Casado: Giving Engineers 20% Time for Experimentation Consistently Fails
Martin Casado · From the Dot-Com Crash to the AI Era: How Builders Survive Waves of Disruption · Aug 6, 2025 · at 13:20
Martin Casado, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), shares observations on corporate innovation programs.
0:00 / 0:18exact quote · 19.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“So one thing I've seen fail consistently, again, like you guys are way more expert than I am, but is this kind of notion of, You know, if a engineer spends one day a week experimenting, then maybe they'll come up with a great idea that changes the company. It just feels like that tends to not have enough momentum behind it to do something big.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Martin Casado
Casado: US AI export controls failed; regulation is sole obstacle to winning
“China is a lot of very smart people. They're incredibly capable. They're great researchers. They can build stuff as great as well as we can, and they can open source it. We did not enable them. They do this even with export controls on chips. Right? So there's…”
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 …”
Casado: H-1B consulting firms squeeze out $80k to $120k US IT jobs
“It's very, very tough to get a job between like 80 and a 120 K in, in much of the United States because of this, right? And so this isn't about like a new grad being a software engineer, because the reality is, is the expected value of a software engineer over…”
Casado: Non-consensus investing is dangerous because solitary views are often wrong
“It's dangerous to do non-consensus investing. Like, that's a dangerous idea. If you're alone in your view, you may just be missing something.”