More About Martin
Martin Casado is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he leads the firm’s $1.25 billion infrastructure practice. He first joined the firm in 2016 and currently serves on the boards of ActionIQ, Ambient.ai, Astranis, Coactive, Convex, dbt Labs, DeepMap.ai, Defined Networking, Distributional, Fivetran, Ideogram, Imply, Kong, Material Security, Metronome, Netlify, Orbit, Parsec Gaming, Pindrop Security, Preset, Rasa, Tackle, Tecton, and Truffle. He previously served on the boards of Isovalent (acquired by Cisco) and Tabular (acquired by Databricks).
Martin was previously the cofounder and chief technology officer at Nicira, which was acquired by VMware for $1.26 billion in 2012. While at VMware, Martin was a fellow and served as a senior vice president and general manager of the networking and security business unit, which he scaled to a $600 million run-rate business by the time he left VMware in 2016.
Martin started his career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he worked on large-scale simulations for the Department of Defense before moving over to work with the intelligence community on networking and cybersecurity. These experiences inspired his work at Stanford where he created the software-defined networking (SDN) movement, leading to a new paradigm of network virtualization. While at Stanford he also cofounded Illuminics Systems, an IP analytics company, which was acquired by Quova Inc. in 2006.
For his work, Martin was awarded both the ACM Grace Murray Hopper award and the NEC C&C award, and he’s an inductee of the Lawrence Livermore Lab’s Entrepreneur’s Hall of Fame. He holds both a PhD and Masters degree in Computer Science from Stanford University.
Latest Content
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AI is poised to become more consequential than the internet, but federal regulators, influenced by Big Tech, appear intent on squashing its potential.
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Regulators influenced by the big companies create barriers to entry for "little tech" and curtail innovation.
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Senator Todd Young (R-IN) speaks with a16z General Partner Martin Casado about the importance of open innovation and American leadership in AI, and why we need to support AI research at all levels — from the classroom to the war room.
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Jennifer Li is being promoted to General Partner at a16z. She will continue to invest broadly within the enterprise space, focusing on infra.
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Artificial intelligence has taken the world by storm. But despite the hype around personalized avatars or podcast language translation, artificial intelligence is not only impacting the creative spheres; in fact it’s hard to find an industry that isn’t being touched by this technology – and defense of our country is far from excluded. In this episode, originally recorded in the heart of Washington DC this January during a16z’s American Dynamism Summit, a16z General Partner Martin Casado and a16z enterprise editor, Derrick Harris are joined by the first-ever CTO of the CIA, Nand Mulchandani.
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a16z's Martin Casado lays out the case for AI as a driving force behind incredible advancements in tech, creativity, and the human experience.
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Senator Todd Young speaks about the importance of open innovation and US leadership in AI, and why we need to support AI research.
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The release of the latest Ideogram.ai model is a massive step forward for image models. We're excited to lead their Series A.
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Tigris has built a globally available S3-compatible distributed object-storage service that makes the application developer’s job as simple as possible.
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Distributional is building a platform for robust and repeatable testing of AI and machine learning models so teams can push to prod confidently.
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Is it possible to construct a virtual society that authentically replicates human behavior? AI Town, a virtual town experiment where AI residents live, interact, and engage, provides valuable insights into the future of AI's believability and its interaction with humanity. In this panel discussion, Joon Park, the author of 'Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior,' and Martin Casado from a16z, discuss the influence and potential of Generative Agents, exploring their practical applications in the real world.
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The AI Revolution is here. In this episode, you’ll learn what the most important themes that some of the world’s most prominent AI builders – from OpenAI, Anthropic, CharacterAI, Roblox, and more – are paying attention to. You’ll hear discussion around the real-world impact of this revolution, on industries ranging from gaming to design, and the considerations around alignment along the way.
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The AI Revolution is here. In this episode, you’ll learn what the most important themes that some of the world’s most prominent AI builders – from OpenAI, Anthropic, CharacterAI, Roblox, and more – are paying attention to. You’ll hear about the economics of AI, broad vs specialized models, the importance of UX, and whether we can expect scaling laws to continue.
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To date, a handful of large companies have captured the value created by advances in AI. With generative AI, that’s changing.
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As CTO of OpenAI, Mira Murati oversaw the development and release of GPT-4 and ChatGPT. Here she tells Martin Casado the story behind the release of ChatGPT—and what it tells us about the future of AI and human-machine interactions.
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With generative AI, we’re already seeing use cases with orders-of-magnitude improvement in time, cost, and performance over previous AI waves.
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We’re thrilled to announce Anjney Midha will be joining a16z as a general partner to lead our growing AI efforts.
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Chatbots have been around for decades, but this time is different. Today’s bots are making inroads into our social lives.
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A very simple “getting started with AI” template for those who want to play with core technologies, but not have to think too much about tooling.
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This week, a16z’s own cofounder Marc Andreessen published a nearly 7,000-word article that aimed to dispel fears over AI's risks to our humanity – both real and imagined. Instead, Marc elaborates on how AI can "make everything we care about better." In this timely one-on-one conversation with a16z General Partner Martin Casado, Marc discusses how this technology will maximize human potential, why the future of AI should be decided by the free market, and most importantly, why AI won’t destroy the world. In fact, it may save it. Read Marc’s full article “Why AI Will Save the World” here: https://a16z.com/2023/06/06/ai-will-save-the-world/
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Composable customer data platforms are taking advantage of a shift in data infrastructure and embracing a “warehouse-first” architecture.
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The generative AI boom is compute-bound and, as a result, a predominant factor driving the industry is simply the cost of training and inference.
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Transactional databases have long been the most critical component of application design. Why? Because a steadfast database is generally the ultimate enforcement point for correctness in a messy, distributed world. Witho...
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Understanding what’s in an image — one of the simplest cognitive tasks for most humans — is a stubbornly difficult problem for artificial intelligence systems to solve.
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We're starting to see the very early stages of a tech stack emerge in generative artificial intelligence (AI). Hundreds of new startups are rushing into the market to develop foundation models, build AI-native apps, and...
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Understanding how to build a company in the face of a new, immature, or non-existent market is a topic startups should obsess about.
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Why AI models will replace artists long before they'll replace programmers
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Big data’s roots are in the hyperscalers. As a result, most tooling we use for analytics today has been built around a scale-out approach where performance is sacrificed for the ability to handle enormous amounts of data...
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In this episode from October 2021, Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Technologies and one of the longest serving founder-CEOs in the technology industry, joins a16z general partner Martin Casado, a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen, and host Sonal Choksi on the occasion of Michael’s book, Play Nice to Win: A CEO’s Journey from Founder to Leader. There are lots of challenges in being public while trying to innovate, and limits to being a private company as well; but it's rare to see a company go public then private then back to public again. As is the case with Dell Technologies, one of the largest tech companies -- which went private 2012-2013 and then also pulled off one of the most epic mergers of all time with Dell + EMC + VMWare 2015-2016 (and which we wrote about here at the time). Is there a method to the madness? How does one not just start, but keep, and transform, their company and business? Michael, Marc, Martin and Sonal debate these questions, as well as the impact of the cloud wars, how innovation happens when a company is private and when its public (something Michael knows well, having taken Dell public to private to back to public again), whether you can actually play nice to win as a leader, and more.
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We’re very excited to announce that we’re leading the series B for Fly.io. Fly is one of the fastest-growing core infrastructure companies we have ever seen. And it’s worth understanding why.
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Vertical clouds are on the rise, as traditional clouds give way to specialization.
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Gross margins–which are essentially a company’s revenue from products and services minus the costs to deliver those products and services to customers–are one of the most important financial metrics for any startup and growing business. And yet, figuring out what goes into the “cost” for delivering products and services is not as simple as it may sound, particularly for high-growth software businesses that might use emerging business models or be leveraging new technology. In this episode from June 2020, a16z general partners Martin Casado, David George, and Sarah Wang talk all things gross margins, from early to late stage. Why do gross margins matter? When do they matter during a company’s growth? And how do you use them to plan for the future? The conversation ranges from the nuances of and strategy for calculating margins with things like cloud costs, freemium users, or implementation costs, to the impact margins can have on valuations.
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Distributed systems are hard to build. Really hard. It's one of the few aspects of computer science that you can't hide with a thin layer of software. However, as applications scale, distribution becomes a necessity. It...
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There are people in the industry who seem to be everywhere you look. Zane Lackey has always been one of those people. He's perhaps most well known as the cofounder and CSO of Signal Sciences, which was acquired by Fastly...
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I was recently sitting in a board meeting of a successful SaaS company when the conversation turned to the slipping product release date. The problem was that the billing system wasn't going to be finished in time. On th...
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Today we’re talking about the mindsets and frameworks founders should know about when navigating the mergers and acquisitions or M&A process, both before and after – including how to think about the pricing dynamics, factors that go into the decision-making process, and what to expect from the integration once the deal is done. A16z editorial partner Zoran Basich recently talked to two a16z experts here to give us their big-picture view of the most important things to know – for founders seeking to acquire companies and how they might think about it, or those considering selling a company, or just those deciding to merge with an acquirer. Blake Kim is a partner on our Enterprise Network team and a former investment banker who works with companies on strategic partnerships; he also recently co-wrote a post on Future outlining all the different exit options and considerations for companies. And general partner Martin Casado discusses common M&A issues and shares his experiences both as observer and participant – including the challenges of integration, which he saw from the inside with Nicira, which he cofounded and was acquired by VMware for $1.26 billion in 2012, and where he remained for years to lead its networking and security business unit. They start the discussion by outlining the frameworks for understanding M&A dynamics, including the “kingmaking dynamic” and the difference between “selling your company” and “getting acquired.”
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In the summer of 2011, a masked intruder managed to open a locked door of Nicira, the startup I co-founded, walk directly to the desk of a well known engineer, passing many others on the way, grab a server, and leave. Th...
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Innovation in the data center has been constrained by the traditional model of suppliers providing fixed-function chips that limit how much the biggest data center operators can differentiate. But programmable chips have emerged that allow these companies to not only increase performance, but innovate throughout the pipeline, from operating system to networking interface to user application. This is a major trend among “hyperscalers,” which are some of the world’s most well known companies running massive data centers with tens of thousands of servers. We’re talking about companies like Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Alibaba, Tencent. To talk about the trends in data centers and how software may be “eating the world of the data center,” we talked this summer to two experts. Martin Casado is an a16z general partner focused on enterprise investing. Before that he was a pioneer in the software-defined networking movement and the cofounder of Nicira, which was acquired by VMWare. (Martin has written frequently on infrastructure and data-center issues and has appeared on many a16z podcasts on these topics.) He’s joined by Nick McKeown, a Stanford professor of computer science who has founded multiple companies (and was Martin’s cofounder at Nicira) and has worked with hyperscalers to innovate within their data centers. After this podcast was recorded, Nick was appointed Senior Vice President and General Manager of a new Intel organization, the Network and Edge Group. The podcast begins with Nick, talking about the sheer scale of data-center traffic.
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At its core, information security has always been about protecting secrets. From Mary Queen of Scots using one way ciphers to protect her communications, to Navajo Code Talkers using their native language, the goal has a...
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Build is one of the most foundational tools for software engineering. Traditionally, it is the step in software development that takes the files written by engineers and compiles them into machine runnable code, but buil...
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It's rare to see a company go public then private then back to public again, as Dell Technologies did -- and which also pulled off one of the most epic mergers of all time with Dell + EMC + VMWare. How does one not just start, but keep -- and transform -- a company and business, especially as it adapts to broader, underlying tech platform shifts like demise of PC, end of cloud, cloud wars, and much more? This is really a story about innovation: who decides, who judges, who does it, and where.
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Data systems have long involved a tradeoff between flexibility and ease of use.
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In today's episode we’re talking about the latest developments and trends in cybercrime – including the trends of ransomware, and, attacks on physical infrastructure.
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The pressure the cloud puts on margins can start to outweigh the benefits you scale and growth slows. Understand how much market cap is being suppressed by the cloud to help inform the decision-making framework on managing infrastructure as companies scale.
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Given recent news and discussions around the Endless Frontiers Act, we re-released this episode about that and innovation funding/ R&D.
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These frameworks help map the user journey to figure out the right product tiers, how to differentiate them, and how to price them.
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The most significant transformation in IT infrastructure over the last few decades, and the largest opportunity for enterprise companies I’ve seen in my lifetime, has been the move to cloud. It encompasses the shift of t...
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Amazon just announced this week that its founder and CEO Jeff Bezos "will transition to the role of Executive Chair in the third quarter of 2021 and [CEO of Amazon Web Services] Andy Jassy will become Chief Executive Officer at that time." So in this episode of 16 Minutes — our show where we talk about tech trends in the headlines, what's hype/ what's real, and where we are on the long arc of innovation — we talk not just about this news, but what it signals regarding cloud computing as well as CEO transitions in general.
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It’s not very often you see a demo that you think about for years. And yet that was the case with Parsec, the leading product for remotely accessing graphics intensive and latency sensitive applications from anywhere. I...
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As companies evolve -- especially from product to sales to scaling operations -- so must the leaders. But can the same person transition across all these phases? When and when not; what are the qualities, criteria, and tradeoffs to be made? Two enterprise startup CTOs share a glimpse into their journeys on the question of to CEO or not to CEO; managing their psychology and tactics for managing transitions; and much more.
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Great communities make great companies, and community-building is now part of a broader shift in B2B businesses towards bottom-up growth. As part of that shift, companies are relying on communities as a key method for gr...
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Lakes v. warehouses, analytics v. AI/ML, SQL v. everything else... As the technical capabilities of data lakes and data warehouses converge, are the separate tools and teams that run AI/ML and analytics converging as well?
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I am very excited to announce our partnership with Isovalent in their journey to redefine networking and security. Isovalent is the driving force behind both eBPF and Cilium, projects in Linux that provide a software net...
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Just having data is not enough: it takes an entire system of tools and technology to extract value from data. a hallway style conversation between Ali Ghodsi, CEO and Founder of Databricks, and a16z general partner Martin Casado explore the evolution of data architectures.
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As an industry, we’ve gotten exceptionally good at building large, complex software systems. We’re now starting to see the rise of massive, complex systems built around data – where the primary business value of the syst...