Hey, I'm Dan! I'm the CEO of Plus and a venture partner at Madrona. I write the DL, a newsletter about tech in the Pacific Northwest

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August 2019 Venture Deals

Here’s a roundup of PNW startups that announced new fundraising rounds in the month of August.

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Equifax's other database

Last week, someone pointed me to Work Number, which is an amazing business I had never heard about before. Work Number is a database for employment and payroll data, and customers primarily use it to verify someone’s employment.

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Seattle seed deal trends

After seeing this great visualization from Tom Tunguz, I worked with the PitchBook team to replicate the analysis for seed trends in the Pacific Northwest. Here are some highlights and areas where I’m excited about new investments

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Great use of AI for marketing 👏

I love this marketing campaign that Ogilvy worked on for Deutsche Bahn (German Rail) - such a cool use of computer vision, Facebook data, and targeted ads. Here’s a summary of what they did:

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PNW highlights from the Inc. 5000 ⭐

A couple weeks ago, Inc. released its list of the 5,000 fastest growing companies in the US, so I wanted to highlight a few of the best PNW founding stories.

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Startup success outside of Silicon Valley

Founder Collective put together an interesting analysis on the last ten years of software M&A and IPOs by geography (Jan 2009 - Aug 2019). Seattle got a nice ☕ emoji, and $50B of exit value over the last decade.

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Investing in the Sounders: Q & A with Terry Myerson

Sports teams are 🔥! Every NFL, NBA, and MLB franchise is now worth at least $1B, and there are 52 teams across all sports worth at least $2B, up from one (Manchester United), in 2012. Last week the Sounders announced new owners

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Gaming in Seattle - Ninja Battles and Three Trends to Watch

In addition to cloud, ecommerce, and machine learning, Seattle is a major hub for gaming. There are more than 400 gaming companies here that generate $28B in annual revenue and create 23K jobs.

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July 2019 Venture Deals

Here’s a roundup of PNW startups that announced new fundraising rounds in the month of July. Looks like VCs weren’t on vacation just quite yet!

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Seattle's biotech startups and the Fred Hutch 👩‍🔬

Putting together the Pacific Northwest unicorn chart, I was surprised to learn that ~10% of the PNW unicorns over the last two decades have been biotech companies – Juno, Adaptive Biotechnologies, and Seattle Genetics

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