Soma Somasegar

Soma is a Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group, who had a successful twenty-seven year career with Microsoft and has long been an angel investor in tech. At Madrona Soma is focusing on ML/AI, Intelligent Apps, Developer platforms, and VR/AR.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/s-somasegar-113791a5/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SSomasegar
Others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._Somasegar
Seattle, Washington, United States
Accredited investor
Member since May 16, 2017

About

Investor interests

Type of investor	Early stage VC
Typical investment size	More than $2.5M
Typical investments in a year	3
Categories of interest	Enterprise software Cloud Computing Machine Learning (ML)
Locations of interest	Seattle, Washington, United States San Francisco, California, United States Silicon Valley
Credentials	Accredited Investor

I am a(n):

Investor

Companies I work or worked for:

Microsoft, Madrona Venture Group

Achievements (products built, personal awards won):

Windows, Windows Server, Visual Studio, .NET, VSCode, Visual Studio Team Services

Asian American Engineer of the Year award

My favorite startups:

Snowflake, SmartSheet, ExtraHop, Icebrg

What's most frustrating and rewarding about entrepreneurship/innovation?

+ Having customers use your product to solve a pain point
+ Creating value from scratch

- can be super lonely at times

What's the No. 1 mistake entrepreneurs/innovators make?

- Not being focused enough and thinking they can do everything all at the same time

What are the top three lessons you've learned as an entrepreneur?

Surround yourself with complementary and well-rounded leaders
Have a strong conviction around your PoV and be open minded to feedback
Be driven by customer focus first and foremost

Full bio

Soma is a Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group. Prior to joining Madrona in 2015, Soma had a successful twenty-seven year career at Microsoft Corporation. His last role at Microsoft was Corporate Vice President of the Developer Division. Soma has also long been an angel investor with investments across a wide range of technology areas both in the U.S. and internationally. At Madrona, he is focusing on Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Applications, Developer centric platforms and tools, and the emergence of new technologies such as VR/AR. He has authored several pieces outlining Madrona’s thinking about how these technologies will evolve. Soma serves on the boards of several Madrona companies including Snowflake, Icebrg, Pixvana, Shyft and CloudCoreo. He also serves as advisor to many of Madrona’s companies in the DevOpps and Cloud industries. Under Soma’s leadership, the Microsoft Developer Division, which supports over six million .NET developers worldwide, expanded its mission to deliver developer tools and services for mobile development and cloud development across a variety of platforms and programming technologies through the Visual Studio and .NET family of products.