The Legal Decisions Every AI Founder Needs to Get Right
Founded & Funded
Who is responsible when an AI agent does something its user never intended? Janel Thamkul, former deputy general counsel at Anthropic, explains why the answer depends on your contracts, your product design, and the records you keep. In this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona General Counsel Joanna Black talks with Janel about the legal decisions every AI founder needs to get right, including: 1) Why AI’s constrained supply changes how you incentivize go-to-market teams 2) How a product’s UI reveals whether a team understands agentic liability 3) The OpenClaw gym class incident and...
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Is AI a Bubble? What PitchBook's Head of Research Sees in the Data
Founded & Funded
Recorded live at Seattle Tech Week, this episode of Founded & Funded brings together two people who track the AI capital markets from different vantage points: Pitchbook EVP of Research & Market Intelligence Nizar Tarhuni, and Madrona Partner Sabrina Albert. These two dig into where AI venture capital is actually landing across the model, infrastructure, and application layers, why AI "harnesses" are becoming a winner-takes-most category, and where vertical AI applications may hold an edge that horizontal platforms can't match. They also cover PitchBook's VC Exit...
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Why AI Made Your Buyers Harder to Sell To
Founded & Funded
After leaving a long sales career, spent a year meeting more than 300 founders across 41 countries and turned what he heard into a framework for how companies sell now. In this episode of Founded & Funded, David sits down with Madrona's Anna Baird and Eric Wong to dig into why AI left buyers with more information and less clarity, why deals stall out of fear rather than disinterest, and how founders can cut through. The conversation covers selling against build-it-yourself AI objections, the return of in-person selling, and why the founder's own brand is more important to drive pipeline....
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The Best Infrastructure Moment Since Cloud
Founded & Funded
Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie co-created Kubernetes, the infrastructure standard that became the default for cloud native computing. Now running Stacklok, they're watching enterprises hit the same identity, permissions, and security problems with AI agents that took the container ecosystem years to resolve, and they're building tools to compress that timeline. In this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona's Tim Porter sits down with Joe and Craig to talk through what AI adoption actually requires: why MCP is the Docker moment for AI-native applications, how the LLM gateway is becoming a...
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AGI Needs Formal Reasoning. Carina Hong is Building it at Axiom.
Founded & Funded
There's a theorem being tested about how AI reaches general intelligence. Carina Hong's answer: through mathematics. Carina is the founder of Axiom, and in less than a year of building, her team's AI has scored a perfect 120/120 on the Putnam mathematical competition — a test where more than 50% of brilliant undergraduates score zero. More concretely, Axiom Prover has reached 98.93% on a Lean software verification benchmark that leading alternatives solve at 11–12%. In this conversation with Matt McIlwain, Carina explains her central thesis: that math and code are the two pillars of the...
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Palantir Alum Explains How AI is Used and Bought by the Federal Government
Founded & Funded
Nick LaRovere spent years at Palantir before co-founding Pryzm with friends, including a Lockheed Martin alum. And in this episode of Founded & Funded, Nick shares his inside account of how AI is actually being adopted inside the federal government, and what it takes to sell technology into that market. Pryzm is an AI-powered intelligence engine for government business development: it aggregates data across CRMs, email, Slack, and public procurement sources to help companies win contracts. Nick's argument is that by the time an opportunity appears on SAM.gov, the deal is already decided....
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Zapier Has More AI Agents Than Employees. Here's How That Happened
Founded & Funded
Zapier is doing hundreds of millions in ARR, has 800 employees, and has more AI agents than people. That ratio isn't an accident. Wade Foster, CEO and co-founder of Zapier, built one of the most capital-efficient software companies in history on less than $1 million in venture funding. When GPT-4 launched in March 2023, he called a company-wide "code red" (a term he'd never used before) and stopped the entire company for a week-long hackathon. What happened next reshaped how Zapier hires, operates, prices its product, and thinks about the future of software. In this episode of Founded &...
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Twitter's Ex-CEO: The Web Was Built for Humans — Let's Make it Work for AI Agents
Founded & Funded
What happens when AI agents — not humans — become your primary customer? That's not a hypothetical. It's already happening, and the founders who recognize it earliest are rebuilding their entire infrastructure stacks from scratch. In this live episode of Founded & Funded from our IA Summit in Seattle, Madrona Venture Partner Jon Turow sits down with Parag Agrawal, former CEO of Twitter and founder of Parallel Web Systems, and Nikita Shamgunov, who led Neon through a rapid AI pivot before its acquisition by Databricks. What they cover: Why Parag is building a new search index from the...
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How to Sell AI Into the Enterprise: Pilots, Pricing, and Closing 12-Month Deals
Founded & Funded
What does it really take to sell an AI-native product into the Fortune 500? In this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Managing Director Matt McIlwain sits down with two founders deep in the trenches of enterprise AI adoption, Esha Joshi (Co-founder, Yoodli) and Anup Chamrajnagar (Co-founder, Gradial.) Their companies are selling into some of the world’s most complex organizations, like Google, SAP, Snowflake, Databricks, and more. And they break down what founders often underestimate about enterprise AI sales. They dive into: Why most AI pilots fail and how to prevent it The...
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The Infrastructure of Intelligence: Inside Crusoe’s Massive AI Factory in Texas
Founded & Funded
In this episode of Founded & Funded, Ben Gilbert, co-host of the Acquired podcast, sits down with Chase Lochmiller, co-founder and CEO of Crusoe-AI, the company building what it calls AI factories, including its massive campus in Abilene, Texas, which are designed to power this new era of intelligence. In this conversation, Ben and Chase explore the physical reality behind today's AI revolution. Why modern AI workloads demand entirely new infrastructure. How energy has become the primary bottleneck to scaling intelligence. What it takes to compress multi-year building timelines into...
info_outlineWho is responsible when an AI agent does something its user never intended? Janel Thamkul, former deputy general counsel at Anthropic, explains why the answer depends on your contracts, your product design, and the records you keep.
In this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona General Counsel Joanna Black talks with Janel about the legal decisions every AI founder needs to get right, including:
1) Why AI’s constrained supply changes how you incentivize go-to-market teams
2) How a product’s UI reveals whether a team understands agentic liability
3) The OpenClaw gym class incident and what it shows about open-ended tasks
4) Why copyright damages can be company bankrupting, and how model providers responded
5) Why granular logging is cheap to build early and brutal to retrofit
Liability for AI agents is still an open question, and founders are making product and contract decisions before the answers arrive. Janel gives concrete choices a team can make before shipping.
Transcript/Summary: https://www.madrona.com/what-founders-should-know-about-ai-legal-risk-before-they-ship
00:00 – Introduction
01:16 – What Founders Building on Frontier AI Models Underestimate: Supply Constraints and Sales Incentives
03:06 – How to Tell If an AI Team Understands Agentic Liability by Looking at the UI
05:38 – The OpenClaw Gym Class Incident: When an AI Agent Exploits a Vulnerability
07:56 – Who Is Liable When an AI Agent Fails? Contracts, Copyright, and Indemnification
10:23 – AI Safeguards That Are Cheap Early and Brutal Later: Granular Logging
11:36 – Why the Ecosystem Isn't Ready for Agentic AI: Principals, Trust, and Identity
13:30 – Why AI Startups Should Not Ship Without Real Terms of Service
15:27 – Don't Be the Slowest Zebra: How Early-Stage AI Companies Should Take on Risk
17:11 – Own Your Most Important Relationship: Why No Third Party Should Sit Between You and Your Customer
19:21 – Final Advice for CEOs: Tokenmaxxing, AI Stack Sovereignty, and the ZEBRA Mnemonic