Martin Casado
156 statements across 37 episodes · 61 bullish · 30 bearish · 3 people on the record · first statement Jul 16, 2017 by Martin Casado · said 35 times in 21 episodes since 2017 · 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 Marc Andreessen (9), Ben Horowitz (9), Yoko Li (2), Erik Torenberg (2), Anish Acharya (2), Sonal Chokshi (1), Matt Perault (1), Jennifer Li (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 6 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
- Ben Horowitz on Investing in AI: AI Bubbles, Economic Impact, and VC Acceleration
- Ben Horowitz on American Dynamism and the Future of AI | The a16z Show
- Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz on a16z’s New Media Strategy
- The Biggest Bottlenecks For AI: Energy & Cooling
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 17 mentions in 11 episodes 2 per episode
- Founders, Media, & Memes: a16z’s Strategy for the Future | a16z LP Summit 2025
- Why AI Moats Still Matter (And How They've Changed)
- Who's Coding Now? - AI and the Future of Software Development
- How Andreessen Horowitz Disrupted VC & What’s Coming Next
- ElevenLabs CEO: Why Voice is the Next AI Interface
- "Is there an AI bubble?” Gavin Baker and David George
- Why Creativity Will Matter More Than Code | Kevin Rose and Anish Acharya
- The Little Tech Agenda for AI
- 3 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 6 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
2017 4 mentions in 1 episode
Everything said about Martin Casado, oldest first
Jul 16, 2017
Jul 16, 2017 positive
Jul 16, 2017 positive
Mar 10, 2018
Mar 10, 2018
Mar 10, 2018 positive
Casado: Domain experts can build software without low-level engineering knowledge
“So if you compare that with today, today there's an API for everything. I mean, here's an example of a few thousand APIs everywhere from getting a random quote from Chuck Norris to identifying images in a picture to searching your email inbox. Right. And so wh…”
Mar 10, 2018
Mar 10, 2018
Oct 26, 2018
Casado: Category-creating enterprise startups need $150k+ ACV for viability
“If you identify, listen, we have to do direct sales because, you know, this is only applicable to the Fortune 2000, and this is a market category creation situation, so we have to have, like, kind of the deep conversation and it has to be evangelical sale. If …”
Oct 26, 2018
Oct 26, 2018
Oct 26, 2018
Oct 26, 2018
Oct 26, 2018 negative
Oct 26, 2018
Casado: Early startups should withhold pricing discussions until technical close
“If at all possible, don't talk about pricing until here in, in early market. And the reason is, is there's no way they can actually value your solution because they've never thought about before until you get to technical close.”
Oct 26, 2018
Oct 26, 2018 positive
Casado: Open-Source Enterprise Startups Need Direct Sales to Pass $100M
“In general, when we have seen companies come in that have open source strategies that create large top of funnels with developers, you get nice, super linear, Revenue ramps to a hundred million plus once they build direct sales.”
Oct 26, 2018 negative
Oct 26, 2018
Oct 26, 2018
Jan 2, 2019
Andreessen: Nicira scrapped its OpenFlow tech immediately after a16z investment
“So we funded this here at NetWeQ's networking lab, and it was the OpenFlow. OpenFlow was the sort of protocol was the approach and Martine had, had, had been one of the main people doing that. And so they start in Asira, and we're all excited, because we're li…”
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Casado: Open source business models often resemble low-margin professional services
“Like Silicon Valley loves software companies because you get a repeatable product to market with a really high margin and high multiples. But if you start looking around a lot of the open source business models, it looks a little bit like a PSO company, which …”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Casado: Modern applications have evolved into complex distributed networks
“The application has evolved into a network. I really believe that. So an application used to be like, I'm running Pac-Man, but that's no longer the case now. Like, think about like one query to Google, man. Like, you're literally touching hundreds of compute n…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Casado: Data centers must enforce least privilege access across servers
“In the case of the data center, if I'm a server, I should really only have to talk to other servers that I need to talk to and nothing else, but the reality is, is, you know, if I'm able to compromise a server, I can talk to anything that I want, and so we nee…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Casado: Open source creators must retain sole supplier status for pricing power
“If you've originated a project and you're bringing that to market, you should retain the ability to be the sole supplier, if only to set pricing and brand awareness in the market. Companies live or die by this type of thing.”
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Casado: Relying on AI to discover product-market fit is wishful thinking
“And then the fourth, the most science fiction, and these are the ones I don't give a lot of credibility to, they basically want AA to solve their product market fit problem. So they basically say, I don't really know what company to build, you know, so what I'…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Casado: Legacy machine learning startups rebrand as AI to leverage market froth
“So there are companies that come in that have been doing, you know, hardcore ML stuff for a long time But they haven't called it AI. They're probably older techniques, probably not the kind of latest DNN stuff or whatever. And then they start calling it AI bec…”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Casado: Most investment time goes to AI startups solving existing problems
“The second one, and it's the one that I tend to focus the most on, they actually understand what you can apply AI to. So they're like, you know, it's good for these things to solve these problems. They're taking that and they're applying it to an existing prob…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019
Casado: Enterprise license revenue doesn't prove product-market fit until production deployment
“It's quite possible to get a ton of engagement, and a ton of money, and do pox, and pilots, and everything else. And still, it's not actually moving. Like, you can even get license revenue, and it still remains shelfware. But if someone puts it in production, …”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Casado: Repeatable sales without founder involvement signals true product-market fit
“Once you actually start to see a repeatable sale from a non-expert, then I think you now have good signal. So for example, anybody that can push the deal through without actually having the original founder, I think then you're kind of getting close to product…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Casado: Enterprise sales enablement requires branching algorithms, not static decks
“A lot of people, they view sales as, I'm going to give, you know, one slide deck to somebody, you know, to a salesperson. They'll take that slide deck, and then they'll be successful in selling. No, like, actually, you're developing an algorithm that they need…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Casado: Mobile 2FA is fundamentally insecure due to retail SIM-swapping vulnerability
“But even those aren't something that you can really protect because somebody could walk into a T-Mobile store in Idaho, and they could show a fake ID from our team. They could port my phone number to their phone, and then they could use that to reset all of my…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Casado: Authentication must be physical and independent of the human body
“Now a hardware token that's independent of that, you can protect it, and so I feel very strongly that the solution must be physical, it must be independent of the physical body, and something that you can put in a safe if you want to.”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
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.”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Casado: Fundamental research and development is shifting from academia to tech companies
“Some of the most fundamental research contributions are actually happening in industry today, and not only that, that, you know, the academic system has actually moved towards short-termism, especially in incremental publishing.”
Feb 20, 2020
Feb 20, 2020
Feb 20, 2020
Casado: Cyber attackers are shifting focus from companies to individuals
“En masse, attackers are moving from these traditional targets of companies and of systems and actually are focusing on, on you. And actually, we think this is one of the biggest shifts in the entire industry, and we think that it impacts everybody in this audi…”
Feb 20, 2020
Feb 20, 2020
Feb 20, 2020
Feb 20, 2020 negative
Casado: Neglecting personal cybersecurity erodes an employer's digital herd immunity
“So, there are solutions to pretty much every one of these techs that's very simple to use, so much so, if you don't use them, like, I kind of view you a bit of an anti-vaxxer. And the reason is, is like, you are the attack service for your company, and they're…”
Feb 20, 2020 positive
Feb 20, 2020
Jun 10, 2023 bearish
Sep 25, 2023 positive
Nov 6, 2023 bullish
Mar 5, 2024 neutral
Martin Casado: Unique internet risks like asymmetric attacks do not fit AI
“So the danger, so, so having been through the rise of the internet very closely, there were things that were very unique to the internet. Things like asymmetric attack, right? The more that you invested in the internet, the more vulnerable you were, and if you…”
Mar 5, 2024 bullish
Mar 5, 2024 bullish
Casado: There is now real line of sight to economically viable embodied AGI
“And if you really want some prognostication for this is all going, I mean, for the first time, I say there is actually real line of sight to embodied AGI. And by embodied AGI, I mean, something that's economically viable. So you don't have a bunch of robots th…”
Oct 30, 2024
Oct 30, 2024 negative
Feb 6, 2025 bullish
Mar 7, 2025
Casado: AI prompting requires domain vision and skill, not just access
“One thing you definitely learn is that there is a skill to prompting like it, like this idea that like it allows everybody to be like creative is like not quite right. It just turns out that like some people know what they want and they have vision and they ac…”
Mar 7, 2025 positive
Casado: Most startups today build natively in JavaScript or TypeScript
“I will tell you now as an investor, if a company comes in the door and they're building a product, it's almost certainly going to be, you know, built natively for the web using JavaScript and TypeScript. And like the majority of functionality is like some thir…”
Jul 14, 2025 positive
Casado: AI will not eliminate formal programming languages
“I just don't see a world when, where you get rid of formal programming languages just because they arose out of natural languages for a reason. Like we started with English and then we made programming languages so that we could formally describe stuff. And so…”
Jul 14, 2025 positive
Jul 21, 2025 positive
Jul 28, 2025 bearish
Jul 28, 2025 negative
Martin Casado: Formal computational bounds will eventually demystify AI systems
“When it comes to computer systems, we can put formal bounds on them. We can do this information theoretically. We can do this computationally. And like, that's gonna come, and once that happens, we will understand these systems fully, and it'll be very hard to…”
Jul 28, 2025 positive
Jul 28, 2025 neutral
Martin Casado: AI coding products bifurcate into casual and professional markets
“Some products are very clearly for the casual user trying to replace like, you know, like think about like cursor versus lovable, right? So lovable is like, I'm a casual user. I'm going to create a website. I don't even have to know about code. And that's grea…”
Jul 28, 2025 negative
Jul 28, 2025 neutral
Jul 28, 2025
Martin Casado: Domain-specific reinforcement learning requires a plurality of models
“But as soon as you're doing RL, where you're training it in a specific domain with a specific verifier, you're likely losing, you know, other areas. So you make it really, really good at playing chess. It's going to be less good at, you know, something else li…”
Aug 15, 2025 positive
Casado: Open-weight AI does not empower competitors like open-source software
“Open weights is not the ability to produce the weights. But open software is the ability to produce the software. Like if you give me open software, I can compile it, I can modify it, whatever, but giving open weights, you don't have it. You don't have the dat…”
Aug 15, 2025 negative
Casado: Tech industry AI self-policing backfired by frightening the public
“There was always this prevailing view, which has turned out to be so wrong from really well-intentioned people, which was like, it's going to be regulated anyways. If it looks like we're self-policing, we can dictate, you know, how that happens. And unfortunat…”
Aug 15, 2025 negative
Casado: Omitting academic funding from AI policy severely hinders US innovation
“The other one that I thought was a huge omission is there's basically no real mention of academia, investing in academia. Like there's, you know, some oblique references to it, but it's just been such a mainstay of innovation, computer science. Of the last 40 …”
Aug 15, 2025 positive
Casado: Pragmatic tech founders and VCs now drive AI policy debates
“Maybe the biggest change now is, like, those people are there. Like, the founders are there. Academia is there. VCs are there. Now, now the people that are not either Baptists or bootleaders are driving the discussion, which actually, independent of the action…”
Aug 22, 2025 neutral
Casado: AI solves startup customer acquisition but not user retention
“AI actually solves that problem. It just solves the bootstrap problem. It's like, these models are so magical. So, like, You know, you wrap one of these models you know, you make it available, and people think it's amazing they show up. But what's also clear i…”
Aug 22, 2025 negative
Aug 22, 2025
Casado: Tech supercycles originate with prosumer adoption before enterprise penetration
“Every time we have a super cycle, it tends to start, you know, in these prosumer ways, right? The internet did this, right? Like, remember when Sun outlawed the browser, right? This is like Sun Microsystems, right? But they didn't really know how to consume it…”
Aug 22, 2025 positive
Casado: Early AI coding tools reached $400M to $600M in ARR
“The first kind of monetized AI app was code, right? It was Copilot, and so Microsoft had invested a ton of money and matured the market with Copilot, with VS Code, and so everybody knew it. It's just, like, the models weren't quite ready then, and so you had, …”
Aug 22, 2025 neutral
Casado: China excels at AI models but struggles in enterprise software
“Historically, China's just not been able to build software, at least for, like, the prosumer enterprise market, which is kind of my world. They've just never really been able to do that, and so I think that, you know, their ability to compete at, like, a softw…”
Aug 22, 2025 bearish
Aug 25, 2025 neutral
Aug 25, 2025 neutral
Aug 25, 2025 negative
Sep 3, 2025
Sep 3, 2025
Casado: AI competition is fiercer for talent than product space
“Even companies that seem like they're competing end up in totally different places just because so much white space is being created, but they're all competing, like totally different companies and spaces are competing with the same talent. So the first time I…”
Sep 3, 2025 neutral
Sep 3, 2025 positive
Sep 3, 2025
Casado: a16z seed investments target top technical experts from big tech
“When we do seeds, normally it's like the person that did the thing in the big company and now is doing the thing and is the world expert and the thing is very technical thing. And like somebody else isn't just gonna wake up and decide to do it. Who's a good fo…”
Sep 3, 2025
Casado: The primary sin in VC is backing the wrong company
“The only sin is picking the wrong company in a certain space because that conflict thing, because you're conflicted out of the winner, like investing in a space that doesn't work is fine. I mean, like, there's no way you can actually predict whether a space is…”
Sep 3, 2025 positive
Casado: Founder experience beats technical credentials when winning startup deals
“It's a lot more powerful that founders know that I've been a founder. And I know this is a such a cliche thing to say, but I do feel that resonates much more than like, I got a PhD in computer science or I know infrastructure.”
Sep 3, 2025 negative
Sep 3, 2025
Sep 3, 2025 positive
Sep 3, 2025
Casado: Traditional equal VC partnerships cannot scale like modern tech firms
“Venture capital uses like the same. Model that you'd use for like a dentist office or something, like a partnership where everybody's equal, right? Like that makes sense for a small service organization, but you can never scale that.”
Sep 3, 2025
Casado: Ignore TAM and valuation when investing during fast-moving tech booms
“I think in these times where you don't know the TAM and things are moving quickly, you definitely want to pick the best team. I don't think you should overthink the space, but like asking questions about like TAM or valuation or value makes a lot less sense be…”
Sep 3, 2025 bullish
Casado: Tech platform shift value accrues primarily to infrastructure, not apps
“My view is, is the infrastructure is where the value is. Every time you have a platform shift, you'll get a new set of infrastructure companies, and then a bunch of apps get built on top of those. But like the value is going to accrue largely to the infrastruc…”
Sep 3, 2025
Sep 3, 2025 bullish
a16z analysis: Infrastructure software commands higher public market multiples than apps
“Sarah Wang, who is an investor on the growth fund here, and I did a, you know, kind of relatively loosey goosey public market analysis where like, what are the multiples of companies that are infrastructure versus apps? And they just have higher multiples for …”
Sep 3, 2025 neutral
Casado: Founders get to block one direct 'mortal enemy' a16z investment
“For any company that I'm an investor in, If I'm talking to another company that looks similar, I'll ask the founder. I'm like, listen, is this your mortal enemy? You only get one. You can't, you know, you only get one, but it's just, if this is your mortal ene…”
Sep 4, 2025 bearish
Sep 4, 2025 bearish
Casado: 2021 billion-dollar startup cohort will be a massive capital wipeout
“I actually think in 20, 21, If you look at, if you just did a study of that cohort, the companies that had these, you know, these billion dollar bees, if you remember that time, it was totally crazy. I'll bet that's probably one of the biggest wipeouts of capi…”
Sep 4, 2025 neutral
Sep 4, 2025
Sep 4, 2025 negative
Casado: Most startups fail from indigestion rather than starvation
“Most companies fail from indigestion, not starvation, which is they just raise too much money too easily. They don't listen to the actual market, which is, you know, the customer base. And as a result, they just have a bunch of bad practices and end up running…”
Sep 4, 2025 bullish
Sep 4, 2025
Sep 4, 2025 negative
Sep 4, 2025 positive
Sep 4, 2025 positive
Sep 4, 2025 neutral
Sep 4, 2025 positive
Casado: ElevenLabs and Midjourney have excellent unit economics
“For AI, for better or for worse, like, you have great unit economics. I mean, you know, everybody knows kind of like when we always talk about the opening eyes and the anthropics, but do you talk like the 11 labs, for example, or mid journey? I mean, these are…”
Sep 4, 2025 positive
Sep 4, 2025 positive
Sep 4, 2025 negative
Sep 24, 2025 positive
Casado: AI creates new buying behaviors that disfavor incumbents over startups
“I will say incumbents are very bad when new user behaviors and buy behaviors show up. Like, in particular, they don't know how to cater to it. AI is definitely a new user behavior and a new buying behavior, and so this is very much an advantage of startups, ju…”
Sep 24, 2025 neutral
Casado: Contracting AI creatives costs the same as using traditional techniques
“I have seen the shift for contracting someone that uses traditional techniques to AI. Dollar amounts are the same. And so again, like, you know, this is Jevon's paradox all over again. Like, they spend just as much time. You know, it's just the output tends to…”
Sep 24, 2025 bullish
Sep 24, 2025 positive
Casado: Generative AI monetization is driven by professionals, not casual users
“If you draw a dollar at random that's monetized, it's from a professional. And for obvious reasons, because, you know, like, you know, they can produce, if you draw a user at random, it's casual and it's in the tail. And so it's fairly clear that, you know, th…”
Sep 24, 2025 positive
Casado: Price-based H-1B visas will squeeze IT consultancies
“There are a number of organizations that are consultancies. That actually are price sensitive. That would be squeezed by this. I would think that You know, given that they're in the top 15, they make up like four or five of them. That would be a significant fr…”
Sep 24, 2025 positive
Casado: AI coding assistants improve code quality rather than shipping velocity
“So like, what do people, in my experience, the more senior folks actually use AI for code? It's like documentation, writing, testing. I mean, it's a lot of the other stuff that may not actually like increase like the shipping schedule, but like you get a lot m…”
Sep 24, 2025 positive
Casado: Replacing H-1B lottery with pricing helps startups beat big tech
“This system has been gamed for a very long time. It's very hard for startups. To hire because of the lottery system. It's locked up by the large companies, the consultants, Amazon and Google and like that has to change, and I think a very reasonable way to do …”
Nov 10, 2025 bullish
Nov 28, 2025
Apr 8, 2026 bullish
Casado: 50 a16z infrastructure portfolio companies recently saw asymptotic growth
“I you know, I've been in for investing for, 10 years now, I probably have a portfolio of 240 companies that work with. I have visibility that was saying that 50 of them, these are all infrastructure companies. Some historically have done well, some not so well…”
Apr 8, 2026 bullish
Apr 8, 2026 bullish
Casado: High AI token costs are forcing software toward usage-based pricing
“And because tokens are such a significant part of COGS right now, it is pushing the industry to do usage base in the way that we have. Like, I remember when we went from like perpetual to recurring, and that required like a bunch of huge changes. Like, we're l…”
Apr 8, 2026 neutral
Apr 8, 2026 bullish
Apr 8, 2026 positive
Apr 8, 2026 positive
Casado: AI agents select software based on core performance, not interfaces
“And at the end of the day, like, it's the semantics that end up mattering a lot more, right? And so, like, the agents, in my recollection, or in my experience, are very, very good at picking the right Back end for whatever they're doing. So they don't, they're…”
Apr 8, 2026 negative
Apr 28, 2026 positive
Casado: Software design is shifting to treating AI as a user
“What we're seeing instead is instead of viewing AI as software, like just view it as a user. And so instead, like take your product Make it a CLI tool and then have the AI be an agent that actually uses this. You're not fusing the two. You're just making it mo…”
Apr 28, 2026
Casado: AI agents will interact via existing interfaces rather than headless APIs
“So I think these models are going to be very good at just using apps like they are today. And we're already seeing this happen. And rather than the headless versions, the non-headless versions are what's actually being used.”
Apr 28, 2026
Apr 28, 2026 bullish
Apr 28, 2026 negative
Casado: Board-mandated, consultant-led enterprise AI projects are bound to fail
“I sit in these boards too. So the board goes to the CEO. What does the board say? We need more AI. And what does the CEO said? Oh, okay. I'll get like a consultant to do more AI. And then they have some centralized project that nobody knows how it works. They …”
Apr 28, 2026 negative
Aug 25, 2026 neutral
Casado: AI Math Breakthroughs Do Not Prove Deluge of Economic Value
“I'm not sure that the fact they've been longstanding is that much of an indication because there hasn't been a huge economic incentive in order to solve. Now that doesn't mean that it's not hard or whatever. It's just like, I just don't think we have, like, th…”
Aug 25, 2026 neutral
Casado: AI programming differs from past abstractions by abdicating deterministic logic
“If I'm writing a program, I'll like, whatever, I'll use a cloud database, I'll use storage, I'll use networking, you know, whatever it is, but like correctness and logic for the program is under the programmer's control. Maybe I'll use a third party library. B…”
Aug 27, 2026 positive
Casado: Cursor rapidly self-cannibalized from an IDE to an agent and model platform
“And I think another thing that the Cursor team probably doesn't get, you know, the level of credit for is to the extent they cannibalized themselves so dramatically in like a Reed Hastings type way in a matter of two years, right? So they were first an IDE, an…”
Aug 27, 2026
Casado: Coding is the most competitive startup market ever seen
“Founding teams work on exactly what is needed by the business, and I think they did a very good job, and I think it allowed them to navigate the most competitive market we've probably ever seen. Has there been a more competitive market than coding?”
Aug 27, 2026 positive
Aug 28, 2026
Casado: Perfect foresight couldn't have prevented AI infrastructure capacity shortages
“So even if we had a perfect Oracle, once it started working, I don't think we could have built the capacity. We could have built the capacity. There's no way. And we're talking about like chip cycles, which tend to be three to four years. We're talking about b…”
Aug 28, 2026 bullish
Aug 28, 2026 bullish
Casado: AI compute demand will persist for decades like electricity
“The right analog here is like the steam engine or electricity. In the following way, like, we've introduced this new thing that you can turn to work, and there's some very obvious applications now, but there's probably 3040 years of throwing computer problems.…”
Aug 28, 2026 bullish
Casado: AI agents work best as autonomous digital employees with dedicated computers
“GrokBot got really right is, no, how about if it's actually an employee? So now you have this thing that's an entity, and it doesn't have, like, special access to your keys or whatever. It has its own computer, and it has its own browser, and because these are…”