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Startup marketing and product leader. I've always been heavily involved in community;…
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Shauna Causey shared thisDay one of NVIDIA’s hackathon with incredible teammates Namratha Murarikar, Peter Chee, Michael Agustin, Craig Swanson. I’ve spent the last few years helping other founders; haven’t participated in a hackathon in a minute so I’m excited. We just got a Spark AI Supercomputer for the weekend. Let’s goooo!Shauna Causey shared thisNVIDIA is bringing its Spark Hack Series to Seattle, and Ascend is proud to co-host! It's a weekend for builders who build AI that perceives the world, takes autonomous action, and pushes the limits of what's possible. Hackathon teams will be able to choose a real-world problem they want to solve, broken out into three tracks: See — AI that understands the physical world Do — AI that plans, acts, and gets things done Spark — AI that surprises us Every team will get an Acer Veriton GN100, powered by NVIDIA's GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, to use all weekend. Winners walk away with hardware, cloud credits, and investor meetings with us. It’s in person, capped at 35 teams, and teams of three to five get priority. Spots will fill up fast, so contact Nate Bek for the link :-)
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Shauna Causey shared thisWe all know this in Seattle but it's interesting to see the numbers. Even if their HQ isn't located in Seattle, their tech talent is.Shauna Causey shared this"isn't seattle tech just a bunch of AWS and MSFT employees?" well, no. aside from having 25% of the AI engineers in the US, and the second largest pool of dev talent in the country, seattle is home to the engineering hq2's of the world's most important tech leaders. we counted 55 seattle-based c suite execs from Anthropic and OpenAI to NVIDIA and Cisco; from Palo Alto Networks to CrowdStrike; from Shopify to Stripe. see the latest from Nate Bek below.
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Shauna Causey shared thisThe future is bright if you look at entrepreneurs coming out of UW. I got a chance to judge the MBA Entrepreneurship pitches tonight with Brooke B., investor at FUSE. The winning team created technology that could end malaria worldwide and already has grant funding. The two runner up teams 1) an AI dating app matchmaker that intros you to friends of friends with similar mission/vision/ lifestyle and 2) a web plugin and removes all the cookies and tracking data and ensures your info isn’t shared on the dark web. So impressed with Elizabeth Scallon who is leading the class to big things… and the talent in that room tonight.
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Shauna Causey shared thisStill thinking about the energy from Startup Day. It came together at the right moment with so many people actively experimenting with AI, building something new, or thinking about what's next. The speakers were incredible, sharing so many behind the scenes stories and learnings from their startup journey. The tough moments and the triumphs. All the credit to Marcelo Calbucci for dreaming this up, an event organized by founders, for founders. I loved getting to coordinate speakers and spend the day with so many people I admire, including some I hadn't seen in way too long. The community really came together for this which made it even more special. So so much gratitude to Chet Kittleson, Greg Gottesman, Ambika Singh, David Shim, Nikesh Parekh, Eric Ries, Todd Bishop, Peter Chee, Patrick Thompson, Rand Fishkin, Aaron Bird, Kirby Winfield, Maria Colacurcio, T. A. McCann, Lyndi Thompson for sharing so generously and to Marc Nager, Gregg Gottesman and Heather Redman for all the many emails and calls for advice and encouragement to make Startup Day happen in the planning phase and Kailin Spencer for pulling off the event logistics effortlessly. What a day, so good! Still catching up on messages from the event after getting back from vacay. 😊
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Shauna Causey shared thisSo so hard to see this one. When I was at Madrona Venture Labs, Soma S. Somasegar was always quick to say hello and he was always kind. When he was invited to community events, he showed up to support the community. The Seattle tech community lost someone who genuinely made it better. Thinking of everyone at Madrona and of Soma's family. https://lnkd.in/gQjgY7wyS. ‘Soma’ Somasegar, 1966-2026: Microsoft and Madrona leader was a champion of developers and startupsS. ‘Soma’ Somasegar, 1966-2026: Microsoft and Madrona leader was a champion of developers and startups
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Shauna Causey posted thisIt's almost here--tomorrow is Startup Day (Seattle Flow) and hundreds of current/aspiring founders are gathering at Bell Harbor Conf Center. Will you be there? If so, comment here so I can be sure to keep an eye out for you and say hi.
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Shauna Causey shared thisAmazing job alert. Some of the Decide.com alum are reuniting to build the future of travel, and they have 10 positions open right now. Incredible team and chance to build something exciting. Contact Hsu Han Ooi and Mike Fridgen for more info!Shauna Causey shared thisLast week I joined a new stealth startup focused on rebuilding travel with AI at the core. We’re now a team of 10, and we’re looking for the next 10 here in Seattle. We’re hiring for: - Product Manager: lives in AI tools daily and has strong consumer instincts - Full Stack Engineer: ships agentic consumer products end-to-end - Applied AI Engineer: trains models and designs/implements our LLM, agent systems, and evals - Platform Engineer: builds the core infrastructure and services for our models, agents, APIs, and payments - People Ops Manager: builds and runs the full people function If you or someone you know is interested, let me know.
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Shauna Causey shared thisDo you need a cofounder anymore? Is the best founding team you + a few AI agents? The playbook is changing. Solo founders are now shipping early products without eng teams. Hackathons are encouraging solo work. VCs are quietly watching it. I am excited to hear Nikesh Parekh share his story and unfiltered take at Startup Day this Friday. He's lived the cofounder journey multiple times, with Suplari, Inc. and now, Provn to reinvent how AI talent gets hired. A few tickets are still available. Come join us at Seattle Flow Startup Day on May 15. I can't remember a recent time so many of Seattle's current founders will be in one room. The day follows the arc of a startup - from finding the idea, acquiring your first 1,000 customers, funding, scaling, and the day ends with one of Seattle's most successful startup founders sharing his story. https://lnkd.in/gSA2fy2tSeattle's Startup Founder Conference by Seattle Flow | Startup Day 2026 | Seattle FlowSeattle's Startup Founder Conference by Seattle Flow | Startup Day 2026 | Seattle Flow
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Shauna Causey posted thisI don't know what happened to my LI feed but today it is full of women founders, VCs, and leaders hyping each other up. Just simply celebrating each other's wins. It's different from what I usually see here - and I love it. This is the energy. Let's keep passing it on. Today it was Leslie Feinzaig, Joanna Lord, Julie Sandler, Rohre Titcomb, Melody Biringer. And Ambika Singh, Sarah Studer, Hazel Grace Dircksen also come to mind because they are always shining a light on somebody worth celebrating. I am down with this trend. Let's keep celebrating the wins.
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Shauna Causey liked thisShauna Causey liked thisI'm delighted to share that I'm taking on a new role at Anthropic: international special envoy, where I'll work with governments around the world. It is a dream job for me. The decisions being made around AI policy right now, in capitals on every continent, will shape the development of this technology for decades. This role brings together the two halves of my career, law and diplomacy, and I could not be more excited and grateful to join our policy team to serve in this role. The best part of this news is who I’m handing the baton to. Elena Leichty is our new General Counsel, and having worked beside her every day, I know she is up to every bit of the job. There are few things better than seeing a good person succeed. As one of Elena's biggest fans, I'm delighted to see her step into this role. Our legal team, our company, and everyone out there who is pulling for safe AI are lucky to have her at the helm.
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Shauna Causey liked thisShauna Causey liked thisWhen I was at Madrona Venture Labs, I started more explicitly tracking the number of ideas killed. This week, I decided to start tracking rejections. I told someone via slack that "I live for constant rejection" and that's a great thing because it is truly constant. To name a few: rejection with cold outreach (this typically looks like no response) and with my writing (both professional and personal writing not getting traction). My advice for anyone early in their career is to get really good at being rejected. That + taking feedback well are two things that helped me grow. It translates to (1) trying more things because the worst that happens is rejection / failure and (2) people giving you more feedback which is (usually) helpful.
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Shauna Causey liked thisShauna Causey liked thisToday is my last day at The Associated Press, after 33 years. I'm bad at this part, so here's the short version... Covered Napster and the birth of distributed file-sharing disruption. El Niño from inside a NOAA hurricane chaser. Deepwater Horizon — the Polk, the Scripps Howard, the Grantham Prize. The Grand Theft Auto "Hot Coffee" investigation, where I decrypted the patch code, found the programmer who wrote the mod, and took a call from Hillary Clinton on my lunch break. The AP's first regional Social Media Editor. In the margins: Buzzkill, a documentary on Bayer AG and the collapse of pollinator populations — 25 nominations, four continents, now on Amazon Prime. An MFA from Drexel this year, and editor-in-chief of its literary journal. Next: Dispatches, reported essays, photography, and two documentaries in pre-production. Thirty-three years of good people and good work. And I'm not done. -30-
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Shauna Causey liked thisShauna Causey liked thisIt’s been almost three years since my last byline in GeekWire. This time, I’m back as a guest columnist alongside Ben, making the case that we’ve entered Seattle’s Third Act. It seems that every week brings another round of grim economic headlines. This constant drumbeat does little to alter Seattle’s trajectory and a great deal to wear down the people who live here. Maybe what we need most right now is the promise of an ambitious new chapter worth building toward, rather than a decline to defend against. *Thanks so much to Todd for publishing this piece. We’re incredibly grateful, and we hope it inspires a broader discussion about Seattle’s tech and economic future.* https://lnkd.in/dvY7_XQA
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Shauna Causey liked thisShauna Causey liked thisWhat happens when ChatGPT can use your computer? I just found out last week and it's been pretty amazing. My use case was something I've been dreading and avoiding for years. Photography has been a hobby but organizing the photos has been a challenge. As a result, I had 60,193 photos but 23,831 of them were "missing" in Lightroom - scattered across my MacBook, Dropbox, Adobe's cloud, and old external hard drives. Normally, you'd just ask ChatGPT, “How should I organize my Lightroom library?” and received a useful checklist and instructions. This time I used OpenAI Codex to help "do" the work itself. Codex can use the software on your machine - so it opened Lightroom, inspected connected drives, searched for missing originals, changed Lightroom settings, moved files, renamed folders, created collections and verified that files reached both their primary and backup locations. It's a bit surreal to watch ChatGPT literally operating a program on your desktop. But it also demonstrates the new era we're moving into with agents. A chatbot can explain which buttons you should press. It answers questions. An agent can understand an environment, use tools, operate applications, run work in the background, problem solve unexpected problems, work for hours toward a goal - all with a person retaining control over credentials, physical devices, judgment calls, and approving risky actions. We've spent three years learning to ask AI better questions. The next skill is knowing which work to hand it and how to manage it, and I suspect most of us have a 23,831-photo problem sitting somewhere.
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Shauna Causey liked thisShauna Causey liked thisHeading to GWA Conference in Denver! Honored to be speaking with Oliver Easton-Hughes, Katie Baroway, Ben Von Drehle on how we're using AI. Also quite excited to see friends and other leaders in the industry to spend time learning from them. It's a crazy time and AI is unlocking everything for us @ thinkspace. Thank you Giovanni Palavicini for inviting me. If you haven't registered for GWA, you should!
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Shauna Causey liked thisShauna Causey liked thisWhat a weekend in Seattle! We had a great time at the NVIDIA Spark Hackathon, meeting developers, seeing teams come together, and watching ideas turn into working AI projects over the course of just a few days. Acer was proud to support the teams with the Veriton GN100 AI Workstation, powered by the NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip. Even better was getting to see the GN100 put to work as teams built, tested, and iterated throughout the weekend. Congrats to the winners and to everyone who participated. It was great seeing what this community could build in such a short amount of time. A big thank you to NVIDIA, the organizers, champs, and everyone who stopped by to connect with the Acer team. We enjoyed being part of it and can't wait to see where some of these projects go next. #AcerForBUsiness #BuildBeyondLimits #NVIDIASpark #Acer #NVIDIA #VeritonGN100 #AI #Developers #Hackathon
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Shauna Causey liked thisShauna Causey liked thisTo the people building what's next, happy #WorldEntrepreneursDay. 🚀 We’re proud to support #NVIDIAInception startups around the globe—from early technical breakthroughs to scaling AI products that make a real-world impact. Thank you for letting us be part of your journey. 🤝 Meet startups shaping the future of AI: https://bit.ly/4i6gk15
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Shauna Causey liked thisShauna Causey liked thisWhat an amazing experience being part of the NVIDIA Spark Hack Series at Seattle last weekend! 🚀 Looking back, one of my biggest takeaways was the people I met and the conversations I had along the way. One of the biggest highlights was definitely meeting so many amazing (and very, very smart 😄) people from NVIDIA. Some were familiar faces, while others were new faces I had the chance to meet for the first time. Great conversations, great energy, and lots of new connections! Huge thanks to the NVIDIA team for putting together such a fun and inspiring event, and for making us feel so welcomed! Ayesha Asif, Kiana Steele, Adam Ryason, Ph.D., Apurv Kumaria, Aviv Weinstein Sabrina (Yahan) Yang, Indrajit Maloji Bhosale, Barry M. Really glad I got to be part of it, and I’m already looking forward to the next one! #NVIDIA #NVIDIASparkHack #Nemoclaw #Nemotron #Acer #AcerForBusiness #VeritonGN100 #ThinkSpace
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I’m in the 2023 class of leaders working on world changing ideas, all taking place on the beautiful Whidbey Island.
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