Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Founders should pick durable 10-year trends because building takes longer than expected

Augusto Marietti · How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure · Oct 21, 2025 · at 36:23

Augusto Marietti is the CEO and co-founder of Kong, sharing founder advice with a16z partner Martin Casado based on a decade of building Kong through prolonged early struggles.

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“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 it's going to take longer than what you think as a leader, as a human, as a marketer, as a product, as a revenue is always going to take longer. So take something that lasts and just put a 110% on it.”

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 Augusto Marietti

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…”
Augusto Marietti Oct 21, 2025 ▶ 27:56 How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure
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…”
Augusto Marietti Oct 21, 2025 ▶ 33:47 How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure
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.”
Augusto Marietti Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 27:53 a16z Podcast | The API Economy -- The Why, What, and How
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.”
Augusto Marietti Oct 21, 2025 ▶ 25:45 How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure
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…”
Augusto Marietti Oct 21, 2025 ▶ 31:10 How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure
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 …”
Augusto Marietti Oct 21, 2025 ▶ 35:48 How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure
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