Mike Fridgen
Mike Fridgen is Venture Partner at Madrona, Founder and CEO at a stealth startup, Advisory Board Member for the Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship at University of Washington, and Chief Operating Officer at Rover. He previously served as Director of Interactive Marketing at Alaska Airlines, President & CEO at Decide, General Manager at eBay, Partnerships Manager at Expedia Group, and VP Marketing & Product at Farecast.com. He founded Decide.com and Farecast, both acquired, Madrona Venture Labs, TripHub, and his current stealth startup. His expertise is in consumer travel startups and building technology products in the travel industry.
Live show: Amazon, Meta and the fight over the future of AI; Plus, is Seattle still the place to build?
This week: Amazon is blocking Meta's new Muse AI assistant from shopping on Amazon.com, saying the agent doesn't identify itself and violates the site's conditions of use. We explain why the standoff is an early sign of a much bigger fight over whether AI agents can use websites and apps on people's behalf, and why Amazon has so much riding on the answer. For the definitive word on the issue, we ask Muse what it has to say for itself, and get an impressively sophisticated and evenhanded answer. We recorded this week's show live at Daniel's Broiler in downtown Seattle…
#20 Mike Fridgen: Seattle based Startup Incubator Madrona Venture Labs
In this Episode of Startup Project, Nataraj talked to Mike Fridgen, Managing Director at Madrona Venture Labs a Seattle based tech startup incubator. Some of the companies incubated include Style Genome (Acq by Wayfair), Chatitive (Acq by MailChimp), Message Yes (Acq by Nordstrom) & more. Before joining Madrona Venture Labs Mike was part of founding teams at Farecast (Acq by Microsoft) & Decide (Acq by Ebay) where he led product and growth strategies. Full Conversation includes: Farecast.com (Predicting prices) - Acquired by Microsoft Decide.com (next gen consumer reports) - Acquired by Ebay Through line across being part of multiple acquisitions…
Organizations
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Madrona Venture Partner 2025–present · current -
Stealth startup Founder and CEO 2025–present · current
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University of Washington Advisory Board Member for Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship 2014–present · current
Education
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Harvard Business School MBA · 2001–2003
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Foster School of Business Entrepreneurship/Entrepreneurial Studies · 1993–1997
