Founded and Funded – Madrona’s Podcast about Startup Life

Today we are launching a podcast. We looked around at the offerings for startups in Seattle and felt there was room for experienced entrepreneurs to share their moments of truth – where they made mistakes and figured it out, a turning point in the business, their “ah ha” moment, or just what got them through. And to tell some great stories along the way. We have entrepreneurs of all kinds in and out of our doors every day and every one of them has an interesting story. We hope to share some of them here.

In each episode, someone from the Madrona team will sit down for a discussion with one of these entrepreneurs. We hope you get to know the broader team here through some of these discussions – from investors to HR and recruiters to Biz dev and Comms pros. In the first season you will hear from Managing Director Hope Cochran who used her pursuit of opera early in her career to help her manage a room full of businessmen, and Venture Partner, Mark Britton on what he learned building Avvo into a leader in the field. Others in the first season are Oliver Sharp, founder of HighSpot who advocates that customer success is not just a department at a company, it’s everyone’s number one goal, and Elissa Fink who talks about how building a BtB brand that resonates with customers is just as important as a BtoC brand.

We worked with Larj Media to get going and they were great Mentors – thanks Tina and Joelle!

Here is the teaser to give you an idea of what to expect. We will be putting the podcast in all the usual places, ITunes, Spotify, Google Play, SoundCloud etc – if there is somewhere you want it and can’t find it let us know at [email protected]

 

David & Ben’s ‘Acquired’ Podcast Dissects What Went Right – New Episode Available

In 2023, Ben and David joined Managing Director Matt McIlwain to reflect back on the greater Seattle innovation ecosystem and the role of Amazon, the late Tom Alberg’s enduring impact and vision for flywheels, and the growth of the Acquired podcast founders from their days at Madrona. Listen here.


David Rosenthal of Madrona and Ben Gilbert of Pioneer Square Labs team up every two weeks or so to eat some food and talk about acquisitions. These can so easily go wrong. This podcast is about the ones that mainly went right – the “The 1+1=3 deals” as the authors say on their site. Why did these go right? What were the elements of success? And they are only 30 minutes! Perfect. The newest episode looks at YouTube (and includes a link to the original internal investment memo from funders, Sequoia)

Get the podcast from iTunes or from Acquired.

We sat down and asked a couple questions about the podcast and the response so far. Read on for fun insight and a good restaurant recommendation.

How did you get the idea for Acquired?
The idea was Ben’s— he had wanted to do a podcast for a while, and thought a theme around analyzing tech acquisitions would be a good mix of unique, focused and atomized-enough content that we could keep it going with fresh and interesting material. So far we’ve been very happy with how it’s working, and we have a few fun ideas in the works riffing on the theme— acquisitions that DIDN’T happen, “real-time” analysis when a big one gets announced, more special guests, etc.

Continue reading “David & Ben’s ‘Acquired’ Podcast Dissects What Went Right – New Episode Available”