Cisco
also referred to as: cisco systems
includes Cisco Meraki, Cisco NX OS, Cisco UCS, Cisco NAC
26 statements across 16 episodes · 12 bullish · 5 bearish · 12 people on the record · first statement Jan 2, 2019 by Peter Levine · said 152 times in 54 episodes since 2017 · across every show →
Mentions by year, the whole family
brought up most by Martin Casado (39), Marc Andreessen (12), Jeetu Patel (11), Peter Levine (8), Joe Schmidt (8), J.R. Rivers (6), Chris Dixon (6), Andy McCall (6)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 19 mentions in 6 episodes 3 per episode
- Lighthouse or Landgrab? How to Pick Your AI Sales Strategy
- Why Top Founders Are Racing Into AI Infrastructure
- Building a Company in Stealth | Travis Kalanick with a16z
- Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | The a16z Show
- Ben Horowitz and David Solomon: The Sweetest Macro Spot in 40 Years
- The AI Opportunity that goes beyond Models
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 40 mentions in 9 episodes 4 per episode
- From the Dot-Com Crash to the AI Era: How Builders Survive Waves of Disruption
- Building the Real-World Infrastructure for AI, with Google, Cisco & a16z
- Software Finally Eats Services - Aaron Levie
- Marc Andreessen Reveals His Biggest Wins and Mistakes at a16z
- "Is there an AI bubble?” Gavin Baker and David George
- Dylan Patel on the AI Chip Race - NVIDIA, Intel & the US Government vs. China
- Dylan Patel on GPT-5’s Router Moment, GPUs vs TPUs, Monetization
- The Current Reality of American AI Policy: From ‘Pause AI’ to ‘Build’
- 1 more episode that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2023 7 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
2020 3 mentions in 1 episode
2019 75 mentions in 31 episodes 2 per episode
- a16z Podcast | Mobile Invades the Data Center
- a16z Podcast | Dell + EMC -- Why the Python Just Ate the Cow
- a16z Podcast | From Research to Startup, There and Back Again
- a16z Podcast | B2B2C
- a16z Podcast | Startups and Pendulum Swings Through Ideas, Time, Fame, and Money
- a16z Podcast | Infrastructure... Is Everything
- a16z Podcast | AMPLab, the Power of Open Source, and the Future of Systems Software
- a16z Podcast | The Role of Academia in the Startup World
- 23 more episodes that year, every mention in 2019 →
2018 1 mention in 1 episode
2017 3 mentions in 1 episode
Everything said about Cisco, oldest first
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Levine: Cumulus Networks matches Cisco and Juniper performance on commodity hardware
“What they are doing is taking commodity hardware, putting a layer of Open source and closed source software on top of commodity servers and turning that into a new switch that is as fast as is, you know, as capable as some of the most proprietary systems that …”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Clark: Enterprise corporate development focuses on transaction execution led by GMs
“If you look at, ah, the corporate development teams on the enterprise side, and so I'm talking about Oracle, and Cisco, and VMware, and those kind of companies, they tend to be more M&A execution focused, ah, and so you hear a lot of times, you know, CorpDev p…”
Jan 2, 2019
Levine: Fidelity and Morgan Stanley defined the legacy data center blueprint
“So, 10 years ago, everyone would look at Fidelity and Morgan Stanley, and those were the prototypes for the data center. And it was, guess what? It was EMC storage, an Oracle database, a Sun Microsystems server, and a Cisco switch. And the entire world copied …”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Chen: A Cisco-class company will emerge to route autonomous physical transportation
“I actually think, here's another interesting thing, which is if there were self-driving cars, trucks, robots, shopping carts, there will probably be a Cisco routing service on top of that that can calculate the best way to get object A from point A to B, which…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Casado: Cisco is uniquely successful at acquiring startups and integrating technology
“They've really, I think, are probably the top companies in making those acquisitions successful and doing spin-ins. I mean, there are very, very few companies you can point in that have been so successful in acquisitions. It's basically a core competency.”
Feb 26, 2019 neutral
Aug 9, 2019 bearish
Jan 9, 2020
Feb 6, 2023
Sep 25, 2023 neutral
Ghodsi: Hype around the largest LLMs mirrors 2000s focus on Cisco
“So I think it's a little bit like right now like that. Who has the largest LLM? Obviously whoever can build the largest one that can train it the most obviously will own all of AI and all the future of humanity. But just like the internet, someone will show up…”
Jul 16, 2024 negative
Horowitz: Tow trucks repossessed Cisco employees' cars after dot-com tax debts
“And one of the things, so Cisco, which is probably the most stable, like monotonically increasing company in the industry a lot of the employees did something called exercise their option to convert them to capital gains. And when you do that, you're subject t…”
Aug 6, 2025
Patel: Product Leaders Must Never Delegate Corporate Storytelling
“Don't delegate the storytelling to anyone in the company. You go do it yourself because you need one voice. And it doesn't mean that I'm the best presenter in the world. But if one person doesn't tell the end-to-end story who actually owns it, you start to fra…”
Aug 6, 2025 positive
Patel: Cisco Produced More Innovation in 18 Months Than Previous Decade
“For about a six, seven year period, we had just stopped innovating, and I just don't think it was that that productive for us, and then getting back out to innovation right now. For example, past 18 months, we've probably done more innovation than the previous…”
Aug 6, 2025
Patel: A 15% product improvement cannot displace enterprise incumbents; 10x is required
“No one wins by playing catch up. Right? And so the asymmetry of coming at it from a different angle and being at least an order of magnitude better is something that you have to continue to keep pushing at and be the biggest skeptic. Because most people will t…”
Aug 6, 2025 positive
Patel: Cisco Generated Hundreds of Millions by Natively Integrating Microsoft Teams
“Like one of the best things we've done in the past five years is we've completely opened up to our competitors and like, for example, Microsoft Teams is a huge competitor for us. And we partnered with them and have them run on natively on our devices. Hundreds…”
Aug 6, 2025 positive
Aug 6, 2025 negative
Aug 6, 2025 negative
Patel: Cisco's Compassionate Culture Hinders Direct Feedback on Poor Performance
“One of the things that Cisco is really amazing at is it's a very compassionate culture. One of the things that Cisco is not that great at, because of the fact that it's a very compassionate culture, is we might not actually have very direct conversations somet…”
Oct 29, 2025 positive
Patel: Cisco silicon enables logical data centers spanning 900 kilometers
“We just launched a new piece of silicon as well as a new chip and a system for scale across networking, where you might have two data centers that act as a logical data center that could be up to eight, 900 kilometers apart.”
Oct 29, 2025 negative
Patel: Relying solely on Broadcom silicon creates a predatory monopoly
“Is, if you're just a rapper around Broadcom, Then you've got a monopoly that's gonna be a very predatory one. And so, one of the big reasons where Cisco is super relevant is you don't just have a Broadcom world with people just wrapping Broadcom, that their sy…”
Oct 29, 2025 positive
Patel: AI networking infrastructure will evolve toward dedicated inference-native designs
“And so I also feel like the way that networking will evolve is Rather than it being a training infrastructure that then gets applied to inferencing, you might have inferencing native infrastructure that gets built over time.”
Oct 29, 2025
Aug 12, 2026 positive
McCall: Meraki scaled by gifting free access points to webinar attendees
“Our kind of firm belief at that point in time was, well, what's the best way to get them to understand that our networking equipment is simpler to use than their Cisco that they're about to buy? And the answer is get them to try it. And so what we do is we'd r…”