YouSaid · the spoken record

Marco Palladino

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47

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2025-10-21

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2025-10-21

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1. “But the thing to advise is it always takes longer than what we think. It is good to take a trend the last 10 years, 20 years because you have time to grow into and do a lot of mistakes and building. And just you have to generally believe it in this trend versus falling glitters because it's going to take longer than what you think as a leader, as a human, as a market, as a product, as a revenue is always going to take longer. So take something to last and just put 110% on it every day and then it will compound, keep the barn rate low in the early days.”

   2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Never. Never. The reason is I could. Never visualize myself going back to the airport in Italy. And my dad picking him up and said, How's it going? And I was just like, would fail with my tails and my legs like I could never, I would have died here without food. Like I cannot do that. And so that never crossed through the heads.”

   2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “I think I said before there is a lot of focus on model pre-training, tuning, all of that. But a key thing is the connectivity layer, how LLMs, agents, whatever will talk to each other, how you run. I think a lot of the traffic will be very strategic and yet to build the startups or the enterprise to manage that AI connectivity into your next apps, your next internal tools, your next customers.”

   2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Same thing happened in Microsoft, you will abstract that to a gateway partner once again. And that's where I think AI Gateway will have the same analogy and dispatcher to write connectivity logic to the right 11 versus rewriting. Each of them. I think that's the big bet that we make that happens in microservices, happens in how enterprise will run and govern hundreds of LLMs.”

   2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “What happened in Microsoft because I grew up in Italy and you don't really study a lot of math, you just study histories. But what you learn from history is that Italy does exactly repeat, but it reads. It's just always on and now. So what we see with microservices, what happened? We first built rate limiting and authentication 10 times, 100 times, 50 times into the Python framework, the JavaScript framework, the TypeScript framework, the Java framework, whatever, PHP, blah, blah, blah. At some point, it didn't make any sense. Let's substruct everything into a gateway pattern. And we move all this connectivity logic to the gateway and that dispatch to the right service, no matter what language. The same thing, I think, is going to happen in LLMs. At first, you have one enterprise use one big LLMs. Now they're going to use five, ten, hundreds, small LM, medium, large, whatever. Once you get to, you don't do tokens relimiting, token authentication in each LLM using the framework, the lang chain, whatever. Eventually...”

   2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “I think you can think you can be an enabler to help large companies, small companies to get into the hands of more developers or more coarser. Because it's also how an API, we can provide you that infrastructures and all of that. As you see from Yesse Bourme, we have a very exciting roadmap that is going all in that direction. So those are all named. I think here's the big bet. The big bet is...”

   2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Even like really basic things like for developers, this is evolving very quickly. So, for example, you know, for fun, I develop using cursor. I used to be a professional developer in previous life, even knowing what APIs existed in a company required a ton of reading through docs or some weird search. And it feels like now, especially like if you have something like Kong, which has all the metadata and has the catalog and then you can integrate into something like cursor. And so not only does the agent itself know about the APIs, but you can expose it to you. I mean, it feels like a lot of like even the development paradigm is shifting now because we can start surface things to developers.”

   2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Think you cannot do AI if you're not API first. It's just you don't have them out in the years to a model. And so that's how AI talks. So, the way we know about API infrastructure, it will evolve and want and change. But API traffic and AI traffic are converging. So the classic API calls, yes, but also when you move tokens is an API call. And intelligent, let's say intelligence will be sold through tokens. Every earning release is about tokens. But behind and each tokens, there are calls that payloads move tokens. So they're kind of converging. And what we are calling are building is a unified API and AI connectivity platform that helps you navigate this transition as you're managing classic API traffic, as you're managing agent traffic, as you manage MCP traffic, as you manage LLM traffic. I think we will all converge into a unified. That's how I think intelligence will move. And based on evolutionary steps in like two, three years, but we already see MCP traffic growing every quarter.”

   2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “So maybe just assume for this part of our discussion that whoever's listening is pretty familiar with API infrastructure, right? Do you think that the way API infrastructure looks in six months or a year or two years is dramatically different because of AI? Or is it that the infrastructure that we have in place that we understand today evolved? To also service agents in ways that are pretty obvious. Like, to what extent do you think this is like transformational on the infrastructure layer versus like more of a transition?”

   2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “So what I think the world is a bit of stack, okay, you have these AI companies like Poo that are just building models, yada, yada. And then you have this wrapper company that are trying to solve HR issue, whatever through AI. Then you have these LLMs that have APIs to talks, companies like Anthropy, a lot of revenue through APIs, all that. What is missing is the infrastructure to make those AI talks and run. And that's what we do now. We gave to a lot of products. But at the core, the boarding problem, like you mentioned, authentication, authorization. You can be AGI as much as you want, but at the end, an agent gets stuck if he has to authenticate. And to authenticate, you got to get an API key. You need a human in the loop to get the API key authenticate. But if you can provide infrastructure at the beginning, you can provision and automate key provision in key rotation, authentication. Once you're there, you can unleash your LLM, your agents.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “We had that board meeting yesterday. And what I found actually pretty remarkable is how many more banal use cases there are around AI, right? We can talk about agents, and I think it's worth talking about, and I agree with you, but it also feels like there's like a lot of just basic stuff. key management for a lot of the companies are spending a lot of money on these AI models, right? So it's great to be able to have monitoring billing, key rotations, all of that stuff. So you're actually seeing like a non-agentic draft now.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “I think, and again, it's not like it was like any meeto's things, but the market came at us in AI by creating more APIs. What that means. Agents are going to consume internet a very different way than how human did. It's not anymore websites, scroll, click, up and down, applications. They're going to be there, but not as relevant as before. Agents are going to programmatically exchange labor, get tasks done through programming interface, whether it's classic APIs, MCP protocols, which is like Duolingo for APIs, makes them speak English. Whatever it is, the protocol, but machines consuming internet is going to be very different than human consuming interest. Human consuming interest would be through UI. Machine consuming interest is through programming interface. That's the huge shift that we are now capturing and powering and making sure the enterprise think about AI.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “That's right. Yeah. So, like, in a way, kind of like there was consolidation and you broke out this later. So you kind of navigated this transition from, you know, cloud to breaking up the microservices. You built the control plane for APIs. You are considered now like the leader independent for sure. In the API space, Cong is the leader independent. There's no question of that. But now you're facing another market shift, which is kind of this movement to AI. And so do you view this as directly impactful, adjacent, accretive? Like, how are you as CEO viewing this?”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “But even then at the time, yeah, well, Kong broke away pretty quickly. So, I mean, in recent years, it's clearly been the leader on this. And that only happens, I think, if there's just clearly a market need. The market also kind of did you a favor in that Mulesoft got acquired and Apogee got acquired too, right? It was right.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “No. Actually, I know this, but every year we do the Fonders Award. The founders award is $2,555 stock to the best employee of the company. Why that is 255 days of struggle every day, which is seven years.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “I got to say, I think a lot of people don't know or maybe don't appreciate how fast Kong grew when it actually happened. So there was seven years of starvation, right? I mean, it just basically wasn't working.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “I think before there were all these archae solutions in APIs, but they were not built for the transition to the cloud and breaking down the monoliths into microservices and high scale, decentralized architecture. I mean, you know from your time and this year, like we kind of invented a control plane data plane separation at the API management API control plane level. Nobody was doing it before.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Down the monolith to microservice, it creates more and more APIs, the big data and all that, it creates event streaming and all that. So this just data in motion is much higher than is becoming much higher than data rest or data in use than before.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Right now, before we actually do that, so we left with this Pivot and we open source Kong API gateway took off and we become an enterprise company. We rebrand Kong Inc. And we start to build all sorts of API infrastructure to run, manage and secure your internal or external APIs. So you have software, you have microservices, you have 10, hundreds, thousands of APIs. We are kind of this highways that makes them run and you have rate limiting like if APIs were at cars, you got guardrails, speed bump, speed cameras, gas stations, talls, bumps, guardrails, everything, ambulance, and we provide all the infrastructure to make sure that the API connectivity runs. For small company, big company, all of that. Now, in this transition you mentioned, what really drove, I think, this explosion of cloud APIs was the workload moving from on-prem through the cloud. The second transition is breaking.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “So then we go there. It's like, okay, this is where a year we're barnacle, we're running out of money. And so we build this massive API engine behind the module, this API gateway that was piring 20,000 APIs of this long tail doing billing, rate limiting, routing, caching, authentication, authorization, logging, all of that. We built it three times. And the third time was the great one. And we say, wait a minute, every company will become an API company. Why don't take this engine and we give it to the whole world? And that was the beginning of open source, Mongo. And so boom, we open source Kong.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “So that was one. Shu, you need to have exclusivity somewhat, like the door to access that marketplace supply has to be through the marketplace. APIs, you could Google and go to the website. You can go through the marketplace. APIs at that time power of law for public APIs was on the Tweedy or the Stride. There were Torie that matters and 3,000 that didn't matter much. So it was also this long tail power. And third thing was quality. You were running a cloud marketplace. You couldn't actually maintain the quality of the supply. You would always get blamed for it. And there was no trust. And so I think because of that, it got to a million and a half in gross revenue, but it never became this Airbnb Uber of APIs.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “So there's a lot of graduation problem. These marketplaces are very tough. So the idea of the market was that when I was staying with Airbnb funders, I learned that the marketplace could be the biggest, more powerful business in the world. You don't even have to innovate once you get liquidity. It's just you can't disrupt. Look at eBay. You got eBay. You can't kill. So I thought like there's all this API, you can build a marketplace liquidity. It'll be like AWS. And so we noticed though that in our case, it was a developer API marketplace. So to a marketplace to work, you need to have a long tail of low power people. If you have concentrated in a few high power, marketplace doesn't work. Like Airbnb houses like millions of people with low power.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Markbus wasn't working. And I think so we raised this and we hired more. We moved 20 years office, 25 people. Like the usual post race honeymoon. And I remember this thing like six months after. The business wasn't really doing anything. So it was one board mini that we just cooked pasta for the board members at the time because that was like two years before you joined us. And it was nothing to talk about from business.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “6.5 million. Yeah, I went out with this PowerPoint. Let's raise a 10 million series. At that point, that was like the big thing. We ended up at 6.5. That's science. It was like when we saw it, he was like, yeah, like maybe we got a shot.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Maybe it wasn't sure Marketplace was the right execution, but the theme, it was a big believer. And I think us, like, he came to see us leaping the same mattress. He wanted to really see that we're not bullshitting the big drama story. It was really drama. Actually, he opens, he came to the Akar House because we moved to Akaraus in South Park at that time, where we were sleeping and working there with the 70p. And he opens a closet. And there's like all the bananas felling off because there was one guy only eating huge bananas. He opened another closet. There's another mattress with other guys leaving a second closet. This is real.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “Yeah, because George Zachary was more a consumer, so he passed the link to death that just more on the enterprise side. I remember Death Tal Sunday at 6 a.m. to go for a walk to decide to invest or not. And he knows I'm a night haul. And he just Sunday, 6 a.m. to go to. Go down to Palo Alto, which I had to rent a zip car. The word zip cars, there was no Uber and go down there”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “And I get this 01 visa, and fire, I got the visa. So if I can come here, I can get a WeWorkspace and we start to hire and we got seven people and Mark also get the visa. Mark has also, because of the love book, he never got to college or nothing. So it was the hardest visa to do. So we figured it out more letter recommendations for him. We brought him there. We stay here, blah, blah. We build a year. We grow. At that time, like you needed like a million, let's say a million revenue to take a good series. For a marketplace, you need a million in gross volume. We were like at 50k. So a lot of traction, but not a lot of revenue. But we went through. A three four month series and CRV led and then index around it.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “So then we raise the seed. All right, now it's real. We got to get this visas. We got to Italy, go to the American embassy, blah, blah, blah, do the letter of recommendations. Actually, Sam Altman was one of the guys that wrote me a letter of recommendation when he was CEO of Looped. Which I met on the we're going to the NEA retreat and I see next to him in the bus, and we went to Pebble Beach to the NEA retreat, and we spent three hours together. And I said, by the way, I'm illegal here. Can you write me a letter of recommendation for my 01 visa? And he wrote me. So I have this big thing of how great I am. You gotta get this guy in the country, and no matter what. So we got this five letters”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “But obviously, it was the big brand. And then second, Eric Schmidt, we were working in this co-working space. And what happened is we were the only startup that stay the latest in the night after this other startup that was doing Expedia for cruise ships. They just raised from NEA and Eric Schmidt. And at the end, they saw us work until 3 a.m., 4 a.m. They will leave a chew when they knew we were fundraising. And the investor asked, who's the hardest worker than you? Is it these guys next to us? And so they introduced us to Derek Schmidt Fund and that's how Eric Schmidt invested.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “So Alistair was maybe a $50 billion company then, $80 billion So, what happened is I hired the lawyer of his family office for Koh. And after we hire for doing the seed round, and after the seed round was going along and say, by the way, since you are also the lawyer of the family office and Bezos expeditions, can you introduce me to Jeff Bezos? That's what we do. So it's a PG Coco. And then he was on the road with his brother going around with his brother on the road in Texas. And actually, we want to put more and invest. Boom. So that was Jeff Bezos. What do you get from Joseph Baseball? You get the brands that we got a dinner strategy giant of things”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “So again, that is a serendipity that I don't know we can replicate. So, what happened is Jeff Bezos. So Jeff Bezos, I knew he was special about marketplace as a business, APIs and developers. AWS was just starting to take off. It was this hidden secret.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Yeah, so what happened to this actually, the first checks for George Zakari from CRV back then, he didn't lead around, but he was the first 100k commitment. And so with that, he said, We have CRV, 100K. At that point, they had a seed program, very unusual back then. We went 28, and he said, we're going to lead this round. At that point, also they start a seed program, 500K. And then I met Mike Volti that just moved to San Francisco to Lounge Index, US. It was like him and Danny Reimer show there somewhere. I said, and they also started Angel, a seed program, and they wrote another big checks. And then we got a long tail. It was likely Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt into the funds. And so we got this combination.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “Building all the Java backends and the launch at fast, and I've got a little bit of TechCrunch press. At that time, I was read, write, web. This other one was meshable And so somehow we got covered by all of them, which is now like Chris. And then, and boom. And then start to seed around face. So that time. We went through a lot of iterations, but where we ended up was NEA leading the seed round and then index co-leading 2A. And then we got a bunch.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “No, no, because San Francisco Tuanolu, I think at that time it was like 300 bucks. With our 51k, we're living like on tuna pasta, rice and beans in Valencia in Mission in this historic building middle of nowhere mission. It's unbelievable. At some point, I remember woke up in the morning. I need to go to Honolulu. We could do our walk on the beach and thinking about our future or no future because we knew this was going no future. Our money were starting to drain and we needed two people. And that's where we had the idea, let's go for the people. And then we come back with the crazy, I remember us building the website. Michael was crazy, the Turk co-funder was.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “Exactly, because okay, the economy, this API economy will come. It's not just apps, it will be APIs, and we build a marketplace, we launch it, we got disinteractions on long tail, and that was already the summer of 2011. After a period in a while. So we launched very fast, boom, boom, boom. And then we raise”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “So then a year later, we re architected. So we went to Honolulu on the beach, on Mana Beach, and we thought about, okay, all these APIs were aggregating. I think the world is actually, we see now, finally now, but 10, 15 years ago, it wasn't ready. There were two build apps on the fly through APIs with drag and drop. We were too far ahead. We're missing pieces. But say, hey, we are wrapping a lot of APIs. Actually, that assembly line visual still hold. We just have to pivot it and build an API marketplace where all the APIs, producers and consumers that can come together. And so we pivot that. We relaunch it, then crunch all the stuff.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “I was writing blogs building the website. Trying to do some recruiting that never worked because nobody wanted to work for illegal Italians that will disappear. So, a lot of mistakes, and this, yeah, figures things out”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “No, we were working out of Starbucks. And we were living in Valencia and we were buying rice, beans, and tuna and pasta. And the reason is that we had to find the right amount of carbs and product the cheapest way possible. And that was the combination of, I guess, amount of carbs and product the cheapest way possible. And that's how we made it. Like we never eat out, we never buy. We did everything in house. We cooked in the kitchen Airbnb, rice beans or tuna pasta. In fact, we had so much tuna pasta with tomato that Mark and I, when we seen how tuna pasta, we almost threw up because we're just running on tuna pasta every single day.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “It was three of us. It was Michele, it was the Turk co founder back then. But we did about 1,800 monthly promissory note that the company would give us and we would have to leave in three with $1,000 a month. So you're living.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “What happened is obviously we got the fifth time. We got to come back. We are illegal in two weeks. So we went back to Italy and we came back with a B1, which you could be there. We can be here six months. But we have no social security number. We have no credit score. So you have into this American system very different than Italy's system. You have to enter into a new system. And we had zero anything. So we couldn't pay our salary because we didn't have SSN. We didn't have a legal visa to pay ourselves, all that. So the company...”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “And so I say, okay, well, I don't want to take this deal. Screw that. I say, okay, okay, we're going to leave. And I was very naive, 20 years old. Okay, okay, give a come back. And Travis come to me, put the hands and say, if this guy leave, you're never going to see them again and nor the money. Wow. So let me do something else. So, you guys stay here and figure it out, the content offer. Aggie and I go to the bathroom. We close each other and we come back in 10 minutes. So Trevis brought me to the bathroom, locked the door of the house so these guys don't leave. Went to the bathroom and we sit there 10 minutes. Go back another round of negotiation back to the bathroom, so three, four times. At the end, we handshake on the deal. And what's finally better, like 42% convertible. It's kind of start of 50.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “On his couch? Yes. And Airbnb guys as well. But what happened during the negotiation with these guys were negotiating and they didn't want. So Trevis had at that time was this house up in Castro, called it a jam ped where everybody goes. Aaron Lee would go and drew from Draba was the data. We're all going there on the weekends and I didn't have a place to say. So actually Trevis give me his place to say a few weeks as long as I would cook Carbonara for his better half once a week. And I did that. And then we needed help. He said, come to my kitchen. We negotiate. So we sit on the table. It was myself and Trevis Kalanik and there were the three YouTube investors negotiating these convertible notes at like 50% discounts, something crazy. We were desperate.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “470 didn't reply. Today reply, and 10 were kind of interested. And at the end, five or six went to meet us. And then this one person. Kevin Dunhau was one of the funding team of YouTube came to our Kevin Don And then he started a company for baby books. He sold it. But he said, Look, I think this is something. So he wrote a $17,000 check on earmatches. Thousands, yeah, and for us 17,000 was life Versus We came from $600 and a few hundred bucks. And so then he brought two other phoning teeth. He actually was $16,000, 16,000, 16,000. We got 15,000. They're probably with 15,000 divided three was 6666. It was too many sixes. We don't want too many six in the captive. So we rounded up 17, 17, 17, and we got 51,000 check.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “There's two interesting things that you say can you redo it again? I won't be able to redo it again. So, number one is we went to the Stanford Entrepreneurship Week. At that time, Stanford was doing the Stanford Entrepreneurship Week in February. And it was cool. You made all entrepreneurs, all the VC were coming there, and there was this entrepreneurship mixer, big party. We arrived, we left late. At that point, it was all paper with all the email and the registration. We steal the things with all the email and the registration and we walk home with that. And that night till 5 a.m. I write all the 400 emails about, hey, you need to know about Masha. We didn't have time to catch up at the mixer, but I'm happy to give you a pitch tomorrow. I think.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Yeah, we had no money. We just take 600 bucks last left to go to United flight through Cincinnati. We went through secondary room and we ended up, sorry, Atlanta first time, Cincinnati was secondary room. And then we right to San Francisco and we had 90 days to just make it or break it. We knew that if we couldn't raise, we would go back to Italy broke and that was it.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “Every year we do the Follers Award. The Founders Award is 2555 stock to the best employer of the company. Why that? It's 255 days of struggle. It's just symbolic. But to remember seven years of struggle, every year is a retal.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “Opens a closet and there's like all the bananas filling off because it was one guy only eating huge bananas. You open other closet, there's another mattress with other guys living a second closet. This is real. We had no money. We just take 600 bucks last left to go to United Flight and we had 90 days to just make it or break it. We knew that if we couldn't raise, we wouldn't go back to Italy broke and that was it.”

    2025-10-21 · a16z Podcast · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source