Steve Singh on Transforming Corporate Travel, Sunny Gupta's Apptio Journey, And A Conversation With Highspot's Robert Wahbe
Yesterday, Madrona Managing Director Soma Somasgar shared an analysis of Nvidia's efforts to power tomorrow's AI winners. We recently announced our investment in Direct?Travel, and Managing Director Steve Singh took the opportunity to share his thoughts?and vision for transforming the corporate travel experience. We're sharing?recordings of some of the conversations from our recent annual meeting — first up is?Apptio's Sunny Gupta. And Highspot Co-founder and CEO Robert Wahbe reflected on the company's early days and the founder/investor relationship in an interview with Madrona. Awards season?has also been going strong —?congratulations to all our portfolio companies on Wing's Enterprise Tech 30, Forbes AI 50, and CB Insights AI 100 lists.
Perspectives
Nvidia's Investment Strategy is Fueling Tomorrow's AI Winners
By leveraging its resources and expertise to invest in and partner with early-stage AI companies, NVIDIA is fueling innovation and strategically positioning itself as a linchpin in the AI revolution. And at Madrona , we're excited to partner with a company that is actively investing in creating tomorrow's AI success stories. Read S. Somasegar and Sabrina Wu 's analysis of Nvidia's efforts to power tomorrow's AI winners and shape the tech landscape here .
Transforming Corporate Travel: An Open Roadmap to Fixing a Broken System
Following our recent investment in Direct Travel , Steve Singh unveiled his vision for modernizing the corporate travel industry. We are excited to support and back Direct Travel, our new portfolio company, and existing companies Spotnana and TROOP as they work not simply to introduce another incremental change but to ignite a revolution in corporate travel. Read Steve's vision for the travel industry here .
Madrona News
Highspot's Robert Wahbe on Customers, AI, and Building Relationships That Last
In an interview with Madrona, Highspot Co-founder and CEO Robert Wahbe reflected on the company's early days and the founder/investor relationship.
"Those initial rounds were challenging because it was early days for our category, and people were just learning about the potential of what would soon become known as sales enablement. Madrona was so supportive in that first meeting — they bet on our team and the technology we were building. They were confident we would find the right product-market fit as we pioneered a new category. You don't find that kind of vision and leadership at every venture capital firm, but those are the VCs you want to work with."
A Journey Through Entrepreneurship: The Story of Apptio's Growth and Transformation
During Madrona's 2024 Annual Meeting, Matt McIlwain and Steve Singh sat down with Sunny Gupta , co-founder & former CEO of Apptio, an IBM Company , to share his remarkable journey in the tech industry. The discussion spans Sunny's early life in India and his move to the U.S. for education to the inception, growth, and eventual sale of Apptio. They discuss Apptio navigating the challenges of going public, its acquisition by Vista Equity Partners, Sunny's insights on entrepreneurship, the value of long-term investment, and the future of tech companies in both private and public markets.?Watch the full recording of the conversation here.
Newsletters
Aspiring for Intelligence: The Big 5 and Their AI Stacks Part II: Implications
领英推荐
Investors Vivek Ramaswami and Sabrina Wu recently summarized how the Big 5 Clouds (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Databricks, Snowflake) are building their AI stacks. With great feedback and commentary from readers, they decided to publish an updated summary that includes all the newest products like DBRX from Databricks, Titan from Amazon, and more. They?also dug into each of the company's strategies and shared their key takeaways, including:
Portfolio Roundup
It's awards season! Congratulations to Numbers Station AI , Groundlight AI , Runway , and XetHub for landing?on the CB Insights AI 100 . Congratulations to Runway and unstructured.io for landing?on the Forbes AI 50 list . And congratulations to Unstructured, Fixie.ai , and MotherDuck for landing on Wing's Enterprise Tech 30 .
Cohesity announced its strategic partnership?and equity investment from IBM and?a strategic partnership with Intel .
Eclypsium launched Automata, an?AI-assisted feature for its digital supply chain security platform.
OctoAI ?partnered with Google Cloud to deliver efficient, reliable, customizable GenAI systems. They also made Mixtral's 8x22B available to users and launched OctoStack , a complete generative AI systems stack you can deploy in your own environment, which was covered in TechCrunch.
Direct Travel CEO Christal Bemont was featured in Travel Week.
Yoodli Co-founder Varun Puri joined the Good Fit Careers podcast.
Tigera, Director of Product Marketing Dhiraj Sehgal, shares how to enhance Kubernetes network security with micro-segmentation in The New Stack.
Runway announced the finalist in its AI Film Festival.
Temporal was featured in a McKinsey Digital blog on Medium about building bulletproof applications.
Observe CEO Jeremy Burton joined Evan Kirstel?- the B2V TechFluencer- to discuss moving from monitoring to observability.
Pendulum ?won the?Security Industry Association Award for Best in Threat / Risk Management Software Applications.
Nautilus VP of Probe Development and Bioinformatics Sheri Wilcox was featured in the Human Proteome Organization newsletter.
Clari announced a strategic alliance with Deloitte Digital to help customers stop revenue leak and drive revenue precision. CRO Ben Fiechtner also joined the Better Sell Better podcast , and President of Strategic GTM Kevin Knieriem joined Pavillion's Topline podcast .
Coda launched a new partnership with Snowflake to help users turn data into action across the enterprise.
Tesorio Co-founder and CEO Carlos Vega has a new column in Forbes Finance Council — "Why CFOs Say 'No' More Than They Say 'Go.'
CommerceIQ CEO Guru Hariharan shared his take on Amazon's move away from 'Just Walk Out' tech with NPR.
Clerk announced general availability of IdP-initiated SSO & SAML.
TaxBit announced its European Expansion and welcomed Max Bernt as Managing Director of Europe.
Bobsled CEO Jake Graham was featured in a TechCrunch article.
Congratulations to all our portfolio companies getting recognized this awards season. Not too shabby ??