Kellan Carter is a founding partner of Fuse where he focuses on early-stage investments in intelligent software in both horizontal and vertical categories.  At Fuse, Kellan has led investments in Owl and Pave.  Previously, Kellan spent seven years at Ignition Partners, a leading early-stage venture capital firm. He joined Ignition in 2013 and was made partner by 2018. At Ignition, Kellan led investments in Botkeeper, Symend, Icertis, KenSci, and Azuqua, and served on the boards of both Botkeeper and Symend.

Prior to Ignition, Kellan spent two years in investment banking at Mooreland Partners in San Francisco. There, he helped execute M&A transactions for technology companies in a variety of sectors, including mobile, enterprise software, systems, and infrastructure. Prior to Mooreland Partners, Kellan was an associate in KPMG’s advisory practice in Orange County, CA, where he helped structure asset-backed securities collateralized by student loans, auto loans, and residential and commercial mortgages.

Kellan holds a BS degree in business administration from the University of Montana in Missoula, where he graduated summa cum laude.  After college, Kellan founded an online, business-networking platform to connect current students and faculty to UM alumni.

Ben is the co-founder of Pioneer Square Labs, a startup studio and early-stage venture capital firm in Seattle. He is a technology investor and entrepreneur. He has a background in product management from Microsoft where he shipped the first version of Office for iPad and ran The Garage, the company’s grassroots innovation program. Ben also co-founded Madrona Venture Labs.

Sudip joined Madrona in 2018. Sudip is particularly interested in companies that are transforming the enterprise, cloud and infrastructure markets. He especially enjoys working with technical founders – sharing his own experiences as a technical founder and helping them to build successful teams and businesses.

Past Lives

Prior to joining Madrona, Sudip was a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners where he led or co-led investments in Streamlio, Serverless, Rainnet, Exabeam and, a Madrona portfolio company, Heptio. He started his investing career at Osage University Partners and subsequently was an enterprise investor at Andreessen Horowitz where he was involved with companies such as Actifio, Databricks, Digital Ocean, Forward Networks, Mesosphere and Samsara.

Before venturing into early-stage investing, Sudip was an entrepreneur and an engineer. He started his first company when he was at Georgia Tech, and his second while in business school. In between, he spent a few years as an engineer building complex software systems at Synopsys.

This experience of founding enterprise technology-oriented businesses led Sudip to the venture side and he has been investing in enterprise and open source software companies since that time. His founder experience gives him direct insight into the challenges of startups which involve ups and downs and persistence. He strives to be a trusted partner to every entrepreneur he works with.

Education

Sudip received his PhD in Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech, an MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a B. Tech from IIT Kharagpur.

Dharmesh is leading Fullcast.io, a service dedicated to transforming sales operations to growth operations by automating planning, process, and operations of running sales. Prior to fullcast,io Dharmesh spent time at Salesforce and Microsoft leading teams across sales, engineering, and Operations.

Shirish Nadkarni is a serial entrepreneur with proven success in creating multiple consumer businesses that have scaled to tens of millions of users worldwide. Shirish was the co-founder of Livemocha, the world’s largest language learning site with 15+ million registered members from over 200 countries. Livemocha was acquired by RosettaStone in 2013. Prior to Livemocha, Shirish was the founder of TeamOn Systems, a mobile wireless e-mail pioneer that was acquired by Research in Motion in 2002. The TeamOn technology served as the core foundation for Blackberry Internet E-mail which serviced over 50 million BlackBerry users at its peak. Shirish is the author of an award winning book - “From Startup to Exit - An Insider’s Guide to Launching and Scaling Your Tech Business”.

“From Startup to Exit” shares the knowledge that pioneering, serial entrepreneur Shirish Nadkarni has gained from over two decades of success, detailing the practical aspects of startup formation from founding, funding, management, and finding an exit.

Sanjay is a technology marketer, entrepreneur and investor. He has worked with innovative startups and mid-sized growth companies, as well as top global enterprise / B2B organizations.

Liz Pearce is the co-founder and CEO of Fresh Chalk, site for sharing recommendations for local businesses and professionals with friends. Prior to Fresh Chalk, Liz was CEO of LiquidPlanner, a project management software company, and Chief Revenue Officer at Streem, a Portland-based augmented reality startup. Liz has served on the board of the UW Buerk Center for three years and is an active mentor and speaker in the Seattle entrepreneur community.

Avni is the founder and CEO of Modern Village. She is a third time founder building technology solutions for today’s parents. Her previous company Poppy (YC W16) helped connect parents to vetted caregivers when they had gaps in childcare. Prior to taking the entrepreneurial plunge, she spent over a decade building big consumer businesses at P&G, adidas and Starbucks. She has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BSc Chemistry from the University of British Columbia. She lives in Vancouver, Canada with her husband and 2 little girls.