Aghi Marietti, Co-founder & CEO of Kong, on Scaling an Open Core Offering for the Enterprise

Aghi Marietti is an inventor, technology entrepreneur and angel investor. As the CEO and Co-founder of Kong — the API company on a mission to intelligently broker information across all services — he drives the company’s vision, strategy and long-term growth. Prior to Kong, he was the CEO and Co-founder of Mashape, the largest API marketplace, which was acquired by RapidAPI in 2017. Before that, he founded MemboxX, the first European cloud service for storing documents and sensitive personal data. Augusto holds a B.S. in Economics from the Catholic University of Milan. He is the lead inventor on five U.S. patents and an angel investor in more than 10 startups.

In this episode, we learn from Aghi how he and his Co-founder & CTO Marco Palladino decided to move to an open core model. Kong Inc. was born from the first API marketplace, previously known as Mashape. Today, Kong has 75k downloads for its open source API gateway and more than 40k community members. Aghi and Glenn discussed the changing face of the enterprise software market, and how selling developer tools has changed as developers have more control over the software they use, even within larger organizations. Aghi’s advice for founders: “We tend to overestimate what we can do in the short term and underestimate what we can do in the long term.” This episode was recorded live at Heavybit in San Francisco.