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, Braintrust, Coactive, Convex, Cursor, dbt Labs, Distributional, Fivetran, Ideogram, Imply, Kong, Material Security, Metronome, Netlify, Pindrop Security, Preset, Tackle, Tecton, Truffle, and World Labs. He previously served on the boards of DeepMap.ai (acquired by NVIDIA), Isovalent (acquired by Cisco), Orbit (acquired by Postman), Parsec Gaming (acquired by Unity), Tabular (acquired by Databricks) and Yubico (IPO $YUBICO).
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 helped pioneer the software-defined networking (SDN) movement. While at Stanford he also co founded 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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For as long as software has existed, we’ve treated code as something carefully crafted by engineers: designed, typed out line by line, and managed in repositories and workflows built entirely for humans. That view is alr...
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China has rapidly surpassed global competitors in robotics, building a complete supply chain and innovation ecosystem that positions it as the emerging superpower in physical AI. Without urgent regulatory reform and allied industrial coordination, the United States risks losing its ability to compete in the defining technological and strategic race of the century.
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Phota Labs raises a $5.6M seed round led by a16z to create generative AI that ensures every photo retains both the likeness of the person and truth of the moment.
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Why common criticisms about AI app margins misses the mark.
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Metronome CEO Scott Woody unpacks how AI is fundamentally changing the value proposition of SaaS, spurring a shift to usage-based pricing.
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What if the next leap in artificial intelligence isn’t about better language—but better understanding of space?
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AI’s breakout moment is here - but where is the real value accruing, and what’s just hype?
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Convex cofounder and Chief Scientist Sujay Jayakar and a16z General Partner Martin Casado discuss the real challenges of autonomous software development and why robust evals — and guardrails like type safety — matter more than ever.
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AI is reshaping web development. At the center is agent experience (AX), a new paradigm where AI agents open new capabilities in web design and experience.
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Two words have caught the Internet by storm. DeepSeek.
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Martin Casado and Alan Nichol discuss how to build reliable AI agents and chatbots — from early NLP approaches to integrating LLMs with business logic.
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There actually is a reasonable policy position on AI regulation: focus on marginal risk and apply our regulatory energy there.
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WaveForms AI is training an end-to-end audio language model with the goal of solving the speech Turing test — an AI that feels like talking to a human.
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Resend is transforming how businesses communicate with their customers, and setting new standards for the developer experience around email sending.
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Pedro Domingos joins Martin Casado to discuss the state of AI, whether we're really on a path toward AGI, and the value of expressing unpopular opinions.
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Deepfakes—AI-generated fake videos and voices—have become a widespread concern across politics, social media, and more. As they become easier to create, the threat grows. But so do the tools to detect them.
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Braintrust is a devtool platform for any product effort — from simple apps to sophisticated products — based around large language models.
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Fei-Fei Li and Justin Johnson are pioneers in AI. While the world has only recently witnessed a surge in consumer AI, our guests have long been laying the groundwork for innovations that are transforming industries today...
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Fei-Fei Li and are team of experts at World Labs are building a spatial intelligence model that can generate 3D worlds that users can interact with.
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Cursor is a fork of VS Code that’s heavily customized for AI-assisted programming, with loads of features designed to integrate AI into developer workflows.
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Martin Casado and Ion Stoica argue that open-source models will power innovation without compromising security.
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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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生成AIの領域で、ごく初期段階の技術スタックが生まれている。無数のスタートアップがこの市場に押し寄せ、基礎モデルの開発、AIネイティブのアプリケーション開発、そして立ち上げに必要なインフラ／ツール提供を行っている。
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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...