Seattle VC Profile: Anu Sharma, Madrona Ventures

When I started Ascend in 2019, I realized even though I was o-l-d OLD, I had more in common with the folks in town who were earlier in their professional investing journeys than the venerable VC’s I’d pitched as a founder. I admire and respect the new wave of Seattle/Pacific Northwest venture capitalists, and thought it would be fun to profile some of our region’s up and coming VC talents in these pages. —KW

Anu Sharma possesses that rare combination of a powerhouse intellect and a high EQ. She’s operated at the highest levels in incredible companies and brings start founders that critical perspective we often miss when trying to get from 0-1: once you succeed, are you built for scale?

What made you decide to be a professional investor?

Working in high growth environments such as Flipkart and AWS converted me into a believer in founders and builders, especially when they appear crazy and outrageous. There aren’t enough people invested with them in constructing the groundwork to build lasting companies. I want to invest by transferring the lessons and rigor of product development and iterative growth from my past experiences into a few companies that’ll serve the next generation.

What did you do before becoming an investor and how does that benefit your founders?

Crafting products, driving growth, and building for scale require the mindset and discipline for making hard tradeoffs along the way. Over the last six years, I’ve led product management teams in EC2 (AWS) where we constantly pushed the envelope in serving new customer needs in the cloud. Working up from first principles, we redesigned nearly all layers of technology, from new hardware to virtualization, performance and user experience, pricing, and go-to-market strategy. Before that, I’ve led product management in Amazon’s Global Payments Platform, which processed billions in revenue across all Amazon businesses, building the infrastructure for the end to end payment workflow, serving account balances, and onboarding merchants and new businesses. Prior to that, I’ve helped launch the social and affiliate marketing channels at Flipkart before starting my own e-commerce company. After 17 years, the muscle memory helps me stay open to new situations and learn every day from the founders that I work with.

What are your most successful investments so far?

My most successful investment has been my time with Amazon and Flipkart. Over the last 8 months at Madrona, I’ve led investments in two companies that are yet to be disclosed. Prior investments were mainly in public securities where the markets have been fairly kind to me.

Why should founders want you on their cap table?

I’m here for the journey, as a trusted partner for the long term. The cap table is generally just one manifestation of one leg of the journey.

How many new pitches (actual calls/zooms) do you take per month?

I research about 20-30 companies and meet with about a dozen over the month.

How many new investments do you make per year?

Aim for no more than 3 investments a year.

What's your sweet spot(s) in terms of check size, valuation, and vertical?

Pre-seed and seed, followed by Series A. The check size usually varies by specific situation and timing.

What one portfolio company do you want to hype for us here?

Pulumi – they’re one of the best teams I know of and they’re building a long-term game changer.

What do you think the next ten years looks like for Seattle/Pacific Northwest startups?

I’m expecting new pockets of invention building on and extending the infrastructure that Amazon and Microsoft have already laid down. It’ll require a lot more bold bets from engineers and founders. Today, a lot of them seem to spend the bulk of their time solving for organizational alignment and collaboration in Amazon and Microsoft, solving for problems of scale. These are good problems to have but are mostly building on past innovation. The PNW has the brain power to be the core of the next technological revolution.

We’re also painfully undercapitalized outside of the larger companies and I expect investors to also take more bold bets in the region. Would also love to see better job mobility and employers building deeper loyalty with employees so they don’t have to rely on non-competes.