YouSaid · the spoken record

Martin Casado

lines on the record: 104
first: 2025-12-30
most recent: 2025-12-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And it probably will, but like, I don't think we're anywhere close. I just think people forgot what a good bubble looks like. They're not a lot of fun, man.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, people were saying it right. And then, and they actually had really legitimate concerns. You had WorldCom, which had $40 billion in debt, which is super levered. It was like a single supplier that was underlying all of this stuff. You know, you could IPO a company with basically no revenue, very little revenue. Many of these companies, these crazy value pieces, had no money. Like they were making nothing, right? And so there was these very legitimate concerns. And none of those really exist today, right? I mean, you know, the companies that are bankrolling a lot of the infrastructure have hundreds of billions of dollars on the balance sheet. You know, Google, Meta, Microsoft. OpenAI has real revenue. Cursor has real revenue. And the valuations aren't totally out of whack with the revenue. So yes, markets will oscillate for sure. And so they'll go up and down and you'll have pullbacks or whatever. But I don't think we're anywhere close to like a, you know, late 90s level bubble. No, I think that could come. And, you know, listen, when like.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think people forget what a bubble looks like. I mean, every time valuations go up, people say bubble. I mean, you know, but like, listen, I mean, a bubble, a bubble is like when you get into a car and the taxi driver is giving you stock tips. Like that's a bubble. I mean, remember all of the crazy excesses and all the crazy blow-ups. It's totally, totally different. So, I mean, this feels a lot like early 96. And the big difference is then companies weren't even making money and it lasted so much. By the way, people were decrying bubble in 97. Yeah.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Optimism and chaos in every sector that you look at. And then it feels to me that things got a bit institutionalized, which is just kind of like another day to do business for the last 20 years. Now, I feel again now you have a lot of the same type of energy, which is like, I mean, you know, the billboards we've had for a very long time. But again, you've got like these kind of cultural movements that follow it. And, you know, all the founders and all the investigating going on. So I just feel like it has the same level of energy that we had in the late 90s.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Python conference was going on, and everybody would show up, and all these companies getting created, and it was just, it was just.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the web was just starting, and you can feel this excitement. And then by the time I graduated, I mean, I went to Northern Arizona University. It was a school. My father was a professor in Fikstaff, Arizona, and even in this small mountain school, we had students that were graduating, getting these crazy jobs as programmers all over the nation. And they were being actively recruited. So like there was just kind of all of this excitement. And then when I would go to the Bay Area, you know, I would kind of get kind of caught up in all the founderitis that was going on. And you had everything, you had all the parties. You had all, you know, I remember the first time I landed in Silicon Valley. I drove down the 101. I'm like, all these billboards are talking to me, right? Yeah, yeah. You know, there was just this energy and it was in the streets and you, you know, you'd have like Linux conference and.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so let's see. I turned 20 in 96 and I, you know, I was interning at Livermore, probably starting, I don't remember it was 97 or 98. But, you know, so I was going back and forth for a few years. And then I, you know, I worked full-time in Livermore in 2000. And I just remember this kind of Slow boil that erupted during that time. Like when I started. Computer science as an undergraduate. It was as to kind of in a little bit of a slump.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just feel like X is like, it's just totally chaotic, right? There's some tweets I'm like, this is so deep and pithy. And ignores another one. It's like this kind of pointless thing. And so in a way, again, just like looking at the market as opposed to the company, I think that tweets are much more indicative of the people receiving it than the person actually. Tweet”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've done tons of non consensus stuff. I'm just saying that if you don't consider this, it's dangerous. And so often we don't talk about that. So that was the genesis, which is a totally banal tweet from a very obvious place.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I work with a large team of investors, and I'm often in the position of providing guidance. And if you're not considering follow on capital, then you're not fully evaluating the opportunity set. And I've found that the cliche VC aphorism rulebook is like everything must be alpha and this and that. So I just thought there's plenty of people talking about, you know, finding the diamond in the rough. There's plenty of people that are talking about finding the white space. But like there's this another side to it that isn't as represented, which is as you go later and later stages, VC's become more and more consensus driven. And that's exactly because they're putting more money in and they need more predictability. It follows naturally out of the system. So in a way, this is the most banal tweet you could ever imagine. It's just, it's actually totally obvious. I'm not saying I can say.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thought deeply about the tweet because it's fairly innocuous thing. I thought it was just so obvious. I was like, I'll say some obvious thing on a Sunday morning, and it just turns out to have been a lightning rod.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I think for there's this sense outside of VC that VCs are just pattern matching and add no value. And so for those people, it was a confirmation. And so they're like, oh, I know VC is just consensus of S, you know, and now Martinez disacking it, which I totally wasn't, but we can get into that. And then for the investors, it was like an attack on their originality, which is like, I don't do that. I'm a consensus. You had many junior investors who don't know what they're talking about that they kind of said a bunch of random stuff. But he had some very senior investors that were like, oh, I do all these non-consensus bets and like, whatever, whatever. So everybody found some reason to take umbrage for, by the way, which was like, I hadn't even.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think he just managed to piss everybody off I think there's like every constituency found a reason to hate it, right? And so.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get him on the podcast. I don't know if he's ever done that. Yeah, that'd be great. You should. I mean, yeah, why not? Yeah. That's a great thought.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When Hocktown acquires a company, even something like the size of a VMware, like the M&A committee is Octan. The integration committee is Hock Tan. And the guy is just legendary. I'm like, how hard he works, how he runs his meetings. He knows everything about his business. He knows all of the numbers. And what's interesting, he's a business guy. He's not a technologist nor a product guy. But he's stayed away from the limelight and, you know, to his credit, like, you know, he just focuses on the business. But there's a lot we can all learn from what he has done and what he's going to do. I really do think he's probably the most iconic CEO right now.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll make a stronger form to say. I think Hock Ten may be the best. Outside of maybe Jensen and a handful of others, he may be the best CEO the industry has ever seen in infrastructure. He's just unbelievable. You know, somebody should do the Hock Tan book or overview or portfolio or focus piece or whatever. The employee retention is unbelievable. He's managed to do these incredibly complex acquisitions. And I will say, so, you know, normally when you buy a company, any company at all, like the team that you integrate the acquiring company into is even you've got all these kind of lawyers and corp dev and BizDev and HR people running around. You've got this entire committee for integration.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, 100%. I mean, you just have to be comfortable knowing that even if a company looks like the leader now, anything can happen. Like they could get acquired the next day for an acquire that they decide to do. A new company can show up that didn't exist before. Anything could have, there could be a platform shift, et cetera. And so the entire goal is can you over a set of investments beat the upper quartile of the other venture capital firms? That is the goal and you take the losses along the way.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enumerate the companies that are out there and then doing the analysis to determine who is in the lead and who is not. And then you're right at the end of the day, you just kind of be like, okay, I mean, we did all of this work and we think that you can make this argument here. And we get it wrong a lot, right? There's nobody can predict the future.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just learn that of your selling into a market that's shrinking, life sucks, even if it's a huge market, if it's a huge, huge market, let's say switching and routing is this huge market. But if it's only growing 3% or as flat or is shrinking, you know, you're dealing with budgets that are contracting, people that are losing their jobs, like all of the incumbents are going to be fighting for their lives. It just, you know, so I'm very sensitive to markets that are growing versus shrinking, you know, ability to hire, ability to fundraise. I mean, all of these things go. I mean, the final memos for investments tend to be fairly comprehensive. And so all of this also necessarily requires us to do a lot of work before companies are fundraising. And so”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's the part of the job where it's an underdetermined system, right? There's way more variables than equations than we just do our best. And our analysis is multifarious, right? Like, I don't think as investors and probably fueled by things like X, we like to reduce VC to like here are these five things, here's our basic thesis, and the reality is most investment decisions take a lot of work. You consider an awful lot of things. And then at the very end, you kind of look at it and you make a judgment on that. So what are the things we look at? Like I mentioned, Founder Market Bit is very important. Tactical approach. Is there important? The market itself, to be is incredibly important.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bring it to the rest of the world. You know, I'm a very product focused investor. And so I just tend to resonate with product focused founders that see the world in terms of what is the product we're going to create and how am I going to insert that into the market as opposed to pure technologists, which don't care about that and pure salespeople, which also don't care about that, right? So I'm a very product focused CEO. But I will say my umbrella answer, my macro answer to you is almost all questions I ask about companies actually stem from the market I'm in.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a great question. So, if there's one thing that has shifted in me about how I think about investing and how I think about companies I used to think from company out, right? So I'll look at the company. I'm like, the founder is great. The product is great. The technology is great. The go to market is great. I've stopped that. Now I think only from markets in. The reality is the market creates the company in most cases, not the other way around. And so I always start with like, what is the market? And then I ask the question, is this the right founder for this market? The answer to your question of like, is this a great founder or not founder? I don't think that there's a single answer. It strongly, strongly depends on what they're sending out to do. Now, I do weight a lot of things. I do weight things like earned knowledge. Like, have you earned the knowledge to be in this market based on your experiences in the past? Like, were you at the bowels of Uber building out their storage system?”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if it's too early, we wait. And if we determine that when we think as the leader, then we try and make the investment. The thing about this approach is A, it kind of removes us from like there's so many aphorisms on investing. Like this is a great founder and the founder has grit. And, you know, like all of these things. But at the end of the day, all of that you have to kind of filter through yourself and your team. And we're all very biased. And none of it can systematize where if you're simply asking the question, A is this legit space and B is just the best company in the space. This is something you could actually throw work on. And it's not. It's clearly not perfect. And in fact, you'll be wrong, a lot of the time. But I would submit that if you invest in this way, you will be right in a way that's better than market norm.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I've kind of decided I just need to remove, we as investors need to remove ourselves from predicting the future, which is a funny thing because we're supposed to be predicting the future. I think that's a mistake. And so our approach is very straightforward. We believe that the founder network, the founders themselves are smarter than customers. They see the future, not us. They're definitely smarter than investors. And so if there are three or four very good founders that are working on a space, we just assume that space is good because A, their founders, B, they're doing the opportunity cost of doing it. You know, they're risking their time, you know, their family's wealth in order to do this. And so to first order, we just say, okay, what are interesting spaces? And there's, you know, there's a whole methodology we used to do that. And if there's an interesting space, the next question we ask is, who is the leader in that space? And is it too early to determine?”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's many great folks out there. So, this is just our approach. It's definitely not the only approach to being successful.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Any given company to that market, you have to have also that same understanding. I think it's a great point about, listen, I think some of the best infrastructure investors ever were not classically technical, like Mike Volpe is phenomenal. Doglione is phenomenal. Fented is phenomenal. These are the greats. And I think that a lot of this is because we have almost a generational shift in the industry where before it was such a kind of obscure knowledge, understanding the people and the networks and where they came from was critically important. I think now it's matured to the point that you actually can't take a bit more of a systemic knowledge based on the fundamentals in the industry rather than those. And so I think this is more of a testament to the maturity and the size of the market than us as investors. And I will also say many of the top investors right now in infrastructure are non-technical and they're phenomenal.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Understanding and infrastructure, if you don't have a product background, which by the way is way more important than the technical background. If you don't have a product background, you can evaluate the market. And then if, you know, in infrastructure, you don't have some technical basis. I don't even think you can have the conversations that are important. And then, of course, to map.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think actually the bigger priority for hiring on our team is actually product experience, especially in an infrastructure enterprise and less pure technical prowess. Like nearly everybody on the team has either built a company or run a product team. There's very few that were like low-level engineer or low-level researcher. And so I would say that is the primary focus. And the reason is because we invest somewhere between the seed, you know, let's call it like an early seed. And often you can't judge a company purely by financial metrics, but often there's enough to evaluate. So it isn't just a bet on the founder. And so what are you left with? If that's the case, what you're left with is market understanding. And I just think it's very tough to do market.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The roughest cut is if the buyer or user is technical, it is infrastructure. So it is the stuff to build the stuff. Like apps are built on infrastructure. Now, and in particular, it's computer science infrastructure, right? So like you could say infrastructure is construction and rebar and concrete. This is computer science infrastructure used to build software. And so it's the traditional compute network, storage, security, dev tools, frameworks, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, if there's a piece of software and the user of the buyer is in marketing or in sales or in a flooring shop or in a veterinarian, that's not us. That's apps. For us, all of the consumers, whether they're an admin type, a developer, that's infrastructure.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In some ways, and I've said this before. Kind of this historical quirk that venture capital firms have the same partner model as like a legal firm or a dentist office or a doctor's office, which is this partnership model where everybody's kind of equal, et cetera. And it made sense when the market was a thousandth the size. Like if you think about like when we create venture capital from the market was so small, but it's grown now and it's professionalized as it's matured a lot. And so now firms have to answer the question, so how do you scale deploying money? How do you scale AUM? How do you scale decisions? How do you deal with conflicts, et cetera? So that's been the prime motivator that has changed many of the shifts that we've made at A16Z.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it was very, very different. So now all of that's different, right? Like GPs are specialized. We have multiple funds. We have a clear progression ladder of investing partners. We're 600, some olive people, maybe more. We invest in all sorts of different levels. There's a lot of process and methodology. And so I would say the primary motivator for all of the change. Is the question How do you scale venture capital?”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, it's totally different. I think it was the ninth general partner. You may want to check on it. It was like the ninth. And when I joined. 70 people at the firm. On Mondays, we can all sit around the same table. Everybody was kind of a generalist. You know, we didn't have a notion of a more senior investor below the GP ranks. Like we didn't have any sort of progression ladder. It was actually us. It was a specific. Tenant of the firm that you'd have relatively junior, we call them deal partners, DPs, and they would only stay for two to four years. And the idea was that you get more network that comes in, they're quite relevant. And then also you kind of spread the A6C network as they go join other firms.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And at the time, software was going through a pricing change like it is today. So it was going from kind of on-prem perpetual to recurring. And this had massive impacts in how you comp your sales team had massive impacts on how you do go to market and massive impacts on what numbers meant to be a healthy business. And so he just walked through all of that from this very single discussion. And just so you know, we're seeing the same shift now as we go from basically. Recurring license to usage based billings. And so even this conversation I had in 2009 is still relevant today and I draw from it. So I think this is a good example of. This deep insight that he was able to portray from his operational knowledge.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, a bunch of them. I mean, one of them is, you know, I was talking about pricing. By the way, anybody who works with me is going to realize that like half of what I say just steal from Ben. Because I say what I'm about to tell you, I tell people all the time, but it's so true. And so I was asking a question about pricing. And he says, I just want you to know this is the single most important decision you'll make in the history of the company, one decision. And really, for your net worth as a human being, this is the most important decision. And let me describe why. Well, you know, you own a bunch of the company. The valuation of the company is going to come down to growth and margins. Growth and margins, the single most important decision on what impacts that is going to be pricing. And so everybody views pricing totally, glibly, or they kind of make it up or they're ad hoc, but they don't understand how important that single decision is towards the health and ultimate valuation of the business. And then he actually broke all of that.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next steps, and one thing people, I think, don't appreciate about Mark and Ben is how good of operators they are. And so they took it very seriously. That was pretty streamlined.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think like for the board member, you're never not like the founder that they weren't for. And I said, hey, listen, Mark, you know, I'm interested next.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, he was a guy. I mean, he was so great. I actually learned more from him in that 45 minute meetings than any other advisor I talked to up to that point, which had been years. I mean, it was the most eye-opening thing ever. And so he said, listen, we'd love to Angel Invest. Mark and I are trying to figure out what we're going to do. They did some angel investing. And when they started the firm, then we went and pitched and we raised, I mean, at the time we called it a series B, but it was really a series A from them. And so, you know, we kind of had like a history before Ben joined the board. And so, you know, listen, I built the company under his guidance. It was very critical to basically every aspect of it. And so when I was thinking about what to do next, actually, I reached out to Mark and I actually felt it would be better to reach out to Mark because Ben was on my board. And so that relationship is, you know, it's kind of like your PhD advisor. You're never not their student.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's kind of a funny state. It's actually not a super public story. It's kind of a funny story. So Mark and Ben invested in Nisira's angel investors. This is before the fund existed to begin with. And actually, the way that I met Ben was Andy Ratcliffe was on my board. So Andy Ratcliffe is the famous benchmark partner. He was a professor at Stanford. And I was looking for a CEO because I was a very technical CTO kind of co-founder. I didn't know anything about enterprise sales. And he said, you know, I know this guy. He's just coming out of HP. He saw the company. His name is Ben Horowitz. And so I actually met Ben Horowitz to interview him for a CEO. And you know what he told me? Said, I'm too rich. You're like, all right, this guy's not”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will never listen, I had a small taste of politics last year when I thought that there was nobody defending AI from a policy standpoint. Never realized I will never, ever, ever, ever go into politics, man. As far as I can tell, everybody just lies to each other all the time. It is not for me. It”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A product or lines of code. And then I zoomed out a little bit in the abstraction was one company. And then when you joined a firm, you zoom out a little bit more, and then the abstraction is a company. And you actually see the experiment in parallel. And I will tell you, like from this vantage point, even though I had done two companies, I learned so much more than I ever would have if I would have done another company. So for me, it was the right decision.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Write papers, write code, engineer, you know, poorly dressed PhD student that knew nothing about business and nothing about anything. And it really was, that's what I did. I mean, I wrote a lot of papers. I built a lot of systems and I love that. And then my 30s, basically almost to the day. I mean, it was this journey, which is like building products, building a business, building a team, and doing that globally. And I did think to myself, like, you know, I'm so enamored with technology and I'm so enamored with startups and I love innovation. You know, you ask yourself, okay, so what do you do next, right? And I like being close to like where things are being created. And so that means that you get involved in the startup ecosystem. But do I want to spend another 10 years doing a journey that I've already done, or do I want to zoom up one more level? And so I almost feel like my 20s, it was like the abstraction was.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But one thing that's important is I started the research for this in probably 2005 and 2006. And so by the time, you know, I was at VMware for three years, it'd already been 10 years. So we got acquired by 2012. So it had already been 10 to 11 years that I'd been working on the exactly the same thing. And so I've just found that my career goes in kind of decade epochs, right? So in my 20s, I was”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I learned easily as much at VMware than I did in the startup, and it was a phenomenal experience. And, you know, it's one thing to do a startup and to do early founder sales and to build a team. It's an entirely different thing to get a business to a billion globally with all the partners, and especially within a large organization where you're overlaying with kind of an existing core team and other product teams, et cetera. I mean, it was a great experience”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was so hard because, you know, I mean, especially because this is when Sequoia had released their slide deck, Rest in Peace Good Times. Everybody was riffing their companies. I mean, the economy was tense. It was very, very tough. And part of it was honestly just responsibility. I was just like, I condensed all my friends to join this company. And I would feel like such an asshole if I just like left. That was part of it. And another part of it is I just felt like there was work to be done that I hadn't finished. And I just of the temperament that if I start something and I don't finish it, it'll bug me forever. And so I kind of didn't want to face myself in 10 years. But I'll tell you, when I made the decision, I called my mom and she said, Martine, you're an idiot. For what it's worth, I was pretty alone in the decision. Wow.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know this fork in the road? Like, do you do this company in the worst economic environment since the Great Depression, or do I go be an academic? And it forced me to really decide what I wanted to do. And I decided to do the company.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I actually didn't drop out. I finished my PhD. So I think it was kind of funny. So the adage is kind of interesting. The adage at the time was the only way to be a successful founder is you have to drop out of your PhD, right? Because Sergei and Larry Page were in the floor above where I was in Gates. And almost all of the successful founders at the time were PhD dropouts where I had actually completed. So no, no, I actually didn't plan to be a founder at all. I actually had a faculty offer at Cornell at the time and we're talking 2007 now. So my plan was, you know, I did this PhD work. I did a startup previously. It was a very small thing. It was called Illuminix Systems, which, you know, instead of raising money, we ended up”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, AI makes that a lot easier. I would almost certainly not be programming like I do now if it wasn't for AI, for sure.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I've never been a big gamer as far as playing games, but I've always loved creating games. And I still do. That's what I do in evenings now. So I love music. I love narratives. I love programming. And I love games. And so actually, if you track some of the, I mean, this is like not a great word. This is all hobby work. But, you know, I worked with Yoko on AITown. I've recreated a bunch of old 8-bit games using AI. And so it's actually still a big passion of mine. But again, I'm not a big gamer. I don't like to sit down and play games.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is so funny. So, I worked. The company probably doesn't exist anymore, but I worked with a, it was a contract outfit called Creative Carnage, and they worked with the budget division of, I think it was either acclaimer accolade, and it was called head games. And I think we have the great distinction of having had the games with the lowest ever score on PC Gamer. So they would do games. They would do games like, I remember there was like extreme paint brawl, a mountain biking game, like a skydiving game. And so this was like a very early days of like 3D engines. And we didn't quite understand the game mechanics. And so it was like a super budget, you know, game shot. But these were games that you go to Walmart and buy. I mean, they were very legitimate games. My shady entree into this.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Writing game engines for video games. So that was kind of, you know, so back in the 90s, you only really got into computers if you wanted to hack or make video games. That was it. I mean, it wasn't what it is now. And I kind of took the video game route. And so I did a lot of game development. And in college, I did a lot of engine development. And so what I was interested in was things like 3D engines and game physics and game mechanics. And that pushed me towards computational physics, like simulation. I mean, so the game industry is a very tough industry to do. And I was actually quite interested in science. I was quite interested in physics. And so that pushed me towards the national labs. And so, yeah, so my first job was doing basically computational physics, working on these large simulations at Lawrence Livermore National Labs. And I started interning in 97, 98 time frame. And then I took a full-time role in 2000.”
2025-12-30 · a16z Podcast · Why a16z's Martin Casado Believes the AI Boom Still Has Years to Run · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source