We are thrilled to welcome Jon Turow to the Madrona team as an investing Partner!
Jon is joining Madrona from Amazon Web Services, where he spent almost 10 years building products, teams, and businesses with cloud technology. Most recently, Jon led the product teams for AWS Computer Vision AI services including Amazon Textract (AI for intelligent document processing) and before that Amazon Rekognition (highly accurate image and video analysis). He also wrote the original product and business plans for AWS IoT and AWS Greengrass, which extends AWS services to run locally on edge devices. Jon has launched more than 5 new services and countless features in the areas of AIML, edge computing, IoT, and messaging during his time at Amazon.
It has been our pleasure getting to know Jon and finding ways to collaborate over the past several years. In fact, one of our first interactions was when Jon spoke at our Annual Limited Partner meeting in 2017 on a panel about IoT, shortly after he launched Greengrass for AWS. Jon will continue to build on Madrona’s long-term heritage and close relationship with Amazon, which started with Tom Alberg’s original investment in the company, his service on the board for 23 years, and extends the list of Amazon alumni who have joined Madrona as well as the collaboration and partnering over the years to help our portfolio companies.
Madrona loves to find new teammates who have built and launched products as Jon has done. Jon brings a wealth of experience in achieving product market fit, scaling teams and businesses, and deep technical acumen (he holds 22 patents). Most importantly, Jon has obsessive customer focus and the ability to “work backwards” from customers’ most important problems. All of these are hallmarks of great investors as well, who can use these attributes to identify compelling business ideas and help founders build great companies. Jon is a builder at heart and can’t wait to roll up his sleeves and dive in with founders to help them iterate, optimize and scale.
Jon has not only built successful businesses inside Amazon, he also has been a founder himself and has the empathy to understand that exciting but difficult journey.
In 2011 Jon co-founded a business that provided cloud telephony for local commerce. It was funded by 500 Global and, while ultimately not successful, we were deeply impressed with how Jon’s experience as a founder has shaped his philosophy for building and investing in businesses today.
Most important of all, we immediately resonated with Jon’s humility, easy going nature, curious mind, enthusiasm for tech, and passion for startups. He clearly shares Madrona’s Values.
All these things made Jon a perfect fit for Madrona and our “Day One for the Long Run” philosophy of helping founders build lasting and impactful businesses. Jon will help Madrona invest across our investment themes, but has particular interest in AI/ML, data infrastructure, financial infrastructure, and open–source business models.
In Jon’s spare time he 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. Jon holds a BS 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.
Jon can be reached at his email, on twitter (@jturow) and LinkedIn)!
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