As we near the end of 2024, it’s always fun to reflect on the conversations and ideas that most resonated. This year, Madrona’s top posts, podcasts, and videos showcased innovation and exploration across the AI agent landscape, corporate travel transformation, and go-to-market strategies. From blog posts that captured industry-shaping trends to podcasts that provided tactical advice for founders, here’s a roundup of Madrona’s most engaging content from the year (and some reflection on how it’s held up!)
Top Blog Posts of 2024
THE RISE OF AI AGENT INFRASTRUCTURE
By Jon Turow – Published June 5
AI agents are emerging as transformative tools for businesses but scaling them requires robust infrastructure. This post delves into the evolving ecosystem powering the next generation of AI-driven workflows. Now, six months later, the conversation is very similar, expanding beyond the infrastructure to support the building of agents to include agentic workflows — bringing task-specific agents together to complete complex tasks. If created today, the market map that Jon Turow designed for this piece would have a lot more companies on it.
By Steve Singh – Published April 3
Corporate travel is undergoing a digital renaissance, with personalization, automation, and sustainability at the forefront. In April, Steve Singh outlined how these trends are redefining the travel experience for enterprises. Since then, Steve stepped in as interim CEO of portfolio company Spotnana, and Direct Travel announced Avenir, its next-generation technology stack that integrates all aspects of travel, expense, and meeting management into one best-in-class solution — making Steve’s vision of “The Perfect Trip” much closer to reality. Madrona also seed funded Otto, an agentic workflow that mimics a personal corporate travel agent.
THE MOST IMPORTANT AI MODEL IS THE BUSINESS MODEL
By Matt McIlwain – Published February 22
AI is reshaping industries, but as Matt McIlwain argued back in February, the real differentiator lies in how companies innovate on the business model to integrate AI, while creating sustainable and enduring value. This conversation ramped up throughout the year with a growing focus on the ROI of adopting AI in the enterprise. During our IA and CIO Summits, CIOs spoke cautiously about being experimental and the need for trust and transparency — and more loudly about the need to be able to measure the time savings and productivity gains of tools like copilots for desktop apps. As we have seen strong earnings come in from companies like Snowflake and Salesforce, it’s clear that enterprises are adopting AI but when it will deeply touch customers and be truly generative remains to be seen.
AI AGENTS ARE STUCK IN FIRST GEAR — BUT 2025 WILL CHANGE THAT
By Jon Turow – Published November 18
Jon Turow followed up his June AI Agent piece with this blog post just last month to explore the fact that while AI Agents do face challenges in adoption and integration, there are a lot of opportunities for founders, especially in building the infrastructure and tooling to support AI Agent adoption. He highlighted the four types of Agents and agentic workflows he expects to emerge in 2025 and why the hype is deserved, though the reality somewhat delayed.
HOW AI IS REWRITING THE SAAS PLAYBOOK
By Soma Somasegar and Sabrina Wu – Published October 29
SaaS companies are being transformed by AI, from product design to customer engagement. Soma and Sabrina explore the idea that software is no longer a service; it’s the means to achieve a goal — whether that’s automating business processes, coding software, or generating creative content. As they shared, “Software as a Service is shifting to Service as Software,” — and we still hold firmly to that belief, which they just shared in October.
Honorable Mention
AI MEMORY: REVOLUTIONIZING INDIVIDUAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL PRODUCTIVITY
We would be remiss not to include a post that Soma shared at the beginning of December, which seems clearly headed for the top posts list but hasn’t quite made it due to time. Co-authored with Rhythms CEO and Co-founder Vetri Vellore, this piece was originally published in AI Wire and dives into the transformative power of AI memory — a concept shaped by Soma’s discussion with Mustafa Suleyman at the IA Summit this fall.
Published in 2023, But Still Shaping 2024
While the market map included in this comprehensive overview of the generative AI ecosystem published in June 2023 would likely have many more companies on it now, the bones of the stack the authors described at the time still hold up. We remain astonished at how quickly the science and tooling ecosystems are developing and are excited by the new possibilities that continue to be unlocked.
MOVING TO PRODUCTION: THE PLAYBOOK FOR PERSONALIZING GENAI APP
This piece shared practical insights (that are still relevant over a year later) into deploying and scaling generative AI applications. It included a comprehensive look at the techniques developers can use to augment models with data, allowing them to create rich application experiences by personalizing outputs for each user and workflow, reducing hallucinations, and making models more efficient. These techniques are still key to unlocking differentiated and defensible generative applications.
Top Podcasts of 2024
Our podcasts brought valuable tactical advice and founder stories to life, sparking conversations across our community. Here are the top episodes of the year:
HOW WRITER CEO MAY HABIB IS MAKING GENAI WORK FOR THE ENTERPRISE
Released March 6, 2024
Madrona Partner Vivek Ramaswami hosted May Habib, co-founder and CEO of Writer, a 2023 & 2024 IA40 Winner. May shared her perspective on founding a GenAI company before the ChatGPT craze, building an enterprise-grade product and go-to-market motion with 200% NRR, whether RAG and vector DBs even have a role in the enterprise, the essential attributes she looks for when hiring, and some valuable lessons she learned from past experiences. Investors rewarded May and her team’s hard work — Writer announced a $200 million raise in November at a $1.9 Billion valuation.
STARTUP TO SCALE: A MINI MASTERCLASS IN EFFICIENT GROWTH AND GTM
Released Sept. 16, 2024
Madrona Managing Director Tim Porter hosted Pradeep Rathinam, a seasoned software executive with over three decades of leadership experience. Tim and Paddy dove into that world of SaaS go-to-market. Paddy shared his experiences on how to not just grow a company, as every company needs to do, but how to grow efficiently and how that includes reducing churn, expanding accounts, and landing new logos. This is something that all go-to-market leaders and startup founders have a lot of questions about how to unlock, so it was really a must-listen for founders.
TRANSFORMING CORPORATE TRAVEL WITH STEVE SINGH
Released May 15, 2024
Complementing his blog post, Madrona Managing Director Steve Singh expanded on the future of corporate travel and how technology is enabling better experiences in this episode with Christal Bemont, CEO of Direct Travel. Hosted by Madrona Digital Editor Coral Garnick Ducken, Steve and Christal delve into the acquisition of Direct Travel and its pivotal role in revolutionizing the $1.4T corporate travel ecosystem, along with Spotnana, Troop, and Center.
Top Videos of 2024
MARKET PERSPECTIVE ON AI WITH BRAD GERSTNER
Released Oct. 14, 2024
In the fast-moving world of AI, few conversations cut to the heart of the matter quite like this one. At the 2024 IA Summit, Altimeter Founder & CEO Brad Gerstner joined Madrona’s Matt McIlwain for a discussion about how AI is reshaping everything from web search to enterprise applications — and what it takes to succeed in this new landscape.
FIRESIDE CHAT WITH MUSTAFA SULEYMAN: FROM SAAS TO AGENTS
Released Oct. 10, 2024
AI is evolving faster than we can predict, and no one has a clearer view of what’s coming than Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI. In his candid fireside chat with Madrona Managing Director Soma Somaseger during the 2024 IA Summit, Mustafa shared a bold vision for how personal AI assistants will soon transform the way we live, work, and interact with technology. He doesn’t just talk about tools or models — he redefines AI as a deeply personal relationship, one that adapts, learns, and even anticipates our needs in ways we haven’t yet imagined.
As we move into 2025, these stories and conversations remind us of how rapidly the world of technology, especially AI, is evolving. They also reflect the enduring importance of collaboration, innovation, and strategic thinking. We’re excited to see what the next year holds and look forward to continuing to share insights that inspire and empower our community.