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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