Jon Turow joined Madrona in 2022. As part of the investment team, Jon partners with founders who build products that customers love. He is interested in applied AI/ML, data infrastructure, financial infrastructure, and open-source business models.
Journey to Madrona
Jon is an experienced product leader, having spent over a decade in cloud computing. Most recently, Jon led the product teams for AWS Computer Vision AI services, including Amazon Textract (AI for intelligent document processing) and Amazon Rekognition (highly accurate image and video analysis). He also wrote the original product and business plans for AWS IoT and AWS Greengrass, which extend AWS services to run locally on edge devices. Jon launched more than five new services and countless features in AI/ML, edge computing, IoT, and messaging during his time at Amazon. Jon co-founded and led a cloud telephony startup prior to Amazon.
Lessons learned
“Hair on fire” customers make for great products. Imagine someone’s hair is on fire. What she really wants is a bucket of cold water to dump on her head and extinguish the flame. But what if you don’t have a bucket of cold water? You only have a tennis racket. Guess what – she’ll take the tennis racket too, and she will beat herself over the head to put the fire out. That’s the kind of customer you want — someone with a problem so urgent she will accept even an imperfect product and then hold you accountable to improve that product every day.
When he’s not in the office…
In his spare time, Jon loves history books and movies with great dialog, but his young children have biased the selection in recent years. He also believes that conversations held outdoors while walking are almost always the best ones.
Noteworthy
Jon brings a wealth of experience in achieving product-market fit, scaling teams and businesses, and deep technical acumen — he holds 28 patents! Most importantly, Jon has obsessive customer focus and the ability to “work backward” from customers’ most important problems. Jon also holds a bachelor’s from Wharton and an MBA from Kellogg, and he spent time as a strategy consultant at Accenture before diving headlong into the world of tech, products, and startups.
