Casado: Company diligence is far more reliable than predicting market adoption
Martin Casado · a16z GP, Martin Casado: Anthropic vs OpenAI & Why Open Source is a National Security Risk with China · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jul 28, 2025 · at 1:04:19
Martin Casado, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), debates venture investment strategy with host Harry Stebbings, arguing against top-down market prediction in favor of evaluating existing traction and founder execution.
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“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 markets. This happens all the time. I mean, you could argue that AI is really invalidating tons of markets, and I don't think anybody could have seen that happen. But if you have, say, 10 companies that have some traction, and you can talk to the, you know, the founders, you can diligence the teams, you can diligence the market, you can diligence the project, you can diligence the technical approach, I think you could just say something a lot more concrete than, you know, is some future innovation going to wipe out this entire market?”
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