The DL - 📢 Special Announcement from Dan

The last six years have been an incredible time to be at Madrona. I’ve had the opportunity to work with amazing companies, entrepreneurs, and investors, and it’s been amazing to invest in the PNW tech ecosystem!

So while I haven’t been planning on leaving the VC world, sometimes the right opportunity and team come together, and it’s impossible to say no. And now I’m leaving Madrona to start a new company!

I can’t share a ton of details about our company yet, but here’s a quick summary of what we are doing:

We are hiring designers and engineers, so if you are excited about no code/low code products, productivity tools, and/or data analytics, please reach out! I’d love to give you a sneak peek into what we are building.

Bad news: I’m going to have less time to write the DL now.

Good news: I’m going to keep writing the DL, but now it will be from the perspective of a founder instead of an investor. It’s probably not going to be weekly anymore, but hopefully the content will be just as interesting. 😅 

Also, we are figuring out a way for someone else at Madrona to start a new newsletter with some of the regular content like deal roundups and startup profiles. I’ll send out more on that soon!

🎉 Go Rec Room! - I’m so pumped for the amazing team at Rec Room! This was the last investment I led at Madrona, and they just announced $100M in new funding that makes them Seattle’s newest unicorn! If you’re excited about building the metaverse, check out their 25+ open roles

🎓 School Stuff - Are Sarah and I seeing all of this because we just had a baby, or is there a lot of school content coming out recently? Netflix’s movie on the Varsity Blues admissions scandal was crazy, this Atlantic article on private schools was interesting, and the most interesting part was this ranking of US high schools by how many kids they send to Harvard, Princeton, and MIT

🏛️ IRS.gov - Here’s a funny new startup story. To apply for a federal tax ID number, I had to go to the IRS.gov website, but it would never work for me. After several tries on multiple days, I finally noticed that that it’s because it’s the only website I’ve ever seen that has “Operating Hours”: Mon-Fri 7am to 10pm 😂. Even government websites are on the clock!

About me: I’m the CEO of a startup in the low code / productivity tools space. Before that, I was a partner at Madrona, a Seattle-based VC firm.

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