Soma Archives

Applying Machine Learning to Finding Great Talent – SeekOut

May 14, 2019July 19, 2019

I’m excited to welcome SeekOut to our portfolio. SeekOut is a game-changing solution for recruiters and hiring managers to identify and connect with high performers who have a demonstrated track record of solving problems that are relevant to their needs.

In our capacity as the Talent Team at Madrona, Matt Witt and I help our portfolio companies – and the ecosystem at large in greater Seattle – uncover, attract, select and retain a diverse workforce of high performing individuals. We need great tools to do this work. Once every couple of decades a game-changing recruiting tool like SeekOut comes along to provide an order of magnitude advantage over previous solutions. Matt and I took SeekOut out for a spin last year to give feedback to Soma on the capabilities of the product. It didn’t take long for SeekOut to become an extension of our brains and our sourcing platform of choice. We now use it daily and recommend SeekOut to our portfolio companies as one of the most important tools they need for candidate discovery and engagement.

S. Somasegar (Soma) led our investment in SeekOut and he along with the founders, Anoop Gupta and Aravind Bala, know firsthand the pain of recruiting engineers from their days at Microsoft leading teams of engineers on projects with huge scopes. But since Anoop and Arvind were not recruiters by profession they spent a lot of time with their customers and that has paid off with a rich feature set that works for recruiters across a broad set of industries. They have applied the tools they used as engineering leaders on massive computational projects to the problem of matching data on people with the needs of companies that are trying to grow both quickly and intelligently.

“We see a lot of recruiting related solutions focused on the talent market. What made SeekOut stand out was the team’s pursuit of the solution, customer focus and perseverance which has paid off with the incredible customer adoption we have seen this year since the launch of the product,” commented Soma.

SeekOut recognized there is significant room to go beyond the open web or LinkedIn in terms of both data sources and ML/AI and with that, provide better insights on candidates in competitive markets. SeekOut leverages self-reported data from platforms like LinkedIn (what individuals say they’ve done) and performance data like GitHub and Patents/Publications databases (what they’ve actually done) and who they actually are (pedigree, work history, geography and specific demographics including diversity and contact information). The result is a massive, dynamic database that is constantly being updated to more effectively reach out to highly relevant candidates. We recently published our investment themes and SeekOut is a perfect example of our intelligent app category – they are taking a huge amount of raw data, organizing it and applying intelligence to it to deliver better outcomes for users.

Anoop and Aravind also found that SeekOut made it possible for non-technical recruiters to gauge the relative merits of engineering candidates based on the quality of their work products. Gauging engineering talent is something most non-engineers find impossible to do and is a constant source of frustration between engineering leaders and tech recruiters. SeekOut’s advanced features help recruiters dissect keywords to their root and suggests derivatives and alternatives while simultaneously learning about use cases and teaching recruiters what the terms actually mean. This gives recruiters the ability to go fast and compete more successfully.

As recruiters on the front lines, we can tell you that no other tool does this combination of things as well as SeekOut. Another recruiter told me “I was able to access hundreds of candidates through SeekOut that I hadn’t ever seen before on LinkedIn. It has been powerful specifically searching for female engineering managers. I’ve recently started looking at Data Science as well, and it feels like I’ve found a gold mine!”

Why Madrona Invested in Pulumi

June 14, 2018June 18, 2018

Today I am very excited to announce our investment in Pulumi.

Pulumi aims to fundamentally improve the way people build, manage, and interact with cloud-native applications, services, and infrastructure.

There is a massive movement to the cloud among enterprise customers around the world. As that trend continues to gather and gain momentum, new and transformative techniques are required as customers truly begin to take advantage of cloud-native capabilities. This transformation grows leaps and bounds with serverless computing starting to emerge as the next frontier to enable truly distributed applications and services that are powered by microservices and event-driven functions.

Recent cloud infrastructure breakthroughs include serverless, containers and hosted cloud infrastructure. Containers are great for complex stateful systems, often taking existing codebases and moving them to the cloud. Serverless functions are perfect for ultra-low-cost event- and API-oriented systems. Hosted infrastructure lets you focus on your application-specific requirements, instead of reinventing the wheel by manually hosting something that your cloud provider can do better and cheaper. Arguably, each is “serverless” in its own way because infrastructure and servers fade into the background.

“This disruptive sea change is enabling Pulumi to deliver a single platform and tools suite that allow developers to build and ship code to the cloud in the easiest and fastest way.”

Eric Rudder, Joe Duffy and Luke Hoban are a world-class team to deliver such transformative experiences in a cloud-native world. They have decades of experience in platforms, tools, and programming models. Eric Rudder was one of the most senior executives at Microsoft, including running the $10B+ Server and Tools business, serving as a Technical Advisor to Bill Gates, and most recently as the EVP for Advanced Technology before leaving Microsoft. Joe Duffy was a senior technical engineering leader at Microsoft and was a critical part of the early team that built .NET and C#. Most recently, he was Director of Engineering and Developer Tools Strategy and, in that role, was instrumental in open sourcing .NET and taking it cross-platform to Linux and Mac. Luke has held a variety of product and engineering roles at Amazon and Microsoft. While at Microsoft, Luke co-founded TypeScript and developed Go support for Visual Studio Code.

I have had the privilege and the fortune to have worked with Eric, Joe and Luke closely over the years, and their passion to solve hard problems for developers and enterprise customers is unparalleled. I am personally very excited for the opportunity to work with this very talented group of people. We are confident that this kind of a world-class team is what is going to help drive a breakthrough as cloud-native becomes fundamental to enterprise software today and in the future.

We are doubly excited to partner with Pulumi given it is a Seattle-based early-stage start-up focused on native-cloud environment with a world-class founding team.

Please join me in welcoming Eric, Joe, Luke and the Pulumi team to the Madrona family!

Tigera Joins the Madrona Family

January 24, 2018February 15, 2018

Ever since the advent of virtualization technology in the early 2000s, software has become increasingly abstracted from its underlying hardware. The ability to “write once, run anywhere” has led to the runaway success of technologies like containers, which package software in a format that can run in isolation on a shared operating system. This allows developers to more easily collaborate on code across environments, get better utilization from their hardware, and build agile, secure software delivery pipelines.

The concept of the “software-defined datacenter” extends this analogy beyond compute into networking, storage, and security as well. With the advent of hybrid and multi-cloud, the underlying infrastructure is only getting more complex. The ability to manage infrastructure that cuts across private and public cloud leads to cost-effective solutions; better ability to simplify, automate, and scale; and the agility to move quickly in today’s IT landscape.

While containers have been the rage for the last 18-24 months, the complexity that grows from this technology quickly escalates to an unmanageable level from an application connectivity and security perspective. In fact, this has often been the talking point of those who are hesitant to adopt them too deeply. This conundrum has been an issue for large enterprises as they look to benefit from these new methods of software architecture and management.

This is the context in which we are very excited to invest in Tigera and the team.

Tigera provides secure application connectivity solutions built for modern cloud native applications. It addresses the application networking connectivity challenges that come with cloud native architectures, especially those that must connect to on-premises, legacy environments. Tigera does this by extending leading open source projects, Calico and Istio into commercial enterprise software that enables policy-based security, enterprise controls and compliance that works across on-premises data centers and all public clouds. Tigera offers large enterprise companies a solution for deploying containers within the Zero Trust security framework that they require and opens up this Fortune 500 market to innovations that increase agility and cost effectiveness.

The leadership team behind Tigera including the CEO, Ratan Tipirneni; co-founders Andy Randall, Alex Pollitt, Christopher Liljenstolpe, VP of Engineering, Doug Collier; and the most recent additions including Andy Wright, VP of Marketing and Amit Gupta, VP of Product Management make a world-class team that knows networking and cloud deeply. They have demonstrated strong leadership in the open source community and the ability to build a commercial offering that solves real pain points for enterprise customers moving to the cloud.

We, at Madrona, are looking forward to this exciting journey with Ratan and team at Tigera.

Welcome SmartAssist To The Madrona Family

August 3, 2017August 10, 2017

It is exciting for me to announce our investment in SmartAssist and to welcome the team to our Madrona family. SmartAssist is applying AI to the business of customer support and is already assisting customers of brands you know including MailChimp and Twilio.

Application development and applications the last 10 years were primarily defined by movement to the cloud, SaaS delivery and touch as an interface. Looking ahead, we strongly believe that applications are going to be defined as intelligent applications with a broader set of natural user interfaces including voice/speech and vision. In our opinion, any application of consequence that is getting built now is an intelligent application. What differentiates the intelligent applications is the use of ML/AI and other techniques to apply on the ever-increasing data sets that enable applications to continuously learn and deliver more relevant and appropriate experience for the customers.

Applying ML/AI to intelligently automate use cases and workflows in enterprises is an area where we see a tremendous amount of opportunity and some of our recent investments reflect that investment thesis. As we think about beachhead use cases of ML/AI within enterprises, customer support stands out as one of the most tangible areas that could be fundamentally disrupted through technology.

By using intelligent routing, automated responses, and predictive modeling, SmartAssist helps enterprises significantly increase the efficiency and quality of services while decreasing customer service costs. The company is based on the platform developed by Wise.io which was acquired by GE in 2016. The team of Pradeep Rathinam and Prashant Luthra had a passion for this business and are taking that core business and building it into SmartAssist. Already they have secured some name brand customers. GE has an interest in the company and we expect to work with them as the company grows.

Another big reason for why we are excited about this investment is the entrepreneurial strength of the founding team. Both Pradeep and Prashant have led and been a part of successful start-ups in the past. Their focus and passion to make a difference in this space makes it a delight to partner with them.

We are thrilled to back the compelling vision of this leadership team and be part of a Seattle area start-up that is focused on driving customer success using ML/AI. All of us at Madrona are jazzed at the potential of what is possible here.

Looking forward to helping realize the potential with the SmartAssist team!

Technology Trends Changing the World As We Look Ahead

January 3, 2017January 18, 2017

Drones, Cars, Intelligent Apps, Virtual Reality and More – What to expect in 2017
There’s an age old saying that humans tend to overestimate what can be accomplished in one day, but underestimate what can be accomplished in one year. As 2016 comes to a close, it is a good time to zoom out the lens, and get reflective on what has happened this year, and predictive about what we are excited about for the coming 3-5 years.

1. Commercial Drone (UAV) Technology will Turn to Software

The 2015 hype around drones generated over $155M of VC funding in the second half of 2015, but 2016 has seen far chillier attitudes by VCs towards drone startups. However, we believe 2017 will be a year of renewal for investments and innovations in drone technology. For one, the FAA passed the first set of rules in June governing drone fly rules, allowing commercial drones to finally take to the skies without filing for lengthy and cumbersome case-by-case permission. Secondly, over the last year, the hardware war which has spooked many VCs from entering the space has been all but won. Forbes estimates that Chinese drone manufacturer DJI is valued at $8 billion and controls over 70% of the hardware market. Other contenders for this mantle such as 3D Robotics have retooled to focus on vertical software. For 2017, we see the main opportunity for drone technology to be in best-in-class tools and software deployed across platforms such as equipping drones with advanced sensing capabilities, or software for vertical industries such as real estate and farming.

2. Intelligent Applications

Customers nowadays demand their software delivers insights that are real-time, nimble, predictive and prescriptive. We have no doubt that in the future, every application will be an
intelligent application. However, the reality has not caught up to the hype. We believe data, not algorithms are the bottle-neck. Algorithms continue to become commoditized by the way of access to open-source libraries such as Algorithmia, Tensorflow, Hadoop and Cockroach DB. If products wish to do better than commodity performance, companies with machine learning at their core must figure out how to acquire proprietary, unique, clean and workable data sets to train the machine learning models.

Companies with a leg up are also likely to be vertically integrated in such a way that their data, learning models and product are all geared towards developing the best data network effects that will feed the learning loop.

We believe there is a big opportunity for companies focused on a specific industry such as healthcare, retail, legal, construction to build higher quality domain expertise at a faster rate, which facilitates the acquisition and labeling of relevant data critical to building accurate and effective machine problem solvers.

3. Virtual Intelligent Assistants with Focus on a Problem Space Will Succeed

A great example of vertical vs horizontal machine learning applications can be found in chat bots. There are some horizontal chat bot assistants that help you with any and all requests (viv.ai, Magic, and Awesome to name a few). It would seem obvious that building NLP and intelligent capabilities across all conceivable tasks and requests could be a long slow training slog of manual human validation. These companies are also at a heavy disadvantage to incumbent players tackling the horizontal assistant space. Voice enabled platforms like Alexa, Siri, Cortana, or the new Google Assistant still see limited usability despite enormous access to training data bolstered by the distribution platforms of three of the largest companies in the world. Realizing this, Amazon announced at Re:Invent that Lex, the software that powers Alexa, is now available for developers to build their own chat bots. Every developer who designs their conversation on the Lex Console is now feeding Lex’s data model. Microsoft followed suit with a similar announcement of the Cortana Skills Kit and Devices SDK.

Assistants that will be more successful in the short term are bots that are narrowly focused. There is Kasisto for finance, Digital Genius for customer service, or the many virtual assistant/meeting scheduler apps (Meekan, JulieDesk, X.ai’s Amy and later “brother” Andrew, and Clara). What excites us about these vertically oriented chat bot startups is that they are applying machine learning, artificial intelligence and natural language processing in a highly specialized and narrow way. It is far easier to train a bot to recognize and act appropriately on the finite set of lexicon and circumstances around scheduling a meeting, compared to the infinite set of scenarios that could occur otherwise. In machine learning, it is better to be a master of one, than a master of none.

4. Blockchain Will Expand as Enterprise Services Embrace it

The technological innovation of Bitcoin, blockchain, seeks to create a global distributed ledger for the transfer of assets (currency, cryptocurrency, music, real-estate deeds etc). This enables peer to peer transactions that bypass traditional intermediaries like banks, credit card companies, and governments whose centralized nature slows down processing speed, increases cost of transaction, and are vulnerable to security threats at the hub-level. Blockchain technology has been heralded by some as being as disruptive to the way people view, share, and interact with their assets as the internet was for information. However, adoption has significantly lagged this envisioned seismic shift.

We believe blockchain’s path to mainstream adoption will be more likely to arise from the enterprise and infrastructure side (creation of APIs and protocols that enable ease of adoption) as opposed to consumer adoption of cryptocurrencies (i.e. Bitcoin). An example is R3 which has gathered a consortium of 42 banks to create the technological base layer for various systems including Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple to talk to each other and facilitate global payment transfers.

5. Autonomous Vehicles Have More Validation Work

Aside from machine learning, autonomous vehicles were one of the most hyped technologies in 2016. This year, we saw major product announcements and technology demos from Uber, Lyft, Ford, GM, BMW, Tesla, Cruise, Comma.ai, and many other startups and corporations. Google went so far as to create an entirely new company, Waymo, devoted to their driverless car technology.

Nearly all of the major car manufacturers have announced they will be releasing autonomous vehicles in the next five years, and Lyft has stated that they are planning for the majority of rides to be autonomous within the next five years. Even President Obama said “The technology is essentially here” in a November WIRED interview.

However, despite the hype, there is a tremendous amount of heavy lifting that needs to happen in technology, infrastructure and policy to say the least. Companies still need to solve basic problems related to sensors (e.g., see Tesla Autopilot crash where cameras could not distinguish white truck against bright sky), and billions of edge cases due to construction, pedestrians, and weather, and a murky regulatory environment.

We are huge believers in the long-term benefits of autonomous vehicles, but 2017 may be a year when autonomous vehicle companies and startups are heads-down solving tough problems rather than continuing to push out flashy tech demos.

6. Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality

We believe there is still a three-year runway before VR and AR sees wide adoption by mainstream audiences. Consumer adoption will be mobile-first and/or low-end tech – think the successful recent launch of Snap Spectacles, and the cheaper price points of Google Daydream, and the Samsung Gear. VR uptake today is still burdened by hardware adoption and ease of use. Prices are still too high for anyone but the hardcore technologist or gamer.

On the enterprise side, we see 2017 as a continuing year of innovation and activity particularly in core applicable industries like engineering, science, medicine, real estate education and manufacturing. However, until the dominant form factor (whether it is glasses, head-mounted-display, or some other yet to be seen hardware) emerges, time spent in VR will still be miniscule compared to time spent in this reality.

Ultimately, if gazing into the future of technology was really so straightforward, there would be no need for speculation and VCs would be out of a job. We’ll be back next year to see assess how many of these predictions hit the nail.

Every company is a technology company, but most don’t behave like one

December 9, 2016December 14, 2016

In 2011, Marc Andreesen famously wrote a Wall Street Journal essay declaring that “software is eating the world.” Five years later, the five largest companies in the world by market capitalization are all software companies.

However, in today’s information economy, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook are not the only important large technology companies. As technology becomes more and more pervasive across industries and functions, companies like Exxon, GE, Citi, and Walmart are all racing to become technology companies as well.

Today, we are less interested in the distinction between technology and non-technology companies (because there are very few successful companies that are not technology companies). Instead, it’s more interesting to ask questions like – Tesla is a technology company rapidly learning to become an automobile company, and Ford is an automobile company rapidly learning to become a technology company – which one is going to get there first?

In short, software is eating the world, but software companies aren’t the only ones taking a bite.

How do companies in real estate, finance, healthcare, manufacturing, or other industries that have traditionally not been recognized as technology industries become technology companies? What are some of the key learnings that we see from startups and companies that are successfully making this transition?

1. It starts at the highest level of leadership
Leading a transformation to become a successful technology company is not a job that can simply be tasked to the CTO or CIO. The level of engagement and investment to lead a successful transformation requires the CEO and board of directors to not only be fully bought in but to be the main drivers of the change.

Goldman Sachs has known for many years that technology is a key competitive advantage in financial services. In one recent WSJ article, a top Goldman executive valued a license for their risk measurement system at well over $1 billion, and possibly even up to $5 billion. They have since open-sourced the system in a move to attempt to drum up new business. More importantly, however, Goldman Sachs’ Chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein has repeatedly stated that “Goldman Sachs is a technology firm” and highlights the fact that Goldman Sachs actually employs more engineers than companies like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn and often competes for talent and wins against top internet companies.

2. Talent is the most important asset of a technology company
One of the key drivers for the rapid growth of new technology companies is the low capital requirement to build a company today. New companies no longer need to buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of servers and equipment; instead, they can pay for servers on demand from cloud providers when needed.

This dynamic makes it more important than ever for companies to hire great people. In fact, a recent survey Madrona conducted in conjunction with its annual CIO Summit found that 89% of Fortune 500 CIOs say hiring top talent is their number one concern today.

GE has likely made the largest investment in this space to change the story that young engineers and college graduates hear about the company with a series of Youtube videos and television ads. Though it remains to be seen whether these videos work, GE has recognized that filling its talent pipeline with young engineers and technologists is critical and is investing accordingly.

3. Technology needs to be at the core of company culture, not an afterthought
At a company like Microsoft or Facebook, engineering positions are the most prestigious, highest status roles at the company. The founders and CEOs of technology companies are often engineers and may have even built early version of the products themselves.

For companies to successfully make the transition to become a technology company, cultures need to change to take into account the unique way that software development works and to highlight the importance of technology and the people who manage and build it.

One example of a move towards a developer friendly culture is happening at Walmart. WalmartLabs recently open sourced Electrode, the application platform that powers Walmart.com. Electrode is a modular platform that helps improve application performance, and Walmart is open sourcing the software to give back to the open source world and benefit from additional contributions from the community.

It is important to keep in mind that building a technology-driven culture is not just about free lunches and massages. As Joel Spolsky CEO of Stack Overflow said in a recent interview, “If you want to attract and keep developers, don’t emphasize ping-pong tables, lounges, fire pits and chocolate fountains. Give them private offices or let them work from home, because uninterrupted time to concentrate is the most important and scarcest commodity.”

4. Companies need to move fast and adopt agile practices
The pace of technology adoption is getting faster and faster every year. For example, it took decades for electricity and telephones to reach 50% of US households, but today it takes only years for new technologies like smartphones and tablets to reach a majority of the population. This underscores the importance for companies to continuously adopt new technologies that can enhance productivity and also to continuously experiment with new technologies that have the potential to be disruptive to the business.

An interesting anecdote from The Lean Startup, one of the manifestos for startup founders, is that Intuit holds themselves accountable to being innovative and agile by using two key metrics: (1) the number of customers using products that didn’t exist three years ago and (2) the percentage of revenue coming from offerings that did not exist three years ago. Historically for Intuit, it took a new product an average of 5.5 years to reach $50 million in revenue; at the time the book was written, they had multiple products generating $50 million in revenue that were less than a year old.

Particularly, as the world is moving towards cloud computing, continuous development and continuous updates are the name of the game. Agile development practices enable you to continuously deliver better experiences for your customers and waterfall development methodology is a relic of the past.

5. Companies need to look forward and avoid getting caught in the innovator’s dilemma
The classic case for why legacy competitors can do everything “right” and fail is the force of disruptive innovation described in Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma. Businesses can reject innovations based on customers’ current needs while innovative upstarts develop products in a way that meets customers’ future needs.

Recently, we have seen automakers take very innovative approaches to automotive technology as autonomous vehicles move to the front and center of the startup world with the acquisitions of companies like Otto and Cruise and public pilots of new technologies like Uber’s self-driving cars in Pittsburgh or Tesla’s Autopilot feature.

Ford, in particular, has been very vocal about the autonomous future and the importance of working differently in the context of today’s technology-driven world. Ford’s CEO, Mark Fields, has written that “As little as four years ago, our approach was aligned with the thinking of most automakers today, which is taking incremental steps to achieve full autonomy by advancing driver assist technology. This is not how we look at it today. We learned that to achieve full autonomy, we’d have to take a completely different pathway.”

Conclusion
The race to become the market leader across a variety of sectors and geographies is speeding up amongst older incumbents and promising, young startups. Startups have a lot to learn from the established management and financial practices of incumbents, but incumbents have a lot to learn from startups as well. The companies, young or old, that use technology to best create competitive advantages for themselves will win.

Technology needs to be a fundamental fabric of the company’s DNA and culture as companies truly internalize that “Every company is a technology company”.

Madrona Venture Group Names S. Somasegar Managing Director

October 20, 2016January 12, 2017

Experienced Technologist, Executive and Investor Expands Role

SEATTLE, WA – January 12, 2017 – Madrona Venture Group, an early-stage venture capital firm, announced today the appointment of S. “Soma” Somasegar to the role of Managing Director.

Soma joined Madrona in November 2015 as a Venture Partner, following a more than twenty five year career at Microsoft leading the company’s Developer Division and responsible for the Visual Studio and .NET family of products that enable tens of millions of developers to build applications and services for client, server, mobile and cloud platforms. Soma was also responsible for Microsoft’s R&D labs in Boston, China, India and Israel.

As a Venture Partner at Madrona, Soma became a powerful voice at the table on key investment areas including Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality, next generation cloud infrastructure and intelligent applications. Soma led investments in Shyft and CloudCoreo, and he is also the Board Chair at Pixvana. Continue reading “Madrona Venture Group Names S. Somasegar Managing Director”

Our Investment in Shyft – Transforming the Lives of Hourly Shift Workers

July 13, 2016February 12, 2019

It is exciting and super fun for me to announce our seed investment in Shyft and to welcome the team to our Madrona family.

Shyft serves the huge market of shift workers worldwide – from retail to food service and beyond. They make it very easy for these hourly workers to find someone to cover a shift. It is a real time communication system that has been broadly embraced by users. Workers at 1/3 of Starbucks’ U.S. locations are already on the platform – all driven bottoms up rather than top down.

I first had the opportunity to meet Brett Patrontasch (CEO) and Daniel Chen (CTO) as a part of the most recent TechStars Seattle class. Right from my first interaction, Brett and Daniel were very impressive. Their first company approached this market from a different angle and they learned a lot. They were brave enough to shut it down and take what they learned to build something better. Brett has a strong conviction about this market and is eager to leverage the expertise of his advisors.

Madrona is investing in this seed round because we like the team, see the massive market opportunity and are impressed by their early growth. Shyft’s viral adoption and growth is impressive. For example, Starbucks has hourly workers in their stores on Shyft actively trading shifts each day. One person from McDonald’s tried the app and a day later 70 of her co-workers were on the platform. And though Shyft is primarily focused on workers, store managers are already starting to use the product as having a full staff is crucial for them.

I fundamentally believe that Shyft can build a massive platform and community for hourly shift workers. The app is a game-changing way for hourly workers and managers to coordinate with one another and manage their busy schedules. The mobile first approach speaks directly to the majority of this hourly smartphone-wielding audience.

This is the 5^th company we have backed from the Seattle TechStars program. TechStars and all the people who run and support it are an incredibly important part of the Seattle ecosystem that brings together great founders, angel and VC investors and experienced operators. We are glad it is here and love participating.

I am looking forward to working with Brett, Daniel and the Shyft team as they build their team and business.