Prediction Not checkable as stated
AI agents will consume the internet via APIs, rendering UIs secondary
“Agents are going to consume internet in a very different way than how human did. There's not any more websites, scroll, click, up and down applications. They're going to be there, but not as relevant as before. Agents are going to programmatically exchange lab…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Enterprises will abstract LLM management into a unified AI gateway layer
“The same thing I think is going to happen in LLMs. At first, you have one enterprise use one big LLMs. Now they're going to use five, 1000, small LLM, medium, large, whatever. Once you get to, you don't do tokens re-limiting, token authentication in each LLM u…”
Insight
Mariotti: Open-source software marketing gains are offset by enterprise sales friction
“So 50% of our competition is ourself. So in open source, what you gain in marketing, you lose it in sales.”
Assertion Contradicted
Kong invented control and data plane separation in API management
“We kind of invented the control plane, data plane separation at the API management, API control plane level. Nobody was doing it before.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Augusto Marietti predicts API and AI traffic will converge within three years
“The way we know about API infrastructure, it will evolve, it won't change, but API traffic and AI traffic, they are converging. So the classic API calls, yes, but also when you move tokens is an API call. And Intelligent, let's say Intelligent will be sold thr…”
Disclosure
Augusto Marietti never considered quitting Kong because returning to Italy meant failure
“Never. The reason is, I could Never visualize myself going back to the airport in Italy and my dad picking him up and say, how's it going? And it's just like would fail with my tails and my legs. Like I could never, I would have died here without food. Like I …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mariotti: Fortune 500 APIs Fail When Treated as Brand Ego Projects
“You have giant Fortune 500 that thought that way, and just because they're the ego of the brand, but they never went anywhere, nobody used their APIs. Just because they think like an afterthought or a satellite thing, rather than the future.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Marietti: I took Stanford's signup list and pitched all 400 contacts overnight
“We steal the things with all the email and the registration. And we walk home with that. And that night till five AM, I writes all the 400 emails about, Hey, you need to know about Michelle.”
Disclosure
Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt invested in Mashape's 2011 seed round
“And then we got a long tail, which was, like, Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt into the funds.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sam Altman wrote an O-1 visa recommendation letter for Augusto Marietti
“Actually, Sam Altman was one of the guys that wrote me a letter of recommendation when he was CEO of Loopt.”
Insight
Marketplaces require a long tail of low-power suppliers to succeed
“To a marketplace to work, you need to have a long tail of low power people. If you have concentrated in a few high power, marketplace doesn't work.”
What-if
Augusto Marietti realized API marketplace economics would not work even at scale
“I could never make the economics works, even if this thing would have scaled.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kong grew ARR from $2 million to $10 million post-Series B
“So that year we went from two million of ARR. To 10. That was right. And the plan I think was six or seven.”
Insight
Companies cannot build AI without an API-first architecture
“I think you cannot do AI if you're not API first. It's just, you don't have the mouth and the ears to a model.”
Insight
Founders should pick durable 10-year trends because building takes longer than expected
“It always take longer than what we think. It is good to take a trend the last 10 years, 20 years, because you have time to grow into and do a lot of mistakes and building, and just you have to generally believe it in this trend versus folding glitters, because…”
Prediction Held up
Mariotti: Enterprise transition to microservices will take ten years
“At an enterprise level, you know, 99.9, they're still monolithic, so it's more a 10 years transition that we'll see, and what Netflix did, it will happen to Coca-Cola, to McDonald's, so there's a lot of value to be unlocked and to help companies doing this tra…”
Assertion Supported
Mariotti: Stripe pioneered the now-standard three-column API documentation layout
“I think Stripe did a great job back in like five, six years ago on documentations because they were, I think, the first one to innovate in such a simple thing. But it looks simple, but actually very complex to make it easy to digest by having a three column st…”
Disclosure
Mariotti: Kong locks its GUI and management dashboard behind enterprise subscriptions
“For us, the GUI is more an enterprise feature. DevOps download it and use it, engineers use it. Then when you go in an enterprise relationship, usually you have higher stakeholder than ones, obviously, a management console or dashboard, and that one is part of…”
Assertion Partly supported
Mariotti: Only 10% of Apple product components are built in-house
“Even at Apple, 10% of all the pieces are built by Apple. Actually, 90%, it comes from outside.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Augusto Marietti raised Kong's angel round two weeks before his visa expired
“Yeah, we raised two weeks before departure.”
Disclosure
Kong raised its initial $51,000 from YouTube founding team members
“So we rounded up 17, 1717, and we got 51,000 check.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kong's three co-founders survived in San Francisco on $1,000 a month combined
“We did a thousand and, about a thousand and a hundred monthly promissory note that the company would give us, and we would have to live in three with a thousand dollars a month.”
Disclosure
Mashape raised its Series A with only $50,000 in gross volume
“For a marketplace, you need a million in gross volume. We were like at 50 K.”
Disclosure
Kong took a $2 million insider bridge loan during its 2015 pivot
“We open sourced in April 15. We had to take a bridge of two million to go another year because... We had to take an extension because we were out of gas”
