Martin Casado is a general partner at a16z, where he leads the firm’s $1.25 billion infrastructure practice. Martin has led investments in Cursor, dbt Labs, and Fivetran to name a few. Prior to joining a16z in 2016, he was the co-founder and CTO of Nicira, which was acquired by VMware for $1.26B. While at VMware, Martin was the SVP and GM of network and security, which he scaled to a $600 million run-rate business. 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.
We covered:
- What necessitates specialization
- The conflicts dynamic
- Infra vs app companies
- Importance of open source
- The only sin in VC
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Timestamps:
(0:00) Intro
(0:27) Importance of media for VC
(3:50) Evolution of a16z
(7:00) Specialization
(10:32) Value of distribution
(13:16) Staying power in infra
(19:49) The conflicts dynamic
(26:32) State of play in AI
(30:48) The future of coding
(34:58) Significance of open source
(39:48) Marc Andreessen’s leadership
(44:02) The only sin in VC
(48:37) Scaling a lot of board seats
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More on Martin:
https://a16z.com/author/martin-casado/
https://x.com/martin_casado
More on Jack:
https://www.altcap.com/
https://x.com/jaltma
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