Martin Casado
45 statements across 2 episodes · 15 bullish · 10 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Dec 6, 2022 by Martin Casado · said 19 times in 12 episodes since 2022 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Martin Casado's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Harry Stebbings (6), Aaron Katz (4), Andrew Ng (3), Jason Lemkin (2), Rory O'Driscoll (1), Miles Clements (1), Logan Bartlett (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 10 mentions in 7 episodes 1 per episode
- ClickHouse CEO: AI Margins Need to Improve | Revenue Concentration Should be a Concern
- Stripe's $8B OpenRouter Bet | Anthropic's First Profit & The Math Behind Reaching $600B in Revenue?
- The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Rejected It | The Four Bottlenecks in AI | Anj Midha · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- "Cursor is Dead" is Total BS: Here is Why | Miles Clements · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Anthropic Inference Costs Skyrocket |TikTok Deal Closes |The IPO Market:Wealthfront & EquipmentShare · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Anthropic’s $10B Raise | a16z’s $15B Fund: Is the Middle Dead in VC? | How OpenAI Could Go to Zero? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Alex Rampell: The Best Founders Materialise Capital, Customers & Labour | The Future of Venture · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 8 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
- AI Fund’s GP, Andrew Ng: LLMs as the Next Geopolitical Weapon & Do Margins Still Matter in AI? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Anthropic's $10B Round, Klarna's IPO, Inside a16z's 72 Deal Seed Investment Machine ft. Marc Benioff · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- SpaceX Valued at $800BN & Harvey Raises $160M at an $8BN Price & Netflix Acquires Warner Brothers · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20Product: Should We Kill the PM Role Entirely | How Does Product Design Change Most in a World of AI | How Do Monzo Build Product Today: What Works, What Does Not | Why Most Product Sucks and What Makes Truly Great Product
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
Everything said about Martin Casado, oldest first
Dec 6, 2022 bullish
Casado: Tech downturn will drive tourist VCs out of the industry
“We're at the tail end of a decade long bubble. So of course, you know, you've just got, you know, a bunch of people that just want to get the spoils. And of course you run into them the most because they're the most flamboyant. But I think with this downturn, …”
Dec 6, 2022 neutral
Casado denies doing billion-dollar Series B rounds or overpaying for deals
“I've never done any of these billion dollar bees. I've never done, you know, some strange non-competitive deal where it's an outsized price. Normally in any competitive deal that you've seen I'm almost always on the low end.”
Dec 6, 2022 negative
Dec 6, 2022
Dec 6, 2022 negative
Casado: Evaluating Early-Stage Startups in Isolation Is an Underdetermined Problem
“I used to have the hubris to believe that if a, of a company walked in, I could look at the company and I can determine if it's a good investment or not. And you think, well, of course you do. That's the job. And I've decided that's a totally underdetermined p…”
Dec 6, 2022
Casado: Venture investing suffers from a subconscious principal-agent career problem
“You need to realize that there's a real principal agent problem in investing. And it's not even conscious. It's like, if you have a team or whatever, people are going to do like subconsciously do what's best for their careers or whatever.”
Dec 6, 2022 positive
Casado calls Chris Dixon the world's most thoughtful investor
“Chris Dixon, who I actually think is probably the most thoughtful investor on the planet. I really do. And probably the smartest, I think the founder network. Is just more intuitive and smarter and more prescient than any other network.”
Dec 6, 2022 positive
Casado: Investor Alpha Comes from Comparing Startups Within Cohorts
“If I meet five companies, I can probably tell you which one of those five has a better chance than the others, not to any level of certainty, but like, there's a bit of alpha there. There's a bit of judgment there. So I think that's a much more determined prob…”
Dec 6, 2022 negative
Casado: Average startup board members are net neutral and lack PMF proximity
“I think the mean board member, the median, the average board member, you know, they, they're investors. They've seen a lot of stuff. They'll roll up their sleeves. They'll help, you know, recruit or whatever. But otherwise they're just not close enough to prod…”
Dec 6, 2022
Dec 6, 2022 negative
Casado: Thesis investing is flawed because market narratives are usually retrofitted
“A lot of investors talk about actually in the, a lot of investors talk about thesis. I don't think that's the right way to think about investing at all. I think it's just so crazy to come up with some story, which to your point is more retrofit. So I'm definit…”
Dec 6, 2022 bullish
Dec 6, 2022
Casado: Thorough market research is the only ungameable part of investing
“I think that the only thing you can't game in investing is the work. You can game anything else. You can game heat dynamics. You can game numbers. Like, you can game everything. You can just game it. But you can't game, like, somebody spending, doing the work,…”
Dec 6, 2022
Dec 6, 2022 negative
Casado: Operating background likely hurts venture capitalists more than it helps
“I don't know if operating helps or not. Like, I don't know if it helps you pick. I don't know if it helps you close. I don't know. Like, I don't know how to answer that. Probably not. It probably hurts more than helps.”
Dec 6, 2022 negative
Jul 28, 2025 positive
Jul 28, 2025 neutral
Casado: The AI Playbook Is Open-Sourcing Small Models While Keeping Advanced Closed
“The standard model of open sourcing AI is you open source the smaller model and you keep the more capable model closed source. And it's a way that you get distribution and ran brand recognition, but you don't actually erode your business.”
Jul 28, 2025 positive
Jul 28, 2025 neutral
Casado: AI won't speed up infrastructure dev, but will cut bugs
“So for infrastructure, I think it's quite unlikely that AI will really help in like speed that up because it comes down to something that the developer has to decide on, has to articulate the trade-offs. But I do think it could really help with the development…”
Jul 28, 2025 bullish
Casado: Non-generalizing AI scaling creates room for specialized models
“In this phase of model scaling, a lot of the approaches to scaling don't generalize. So if I want to be much better at like coding, I may not be so good at something else. This gives a ton of room for the application developers to build their own models that s…”
Jul 28, 2025 bullish
Jul 28, 2025
Casado: Company diligence is far more reliable than predicting market adoption
“And so, I actually don't believe You can predict the future of technology adoption. It's a very tough thing, right? I mean, you don't know what a big company is going to do, can wipe out an entire market. You don't know what innovation will wipe out entire mar…”
Jul 28, 2025
Jul 28, 2025 bearish
Casado: Vertical SaaS Tech Is Simple CRUD Where The Team Doesn't Matter
“Every time I look at vertical SAS, I'm like, why do we even care about the technical team? It's fucking crud, man. It's like, crud is like create, you know, read, update, delete. It's like, they all do the same thing. They all just kind of look like a web app.…”
Jul 28, 2025 neutral
Jul 28, 2025 bearish
Jul 28, 2025
Casado: Founders Can Block a16z From Investing In Exactly One Mortal Enemy
“Listen, you have one mortal enemy, and you choose whoever that mortal enemy is, and whoever it is, I'm with you, we're gonna go kill that mortal enemy together, but you get one. You don't get an arbitrary number of mortal enemies.”
Jul 28, 2025
Casado: The only real sin in venture capital is missing the winner
“The only sin in investing and I've sinned so much. The only sin investing is, is, is, is missing the winner. Like there's no, it's fine to like invest in a category that doesn't work. It's fine to lose money all. But like, if you choose the wrong company, like…”
Jul 28, 2025 neutral
Jul 28, 2025
Jul 28, 2025 bullish
Jul 28, 2025 negative
Casado: Unlike Past Tech Cycles, AI Pioneers Are The Primary Fearmongers
“In the past, the people created the technology were kind of pro tech and the people that were like selling security solutions were like the fear mongers, right? So you'd have somebody create like the internet and they're like, this is safe and it's great for e…”
Jul 28, 2025
Jul 28, 2025 bullish
Jul 28, 2025 bullish
Casado: Break-Even AI App Margins Are Deliberate Board Choices For Distribution
“In my experience, most of these companies that are like, let's say break-even margins, it's like a board level specific choice to prioritize distribution, not just because this is systemically something they have to do.”
Jul 28, 2025
Jul 28, 2025 positive
Casado: AI is eliminating routine middle-tier software development
“And so in many ways, I would say, you know, the AI is getting rid of the middle, right? Like, so very new computer science, like models, they don't know how to do just because nobody's done it before. And that's kind of pushing the state of the art. And then i…”
Jul 28, 2025 bullish
Casado: Zero-Sum AI Investing Is A Mistake; Every Layer Captures Value
“Observationally, there's only been one sin, and that one sin is zero sum thinking. We always worry about like, oh, is this defensible? Oh, will this layer get margin? Will this layer get value? And the answer has kind of been unilaterally yes. The answer has b…”
Jul 28, 2025 bullish
Jul 28, 2025
Casado: I consistently underestimated how fast AI coding models would advance
“I mean, the one for me that I've just consistently got wrong is just how fast these coding models advance. And this is probably just sunk cost fallacy my entire life. I've just been this nerdy program and programming since the nineties. I mean, it's like, it's…”
Jul 28, 2025 negative
Jul 28, 2025
Jul 28, 2025 positive
Jul 28, 2025
Casado: Founders shouldn't execute post-exit plans created under peak stress
“Don't use those dreams that you concocted when you were like really in the pressure cooker, like not sleeping, your relationships are falling apart, that whole thing. Like that's not the thing, that steady state you're going to want to do.”