SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Madrona today announced the appointments of a deep bench of successful, experienced operational and investor team members who will work with portfolio companies on strategy and execution. Wei Gao joins as venture partner, Anna Baird as operating partner and Vivek Ramaswami as partner.
As Venture Partner, Wei will help identify new investments and provide strategic and operational advice to Madrona portfolio companies. Wei brings over 20 years of operating leadership across product, technology, and business operations. As a 16-plus-year veteran of Amazon, where she worked in increasingly senior technical leadership roles, Wei delivered significant improvements to customer experience and business performance, oversaw large-scale digital transformation, and built innovative organizations across a broad set of groups including Commerce, Kindle, Supply Chain Technologies, and Amazon Grocery. Wei served as technical adviser to Jeff Bezos and was VP of Amazon Grocery before taking the COO role at Hopin, the leading shared experiences platform that enables immersive and interactive connection from anywhere.
Anna Baird is an Operating Partner at Madrona, where she will leverage her deep go-to-market and operating expertise to help advise fast-growing and acceleration-stage companies in the Madrona portfolio. Anna brings a wealth of management and operational skillsets to Madrona portfolio companies and has served as a COO, CFO and CRO — most recently at Outreach.io - the leading sales engagement platform. As the CRO, Anna had overall responsibility for directing sales & sales development, customer success, professional services, member support, and revenue operations. Prior to Outreach, Anna served as CFO of Livongo, senior vice president at McAfee, and partner at KPMG. Anna also serves on the SeatGeek board of directors.
Vivek Ramaswami joins Madrona as a Partner. Based in the Palo Alto office, he focuses on identifying, evaluating, and leading new investment opportunities and working closely with existing companies. Vivek joins Madrona from Steadfast Capital, where he worked with Managing Director Karan Mehandru investing in and advising technology companies. Prior to Steadfast, Vivek was a principal at Redpoint Ventures, where he spent over 5 years learning the craft of venture capital and partnering with companies like Hashicorp, SentinelOne, JustWorks, and many more.
“Startups at every stage benefit from connecting to people who have been there before. We are excited to bring on these experienced technical, executive, and investing team members to work directly with our current portfolio companies – and help identify new founders and companies that are turning the improbable into the inevitable.” — Madrona Managing Directors Scott Jacobson and Karan Mehandru.
About Madrona:
Madrona (www.madrona.com) is a venture capital firm based in Seattle, Washington. With more than 25 years of investing in early-stage technology companies, the firm has worked with founders from Day One to help build their company for the long run. Madrona initially invests in seed and Series A rounds across the information technology spectrum and in acceleration stage (Series B and C) companies building intelligent applications. Madrona manages $3 billion and was an early investor in companies such as Amazon, Smartsheet, Snowflake, Apptio, Redfin, and UI Path.
