Venture with Grace

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.Jon is an experienced product leader with over a decade of experience 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 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. Jon cofounded and led a cloud telephony startup prior to Amazon.Topics: The Evolution of Applied AIEdge AI & Computing's FutureOpen Source AI Business Models#AppliedAI #VentureCapital #ProductLeadership #CloudComputing #AIInfrastructure

Yujian Tang is the CEO of OSS4AI. OSS4AI is an organization aimed at providing all developers access to the resources to understand, use, and contribute to the direction and development of AI. He is also a Venture Partner at Banyan Ventures, a New York City-based pre-seed, first-money-in, venture capital firm born in the AI era.We will be in person going live at AWS in SF! Topics: Open source AI projects AI infrastructure and development AI-native applications and infrastructure#VCPodcast #AI #VentureCapital #AIStartups #OpenSourceAI

Jay Reno is the Co-founder and CEO of Pointhound. Pointhound is helping people find and book free flights, for free, to amazing destinations using credit card points and miles. 🛫🏝️ 💳 He also leads seed and series A investments with 645 Ventures where he's a Venture Partner. Investment areas include consumer, fintech, climate tech and AI. Previously founded Feather, raised $76m, built a world-class team of 150 people, and sold the company in 2022.Topics: The Role of AI in Fintech Consumer AI Trends Insights from Being a Second-Time Founder#SecondTimeFounder #FintechTrends #ConsumerTech #TravelTech

Lauren Kolodny is a Founding Partner of Acrew Capital. Lauren leads the fintech thesis area at Acrew. She has made investments in companies including Chime, Clara, Divvy, Gusto, Klar, Papaya, Pie, & Plaid. Prior to co-founding Acrew, Lauren was a partner at Aspect Ventures. Previously, Lauren worked in product marketing at Google, where she led a number of launches for Workspace, including Google Drive.Topics: How AI is Transforming the Future of Financial Services The Evolution of Payments Technology Cross-Border Financial Solutions in a Global Economy#FintechFuture #VCInsights #AIBanking #StartupGrowth #DigitalFinance

Nosu founder backgrounds: Audrey (CEO) won 20+ hackathons, engineering @ Intuit, Intel, NASA USRC, content creator with 68k following on instagram @jia.seed. Disclaimer: Grace is an investor in Nosu. Topics: How to Spot Successful Founders at Hackathons Content Creation and Community Building Authentically Building a Gen Z Engineering Community#hackathon#startups#womenintech#engineering#tech

Martin Tobias is the founder of Incisive Ventures. Over decades of investing, he has identified seven meta themes and developed a screening process that successfully identified outlier companies and founders. Incisive Ventures is a Pre-Seed Fund in Seattle to invest in technology companies that reduce friction at scale, leveraging the partner's network built as an angel investor in 60+ companies in the sector, including 4 unicorns, that secured $2.5B+ in follow-on financing. He is a serial entrepreneur who has also invested in over 250 companies as an angel, half a dozen as a venture partner at a major VC firm, and he is a limited partner in over a dozen VC funds. He is also the Founder of a leading Angel network, Element8. As a 3x venture-backed CEO with experience from Microsoft and Accenture, he has raised over $500M (including two IPOs) for his own companies. Topics: Building deal flow when launching a first-time fund Due diligence framework for pre-revenue companies Real metrics that matter at pre-seed #VentureCapital#AngelInvesting#StartupLife#SaaS

Howard Wright is the VP of Startup Ecosystem at NVIDIA. Prior to that he was the VP of Global Head of Start Ups at Amazon Web Services. At NVIDIA, he leads their global Inception program, positioned at the epicenter of the generative AI revolution. His role focuses on democratizing access to NVIDIA's comprehensive AI platform while building strategic partnerships across the startup ecosystem. Working with over 19,000 innovative startups, leading VCs, and global technology partners, they're creating a flywheel of innovation that's transforming industries and solving humanity's greatest challenges.Topics: Current AI trends and their impact on different industries Building a successful startup in 2025 Creating and nurturing a thriving business ecosystem#NVIDIA#AI#GPU#DeepLearning#Innovation

Aaron Jacobson, a Partner at NEA recognized by Forbes for his venture capital insights, dives deep into the evolution of enterprise AI and the future of robotics. He highlights the critical role of identity protection in cybersecurity as technological advancements reshape defenses. The discussion also explores the importance of diverse advisory boards for founders and the balance required for successful startup funding. Jacobson draws on his experience to illustrate how strong product strategies can disrupt markets, especially in sectors like manufacturing and healthcare.

Abbas Haider Ali is the Vice President of Customer Success at GitHub where he lead all post-sales teams with an org size of 550+, supporting a $2B+ ARR business serving over 150 million developers, including over 90% of the Fortune 100. Prior to GitHub, he was Vice President of Customer & Partner Success at Twilio, leading the Data & Growth business ($300M+ ARR) following Twilio's $3B+ acquisition of Segment. He's held executive leadership roles at industry-defining companies, including xMatters (acquired by Everbridge), Managed Objects (acquired by Novell), Opnet Technologies (acquired by Riverbed), and IBM.With a proven track record in leading both Product and Go-To-Market teams, he has cultivated a multi-disciplinary leadership style that spans solutions engineering, customer success, professional services, support, product management and strategy, product marketing, sales, and business development.In addition to being an operator, he is a General Partner at GTM Operators Network where he invests at seed through growth stage including companies such as Atlan, Metronome, Neon, Weights & Biases and 11x.ai. He also has a strong commitment to mentorship and is passionate about empowering women and underrepresented groups as they rise to leadership positions in the tech industry. Topics: AI's impact on software development and developer workflows Bridging the gap between product and go-to-market strategies Key differences in leading customer success at different company sizes#CustomerSuccess#DevTools#VentureCapital#GTM#GitHub

Mike Freedman is the co-founder and CTO of Timescale, as well as the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University.Timescale is building the PostgreSQL database cloud for modern applications, supercharging real-time analytics, intelligence (AI), and transactional workloads. Thousands of global customers, $180M raised from leading VCs. Hiring globally @ timescale.com/careersMike's work broadly focuses on distributed systems, storage systems, networking, and security. He developed CoralCDN (a decentralized content distribution network serving millions of daily users) and Ethane (which formed the basis for the OpenFlow / software-defined networking architecture). He co-founded Illuminics Systems around IP geolocation and intelligence, which was acquired by Quova (now part of Neustar). Mike is also a technical advisor to Stacks/Hiro, building a more decentralized Internet leveraging the blockchain.Honors include the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award, ACM Fellow, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE, given by President Obama). Prior to joining Princeton in 2007, he received his Ph.D. in computer science from NYU's Courant Institute and his S.B. and M.Eng. degrees from MIT.Topics: Academic to entrepreneur journey Distributed systems evolution How AI is changing database requirements and architecture#TimescaleDB#PostgreSQL#DatabaseInnovation#RealTimeAnalytics