Madrona’s role in the broader community, while adding to our growing portfolio of companies. Anu’s deep technical expertise in cloud and infrastructure combined with her passion for sharing it has already contributed greatly to Madrona’s investment thesis and our work with new and existing companies. Each of them embodies Madrona’s values of integrity, excellence and a focus on the customer, and we are excited to recognize their dedication today,” said Tim Porter, Managing Director, Madrona Venture Group.
Dan is a leader at Madrona and in the Pacific Northwest community. Over the last five years, he has helped Madrona build a strong network of next generation entrepreneurs, support organizations like the Pacific Science Center and Challenge Seattle, and source and lead several investments for the firm. Dan has consistently led the firm’s thesis development on new investment themes through his deep research and broad network, and he has led or worked closely on the firm’s investment in companies such as Rec Room, Rainway, Coda, Snowflake, and Tigera. He is currently investing in low code platforms, next-gen productivity, and online communities.
Dan’s passion for the founders of this region is clear through his weekly newsletter, The DL, that highlights PNW startups, as well as perspectives on tech trends from TikTok to SaaS valuations. Dan is also a builder, having developed multiple iOS games and an app that Madrona uses to make investment decisions.
Prior to joining Madrona, Dan worked at the Boston Consulting Group. Dan graduated summa cum laude from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania with majors in Finance, Psychology, and International Studies.
Anu joined Madrona at the start of the pandemic bringing more than a decade of experience as an entrepreneur and in business and technical product management. In a short period of time, she has already brought technical expertise and market analysis to the team as well as sourced and evaluated new investments. Anu is also the creator of the Tractionnow.io blog and YouTube channel focused on bringing Go-To-Market insights from practitioners to founders and leaders of companies at all stages.
Prior to Madrona, Anu led product management teams in Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for Amazon Web Services. She led the growth of the EC2 Spot Instances business and the Accelerated Compute Instances business. Most recently, Anu led the development and launch of AWS Outposts, bringing AWS infrastructure and services to on-premises locations for the first time. Anu started her career as a software developer at Oracle, founded and led a startup, and also held product and marketing positions at Amazon Payments and Flipkart. Anu also has previous VC experience as an associate at Softbank China & India.
Anu has been using her experience as a builder, entrepreneur and investor to help companies particularly in the areas of distributed systems, data infrastructure, machine learning, and security. She helps founders craft customer-facing positioning, pricing, and selling strategies to build scalable and repeatable mechanisms for growth. Anu holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BS in Computer Science from RV College of Engineering.
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