How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure

Summary

a16z Podcast – How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure

Date: October 21, 2025
Host: Andreessen Horowitz (Martin Casado, General Partner)
Guest: Augusto “Aggie” Marietti, CEO and Co-founder of Kong

---

Episode Overview

In this episode, Martin Casado sits down with Aggie Marietti to unravel the extraordinary founding journey of Kong, a leading API infrastructure company. The conversation traces Marietti's path from sleeping on air mattresses in San Francisco to the near-death experiences and pivots that defined Kong’s trajectory. The pair dive deep into the grind of startup survival, the evolution and growing significance of APIs, and how the next era of AI will make API infrastructure even more essential.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

From Milan Garage to San Francisco Survival

• Origin Story and Immigration Challenges

  • Marietti recounts arriving in the US with only $600, no social security number, and a 90-day window to make it as entrepreneurs.
  • Survived early days by sleeping on couches/closets, living off $1,000/month for three founders, and relying on "rice, beans, tuna, and pasta."
  • Quote:
    “He opens a closet and there's like all the bananas falling off because there was one guy's only eating huge bananas. He opened another closet, there's another mattress with other guys sleeping in a second closet. And say, okay, this is real. We had no money.”
    — Aggie Marietti [00:00]

• Fundraising Hustle

  • Creative tactics included stealing attendee lists at Stanford's Entrepreneurship Week to cold-email 400+ people.
  • First meaningful check: $17,000 from a YouTube founding team member—negotiated at Travis Kalanick’s house, with Kalanick forcibly keeping investors from leaving so Marietti could negotiate a better deal.
  • Quote:
    “Travis brought me to the bathroom, locked the door of the house so these guys don't leave ... at the end, we handshake on the deal.”
    — Aggie Marietti [05:05]

• Living on the Margin

  • Survival involved sharing a single mattress, "hacker" living, and being continuously under threat of running out of money.
  • Early employees had to believe in a team of “illegal Italians” who could disappear any day.

---

Pivots and Reinventions: Marketplace to API Gateway

• First Startup Vision Misses Mark

  • Initial product: an API-based drag-and-drop app builder—too early for the market.
  • Pivoted to building an API marketplace but struggled with scale, monetization, and quality control.
  • Lessons Learned:
    • Successful marketplaces require a broad, low-power long tail and strong supply-side exclusivity. APIs lacked both.

• Foundation for Kong

  • Developed an internal API engine ("API Gateway") to support their marketplace.
  • Realized every company would need such infrastructural glue—thus, pivoted the technology into what became Kong, open-sourcing it in 2015.
  • Quote:
    “We built this massive API engine behind the marketplace ... wait a second, every company will become an API company. Why we don't take this engine and we give it to the whole world? And that was the beginning of open source Kong.”
    — Aggie Marietti [18:38]

---

Scaling, Survival, and Breakout

• Constant Struggle until Breakout

  • Multiple near-death experiences, requiring bridges and last-minute funding to survive.
  • The launch and open-sourcing of Kong quickly distinguished it from 40+ competitors due to strong product-market fit and surge in viral adoption.
  • Notable investors included Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt, whose involvement lent further legitimacy.

• Scaling Up & Recognition

  • Kong experienced explosive growth after open-sourcing, reaching nine-figure ARR and hiring rapidly.
  • Symbolism: Each year, the “Founders Award”—2,555 stock options—is awarded to commemorate the 2,555 days (~7 years) of struggle before success.
  • Quote:
    “The founders award is 2,555 stock to the best employee of the company. It's just symbolic ... to remember seven years of struggle every year.”
    — Aggie Marietti [00:35] [25:59]

• Personal Stakes

  • Marietti describes a refusal to quit, tied emotionally to not wanting to return home to Italy in defeat.
  • Quote:
    “I could never visualize myself going back to the airport in Italy and my dad picking him up and say how's it going? ... I would have died here without food. Like I cannot do that.”
    — Aggie Marietti [35:29]

---

Kong’s Position: The Backbone of Modern Software

• Kong Explained

  • Kong is an API infrastructure company providing the “highways” that let microservices and APIs—internal and external—run, scale, and remain secure.
  • Offers enterprise-grade API management, security, traffic control, and more.
  • Analogy:
    “If APIs were cars, you got guardrails, speed bumps, speed cameras, gas stations … we provide all the infrastructure to make sure API connectivity runs.”
    — Aggie Marietti [23:58]

• Breaking Away from Competitors

  • Rapid growth after years of struggle—outlasted and out-scaled over 40 competitors as the market consolidated due to key acquisitions (Mulesoft, Apigee).

---

API Infrastructure and the AI Wave

• How AI Supercharges API Importance

  • Agents (AI models) will increasingly interact programmatically using APIs—not GUIs—making robust API infrastructure core to the next generation of software.

  • The rise of AI brings new “boring” but critical problems, like API authentication, key management, and rate-limiting for models and agents.

  • Quote:
    “Agents are going to consume Internet in a very different way than how human did... Machine consuming Internet, it's through programming interface. That's the huge shift that we are now capturing and powering ... at the end of the day, behind the scene it's all APIs.”
    — Aggie Marietti [27:27]

• Infrastructure is the True Enabler

  • Kong aims to become not just an API Gateway, but a unified platform for classic API, LLM, and agent connectivity—supporting token-based economics and machine-to-machine communication.
  • The shift is likened to the microservices boom: first, each framework re-implements core logic, then abstraction via a gateway pattern wins out. The same is emerging with AI agents and LLMs.
  • Quote:
    “I think you cannot do AI if you're not API first ... what we are calling or building is a unified API and AI connectivity platform that helps you navigate this transition ... I think it will all converge into a unified broker.”
    — Aggie Marietti [30:39]

---

Startup Lessons and Philosophy

• Startups: Survival and Grit

  • Everything takes much longer than you expect: “It always takes longer than what we think.” [35:52]

  • Play the long trend; avoid chasing short-lived fads.

  • Keep burn low. “Don’t die. Don’t quit.” [36:34]

  • Quote:
    “It always take longer than what we thinks. It's good to take a Trend the last 10 years, 20 years because you have time to grow into and do a lot of mistakes ... you have to generally believe it in this trend versus falling glitters ... as a leader, as a human, as a market, as a product, as a revenue, it's always going to take longer. So take something that lasts and just put 110% on it every day and then it will compound. Keep the bar rate low in the early days.”
    — Aggie Marietti [35:52]

---

Memorable Quotes and Moments (with Timestamps)

• San Francisco survival and first investor stories:
  “Travis brought me to the bathroom, locked the door of the house so these guys don't leave ... at the end, we handshake on the deal.” [05:05]

• API marketplace to Kong pivot:
  “We built this massive API engine ... wait a second, every company will become an API company. Why we don't take this engine and we give it to the whole world? And that was the beginning of open source Kong.” [18:38]

• Immigrant refusal to quit:
  “I could never visualize myself going back to the airport in Italy and my dad picking him up ... I would have died here without food. Like I cannot do that. And so that never crossed through.” [35:29]

• On startups lasting through the slog:
  “Don’t die. Like, don’t quit. Those are I think the things I learned along the way.” [36:35]

• How AI is reshaping the future of APIs:
  “Agents are going to consume Internet in a very different way than how human did ... Machine consuming Internet, it's through programming interface. ... behind the scene it's all APIs.” [27:27]

• Big vision for unified API+AI infrastructure:
  “What we are calling or building is a unified API and AI connectivity platform ... I think it will all converge into a unified broker.” [30:39]

---

Select Timestamps for Key Segments

• Fundraising hustles & living rough in SF: [01:03] – [07:45]
• Marketplace struggles and pivot to Kong: [08:30] – [19:08]
• Kong’s open-source moment and scaling breakthrough: [19:08] – [23:48]
• Founder grit philosophy & learning (don’t die): [35:19] – [36:42]
• API infrastructure’s role in the AI future: [23:48] – [34:11]

---

Final Thoughts

This episode provides a rare, no-glamor look at the hard-scrabble, near-miss reality of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship and the outsized perseverance required to endure. It offers foundational lessons on building enduring infrastructure companies, the evolution—and current centrality—of APIs, and why the next decade of AI will only intensify the need for robust, scalable API platforms like Kong.

For aspiring founders, Marietti’s story is not merely a tale of ingenuity, but a testimony to unwavering grit and the necessity of continually reinventing both product and self.

---

For more episodes, visit a16z.com.

Transcript

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

He opens a closet and there's like all the bananas falling off because there was one guy's only eating huge bananas. He opened another closet, there's another mattress with other guys sleeping in a second closet. And say, okay, this is real. We had no money. We would just take 600 bucks. Last left to go to United flight. And we had 90 days to just make it or break it. We knew that if we couldn't race, we would go back to Italy broke and that was it.

[Martin Casado]

I think a lot of people don't know or maybe don't appreciate how fast Kong grew when it actually happened. So there was seven years of starvation, right? I mean it was just basically wasn't working.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Every year we do the Founders Award. The founders award is 2,555 stock to the best employee of the company. Why? That is 255 days of struggle. It's just symbolic. But to remember seven years of struggle every year is a rito.

[Podcast Host/Narrator]

What if the backbone of modern software was forged on $1,000 a month and a borrowed couch? Today's guest is Augusto AGI Marietti, CEO and co founder of.

[Martin Casado]

Com.

[Podcast Host/Narrator]

He joins a16z general partner Martin Casado to trace an improbable path from a garage in Milan to building one of the world's leading API platforms. We get into the seven year grind before breakout, the near death moments that forced reinvention, and how APIs became the assembly line of software. Augie also explains how Kong sits in the flow of everything from microservices to AI agents and why the next wave of autonomous Systems will make APIs more essential than ever. Let's get into it.

[Martin Casado]

So Aggie is the founder and CEO of Kong, which was previously masshape and we are covering his background from a garage in Milan to now being the CEO of a at scale company with I dare say IPO ambitions at some point.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Long way, long way to go, but that's one of the steps along the way.

[Martin Casado]

Ambitions. All right, so you're doing this kind of API thing. You come to the US on a tourist visa.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Tourist visa, yeah.

[Martin Casado]

And the idea was to raise 90 days. The idea to raise funding.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Yeah, we had no money. We just take 600 bucks. Last left to go to a United flight through Cincinnati. We went through secondary room. We landed up, sorry Atlanta first time. Cincinnati was second secondary room. And then we went right to San Francisco and we had 90 days to just make it or break that if we couldn't race, we would go back to Italy broke. And that was it.

[Martin Casado]

So did you raise?

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Yeah, we raised two weeks before departure. You raised in those angel rounds. We're talking about decade ago. Right. Small checks. It was 50k. And your rounds was defining YouTube teams. There we go. And here's the funny story.

[Martin Casado]

How did you get introduced to them?

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

So there's two interesting things that you say. Can you redo it again? I won't be able to redo it again. So number one is we went to the Stanford Entrepreneurship Week. At that time, Stanford was doing the Stanford Entrepreneurship Week in February. And they were cool. You made all the entrepreneurs, all the VC were coming there and there was this entrepreneurship mixer, big party. We arrived, we left late. At that point it was all paper with all the email and the registration. We steal the things with all the email and the registration and we walk home with that. And then night till 5am I write all the 400 emails about, hey, you need to know about Masha. We didn't have time to catch up at the mixer, but I'm happy to give you a pitch tomorrow.

[Martin Casado]

Wow.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

I think 470 didn't reply. Tony reply. And 10 were kind of interested. At the end, five or six went to meet us. And then this one person told a Kevin on our. One of the funding team of YouTube came to our Kevin Donaho Kevin. And then he started a company for baby books. He sold it, but he said, look, I think this is something. So he wrote a seventeen thousand dollar check on our air mattress. Seventeen thousands. Yeah. And for us 17, 000 was life.

[Martin Casado]

Yeah.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Versus debt.

[Martin Casado]

Yeah.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

We came from six hundred bucks and few hundred bucks. And so then he brought two other phoning. The red dot actually was 16,000. 16,000. 16,000 dot we got 15,000. The problem with 15,000 divided three was 6, 6, 6, 6, 6,. It was too many six. It's like we don't want too many six in the captive. So we rounded up 17, 17, 17. And we got 51,000 check. Now the second funny part is we negotiated and closed the deal at Travis Kalanick house.

[Martin Casado]

Travis Kalanick's house. I remember there was an article about you sleeping on his couch.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Yes, and Airbnb guys as well. But what happened during negotiation with these guys? We're negotiating and they didn't want. So Travis had at that time was this house up in Castro. Called it a jampad where everybody goes Aaron leave would go. And Drew from Draball was the data. We're all going there on the weekends and I didn't have a place to stay. So actually Travis gave me his Place to stay a few weeks, as long as I would cook carbonara for his better half once a week. And I did that. And then we needed help. He said, come to my kitchen. We negotiate. So we sit on the table. It was myself and Travis Kalanick, and they were the three YouTube investors. Negotiated. These convertible notes are like 50% discount, something crazy. We were there, desperate. And so I said, okay, well, I don't want to take this deal. Screw that. I said, okay, okay, we're going to leave. I say, and I was very naive, 20 years old. Okay, okay, we'll come back. And Travis come to me, put the hands and say, if this guy leave, you're never going to see them again. And nor the money.

[Martin Casado]

Wow.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

So let me do something else. So you guys stay here and figure it out. The counteroffer, Aggie and I go to the bathroom, we close each other and we come back in 10 minutes. So Travis brought me to the bathroom, locked the door of the house so these guys don't leave. Went to the bathroom and we stayed there 10 minutes. Go back another round of negotiation, back to the bathroom. So three, four times at the end, we handshake on the deal. It's better like 42% convertible discount instead of 50. And it was a higher cap and that's it. And then we shake the hand and that was it.

[Martin Casado]

That's crazy. So I remember you had the Quora, like the top Quora post for living on like 14,000 a year in San Francisco. You'd raised 51,000 and now you had to make that last as long as possible. So maybe talk about the next.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Yeah, stretch. What happened is Obviously we got 50, we got to come back. We are illegal in two weeks. So we went back to Italy and we come back with a B1, which you could be there. We can be here six months. But how? We have no Social Security number, we have no credit score, nobody. So you have into this American system, very different than Italy system. You had to enter into a new system. And we had zero anything. So we couldn't pay our salary because we didn't have ssn. We didn't have a legal visa to pay ourself, all of that. So the company.

[Martin Casado]

Did you have employees at this point? No, it's just you two.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

It was the three of us. It was. Michaela was the Turk co founder back then. But we did about a thousand. 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 that would Be. So you were living.

[Martin Casado]

You were living off a thousand dollars a month?

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

In 3. 3.

[Martin Casado]

3 people were living off a thousand dollars?

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Martin Casado]

In San Francisco.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Yeah.

[Martin Casado]

How do you do that?

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

It was cheaper.

[Martin Casado]

Now what year was this?

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

2009, 2010.

[Martin Casado]

Even. Even then it says impossible. A thousand dollars a month for three people.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

I tell you how we did it. So we leave it in an Airbnb somewhere else at 100 bucks and all in the same mattress. And we were going to Valencia. I don't know if you do this in Valencia.

[Martin Casado]

Did you have an office?

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

No, we were working out of Starbucks and we were living in Valencia and we were buying rice, beans and tuna and pasta. And the reason is that we had to find the right amount of carbs and product the cheapest way possible. And that was the combination of, I guess amount of carbs and product the cheapest way possible. And that's how we made it. Like we never eat out, we never buy it. You know, we did everything in house. We cooked in the kitchen. Airbnb rice, beans or tuna pasta. In fact we so much tuna pasta with tomato that Mark and I, when we see now tuna pasta, we almost threw up because we just running on tuna pasta every single day. So how.

[Martin Casado]

Wait, so how long do you did this last?

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

That Last? So March, April 2010. A year. A year and a few months. Wow.

[Martin Casado]

And what were you doing this time? I can. I know what Marco was doing this time. He's writing code.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

What were you doing? I was writing blog building the website, calling pro. They sign up talking with all every sign up on the website that was talking to us and trying to figure out was a mix of bdevs, HTML, css, slicer. Talking with investor to as you start to build the seed rounds.

[Martin Casado]

Yeah.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Trying to do some recruiting that never worked because nobody wanted to work for illegal Italians. That will disappears. So a lot of mistakes and this. Yeah.

[Martin Casado]

All right, so take us to the seed round. So somebody decided to give you a proper round at some point.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

So then a year later we re architect. So we went to Honolulu on the beach in Moana beach and we thought about. Okay, all these APIs were aggregating. I think the word is actually we see now finally now. But 10, 15 years ago it wasn't ready they were to like build apps on the fly through APIs with drag and drop. We were too far ahead. We're missing pieces. But I say hey, we are wrapping a lot of APIs. Actually that assembly line visual still hold. We just have to pivot it and build an API marketplace where all the APIs, producer and consumers, they can come together. And so we pivot that, we relaunch it with 10 crunch, all the stuff.

[Martin Casado]

Okay, so you originally were doing this kind of drag and drop, composable Dragon builder, apps builder thing. So funny how many companies go through this exact journey. And then you're like, okay, HTML5. Wow. And then you're like, okay, no, we need to build a marketplace.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Exactly. Because, okay, the economy, this API economy will come. It's not just apps, it will be APIs. And we build a marketplace, we launch it, we got decent tractions on long tail. And that was already the summer of 2011.

[Podcast Host/Narrator]

Yeah.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

After a pivot in Hawaiian. So we launched very fast. Boom, boom, boom. And then we raised after that.

[Martin Casado]

Was the Hawaiian the last of the money from.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

No, no, because San Francisco to Honolulu, I think at that was like 300 bucks. We say with our 51k, you know, we're living like on tuna, pasta, rice and beans in Valencia, in Mission, in this historic building, middle of nowhere, in like same mattress and things. It's like unbelievable. At some point I remember, I remember woke up in the morning, I need to go to an Ululu. We could do our walk on the beach and thinking about our future or no future. Because we knew this was going no future. Our money were starting to drain and we needed to pivot. And that's where we had the idea, let's go for the pivot. And then we come back, we did crazy. I remember us building the website, Marco going crazy. The TUR founder was building all the Java backends and the launch at fast and then got a little bit of TechCrunch press at that time was read, write web. This other one was Mashable. And so all somehow we got covered by all of them, which now like Chris and then. And boom. And then it started. Seed round face from who? So at that time we went through a lot of, lot of iterations, but where we ended up was NEA leading the seed round and then index co leading 28. And then we got a bunch and.

[Martin Casado]

Then in the seat. So Volpe did the.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Yeah. So what happened is actually the first checks for George Zakari from CRV back then, he didn't lead the round, but he was the first 100k commit. And so with that he said, we have CRV 100k at that point they had a seed program. Very unusual back then. So we went to NEA and he said, we're going to lead this round at that Point also they start a seed program, 500K. And then I met Mike Volpe that just moved to San Francisco to Lange index us. It was like him and Danny Reimer to there somewhere. I said and they also started Angel a seed program and they wrote another big checks and then we got a long tail which was likely Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt into the funds. And so we got this combination Bezos and Eric Schmidt. So again that is sitting in DPD that I don't know we can replicate. So what happened is Jeff Bezos. So Jeff Bezos I knew he was special about Marketplace as a business APIs and developers. AWS was just starting to take off. It was this hidden secret.

[Martin Casado]

So 2011.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Yeah. So Amazon was maybe a 50 billion dollar company then 80 billion dollar company. So what happened is I, I, I, I hire the lawyer of his family office for call for meshe and after we hired for doing the seed round, as the seed round was going along, I say by the way, since you are also the the lawyer of the family office and Bezos Expeditions, can you introduce me, can you introduce me to Jeff Bezos? That's what we do. So it's a PG cold call. And then he was on the road with his brother going around with his brother on the road in Texas and you actually really want to put more and invest.

[Martin Casado]

Boom.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

So that was Jeff Bezos. What do you get from Jeff Bezos? You get the brand. So we get a dinners a year strategy of things. But obviously it was the big brand. And then second Eric Schmidt we were working this co working space and what happened is we were the only startup that stay the latest in the night after this other startup that was doing Expedia for cruise ships. They just raised from NEA and Eric Schmidt and at the end they saw us working till 3am, 4am they will leave a chu when they knew we were fundraising and the investor asked who's the hardest worker than you? And say these guys next to us. And so they introduced us to the Eric Schmidt fund and that's how invest.

[Martin Casado]

Wow. All right, so now this brings us.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

To a lot of luck.

[Martin Casado]

So what was your total, what was.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Your total seed funding raised at that time? Was very big. It was 1.5. It's like wow, huge seed round. I gotta say in 2010, 11, I.

[Martin Casado]

Gotta say there's a lot of optimism. It's an optimistic retrospective view to be like there was three of you on a mattress for a year and then you say you were lucky illegally. That sounds pretty unlucky.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

No longer jail.

[Martin Casado]

All right, so now you have your seat phone mass shapes going.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

So then we raised the seat. All right, now it's real. We got to get these visas, we got to meet them. So we went back to Italy, go to the American Embassy, blah blah, blah. Do the letter of recommendations. Actually, Sam Altman was one of the guys that wrote me a letter of recommendation when he was CEO of Looped, which I met. We were going to the NEA retreat and I sit next to him in the bus and we go to pebble beach to the NEA retreat and we spent three hours together. And I said, by the way, I'm in legal here. Can you write me a letter of recommendation for my O1 visa? And he wrote me. So I have this big thing of how great I am. You gotta get this guy in the country and no matter what. So we got these five letters and. And I get this O1 visa. And finally I got the visa so far. I can come here, I can get a we workspace. And we start to hire and we got seven people and Mark also get the visa. Marco is also because of the love book, he never got to college or nothing. So it was the hardest visa to do. So we figured it out. More letter recommendations for him. We brought him there, we stay here, blah blah, we build a year, we grow that. But you know, at that time like you needed like a million, let's say a million revenue to. To take a good series A for a marketplace you need a million in gross volume. We were like at 50k. So a lot of traction but not a lot of revenue. But we went through a three, four month series a race and, and CRV LED and then index.

[Martin Casado]

Was it dev dot that?

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because George Zachary was more a consumer. So he passed the link to that just general on the enterprise side. I remember Devta called me like Sunday at 6am to go for a walk to decided to invest or not. And he knows I'm a night hall. And then he just Sunday 6am to go to go down to Palo Alto which I had to rent a zip car. There were the zip cards. There was no Uber and go down there and. And then go for a few walks and I decided to invest because he was always actually a big believer on APIs as assembly in line. He could see that. Maybe he wasn't sure marketplace was the right execution, but the theme he was a big believer. And I think he like us like he came to see us sleeping the same mattress. He wanted to really see that we're not like bullshitting the big drama story. It was really drama actually. He opens. He came to the hacker house because we moved to Aker house in south park at that time where we're sleeping and working there with the 70p. And he opens a closet and there's like all the bananas falling off because it was one guy's only eating huge bananas. You open another closet, there's another mattress with another guy sleeping in a second closet. Okay, this is real.

[Martin Casado]

Wow.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

How big was your a 6.6.5 million.

[Martin Casado]

Oh, so for you that must be. Must have been a lot of money.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

6.5 million. Yeah. I went out with this power plant. Let's raise a 10 million series. At that point that was like the big thing. We ended up at 6.5. And I say that science. It was like when we saw it he was like yeah, like maybe we got a shot.

[Martin Casado]

So at some point you decided that the market wasn't working.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

The market wasn't working. And I think so we raised this and we raised. We hired more. We moved to a new office. 25 people like the usual post race honeymoon. And I remember this thing like six months after we. The business wasn't really doing anything. So it was one board meeting that we just cooked pasta for the board members at that time. Because that was like two years before you joined us. And it was. There was nothing to talk about from business.

[Martin Casado]

The issue was is you couldn't monetize or there was a graduation problem. Like these marketplaces are very tough.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

So the idea of the market was that when I was staying with Airbnb founders I learned that marketplace are could be the biggest more powerful business in the world. You don't even have to innovate. Once you get liquidity it's just you can disrupt. Look at ebay you got ebay you can't kill. So I thought like there's all this API. You can build a marketplace liquidity. It'll be like the AWS of marketplace. And so we noticed though that in our case it was a developer API marketplace. So to have to a marketplace to work you need to have long tail of low power people. If you have concentrated in a few high power marketplace doesn't work like Airbnb houses like millions of people with low power. So that was 1, 2. You need to have exclusivity somewhat like the door to access that marketplace supply has to be through the marketplace APIs you could Google and go through the website. You can go through the marketplace APIs at that time power of low for public APIs was on the Twilio the stride there were 30 that matters and 3000 that didn't matter much. So it was also this long tail power. And third thing was quality. You were running a cloud marketplace, you couldn't actually maintain the quality of the supply. You would always get blamed for it. And there was no trust. And. And so I think because of that it got to a million and a half in gross revenue. But he never became this Airbnb of Uber of APIs. That is like 10%. Yeah. And it was, it was also losing margin on aws. So they. I could never make the economics in that model. I could never make the economics works even if this thing would have scaled. So then we go there, it's like, okay, this is where a year we're burning as we're running out of money. And so we built this massive API engine behind the marketplace API gateway that was powering 20,000 APIs of this long tail doing billing, rate limiting, routing, caching, authentication, authorization, logging, all of that. We built it three times and the third time was the great one. And we say, wait a second, every company will become an API company. Why we don't take this engine and we give it to the whole world. And that was the beginning of open source Mongo. And so boom, we open source Kong.

[Martin Casado]

What was your Runway at the time that you open sourced Kong?

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

So we open sourced in April 15. We had to take a bridge of 2 million to go another year because.

[Martin Casado]

Was it an insider bridge?

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Yeah, we had to take an extensions because we were out of gas from.

[Martin Casado]

From depth and Mike.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Yeah. They gave us an extension on the 2 millions because we were out of gas. Like we were would have died otherwise. Wow.

[Martin Casado]

So you, you released. I remember when Kong released, it was actually a really big deal. When was that? 2015.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

15.

[Martin Casado]

Yeah. That's a really big deal. I remember. Yeah. So this is when you and I started talking about your raise. You're raising the B.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

You came at the right times before. Like these guys make no sense. Okay, now it starts to make sense.

[Martin Casado]

Well, that was even a tough raise for you. Just because the company had been around for seven years. Like a marketplace. Like Kong had just come out and it was taking off. But like it only been a couple of weeks, maybe a couple of months. And so honestly, I'll tell you what, what did it for me is, you know, we were doing all the work and like the GitHub stars checked out. Your story is phenomenal. Your command of the business is Great. But it just wasn't enough. But then while we were doing the diligence, like, I kept getting these kind of serendipitous, like, somebody had used Kong and loved it. I remember didn't, like, somebody stay in, like, your Airbnb and, like, loved Kong. And then you forwarded that to me. And so they're just kind of like all of this zeitgeist around Kong. And as a result of that, I'm like, oh, this is clearly a phenomenon.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Yeah. I remember I was spamming you with emails of every prospect or customer user. They were saying, it's just you say Kong, Kong usage. Kong usage. Just nonstop, like, it was blowing up the inbox.

[Martin Casado]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So how close were you to running out of money for it to be?

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

So after Bridge, there were weeks. Yeah. But I was very. Nothing.

[Martin Casado]

Nothing is ever going to stress you again your entire life because you've been so close to at least business so many times. Because I actually remember when we went to the office, it felt dead. It felt like basically.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

No, no, we were dead. We just didn't know about it.

[Martin Casado]

You're like two weeks from being dead. I mean, it felt.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

We were like bunglebee, you know that it flies, but it's not supposed to fly. And we keep.

[Martin Casado]

No, I remember that very, very well.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Yeah, you were like. You're like, yeah, this guy's been there a while. I think they're gonna, you know, whatever. They raise money and then they're gonna give up you work. I said. I said. And it was tough. And I think. I think if. If we go back and say, I don't know, we were able to replicate all the sequence that happens, all the things that happens. And I remember we went. Yeah.

[Martin Casado]

And then.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Then we had that great sushi with the. With Mark Andreesse, and you and I. And we sealed the deal. And Marco.

[Martin Casado]

Yeah. The end of 2016, we closed. And since then, the company's just been remarkable. I mean, there was kind of an announcement recently that across 100 million, which is now actually quite a while back.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

A year and a half ago.

[Martin Casado]

Yeah, a year and a half ago.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

So we. Yeah, it was in a year and a half is 10 years where we were, like, when you invested, we were, ARR. Less than a million.

[Martin Casado]

Yeah.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Yeah. Less than a million of you. Not even a million.

[Martin Casado]

Remember once. I remember. So, yeah. So you had a great first year. And then I told you, I said, listen, if you.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

If.

[Martin Casado]

If you hit 10 million or whatever it was, I'll buy you a car. Remember that?

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

I did. Oh, actually we have in the new office now. I need to send you a picture.

[Martin Casado]

Well, it's a funny story about this. And so like, you know, you, you do it. So like I think you grow like 10x that year.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

So that year we went from 2 million of ARR.

[Martin Casado]

Yeah.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

To 10.

[Martin Casado]

That was. Right.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

The plan I think was 6 or 7.

[Martin Casado]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I went, I went, I checked with compliance and I'm like, can I buy Augie a cheap car? And they said the maximum for a gift is whatever it is and sound like crap. So I ended up buying you the best model car I could find from Japan.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

I think he.

[Martin Casado]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I spent a long time actually looking.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

For this model car is the 280 GT.

[Martin Casado]

Yeah, yeah, that's right. So great. So. So I would love to shift. I think this is the most remarkable Silicon Valley startup story that I know of that I'm close to. And I kind of having watched that.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Will make a movie one day.

[Martin Casado]

They will have to make a movie one day. Yeah. I would love to kind of shift towards how you think about product, how you think about markets, and then kind of move towards AI. So you actually have seen a number of shifts now, right. You saw the cloud come, you saw the shift to APIs. So maybe just talk a little bit about how you view this current shift with AI. Is it fundamentally different? Is it the same? Does it change how you think about yourself as a leader? Like, how is your view at a high level?

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

So the big thing is I'll start with API first. So obviously we become this API infrastructure company.

[Martin Casado]

Yeah, maybe we should just describe what Kong is right now before we actually do that.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

So we left with this pivot and we open sourced Kong. API Gateway took off and we became an enterprise company. We rebranded Kong Inc. And we started to build all sorts of API infrastructure to run, manage and secure your internal or external APIs. So you have software, you have microservices, you have ten hundred thousand of APIs. We are kind of this highways that makes them run and you have rate limiting. Like if APIs were a cars, you got guardrails, speed bump, speed cameras, gas stations, stalls, bumps, guardrails, everything ambulance. And we provide all the infrastructure to make sure that the API connectivity runs for small company, big company, all of that. Now in this transition you mentioned what really drove, I think this explosion of cloud APIs was the workload moving from on prem to the cloud. The second transition is breaking down the monolith to microservice. It recreates more and more APIs, the big data and all that. It creates event streaming, all that. So this just data in motion is much higher than. Is becoming, much higher than like data rest or data in use than before.

[Martin Casado]

But in a way, when you were starting the company, you were drafting on a big transition. Right. Which was the breaking down of the monolith and the shift to cloud. Right.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

And so that was the key. Yeah, I think before there were all these archive legacy solutions in APIs, but they were not built for the transition to the cloud and breaking down the monoliths into microservices and high scale, decentralized architecture. I mean, you know, from your time, an issue like, we kind of invented a control plane, data plane separation at the API management, API control plane level. Nobody was doing it before, I got.

[Martin Casado]

To say, I think a lot of people don't know or maybe don't appreciate how fast Kong grew when it actually happened. So there was seven years of starvation. Right. I mean, it was just basically wasn't working.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

No, actually. And you don't. You know, despite, like every year we do the Founders Award. Yeah, the founders award is 2555 stock to the best employee of the company.

[Martin Casado]

Yeah.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Why? That is 255 days of struggle every day, which is seven years.

[Martin Casado]

That's amazing.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

It's seven years.

[Martin Casado]

I didn't know that every year the.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Company has to go, they get 2055. It's just. It's just symbolic.

[Martin Casado]

Yeah.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Of course, to remember seven years of struggle every year is a ritual.

[Martin Casado]

And there was this crazy diving catch, which, you know, Marco does the greatest Kong, he throws it out on the market and it catches off. But once it did, the company grew incredibly quickly.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

We had 45 competitors when we started.

[Martin Casado]

Oh, I remember that. Yeah.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Now there's probably 30.

[Martin Casado]

But even then, at the time. Yeah. Well, Kong broke away pretty quickly. So, I mean, in recent years, it's clearly been the leader on this. And that only happens, I think, if there's just clearly a market need. The market also kind of did you a favor in that, like Mulesoft got acquired and Apogee got acquired too. Right?

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

It was. Right, yeah. 17. Mulesoft got acquired. Apigee got acquired in 16.

[Martin Casado]

That's right. Yeah. So like, in a way, kind of like there was consolidation and you broke out this leader. So you kind of navigated this transition from cloud to breaking up the microservices. You built the control plane for APIs. You're considered now the leader independent for sure, in the API space. Kong is the leader independent, there's no question of that. But now you're facing another market shift which is this movement to AI. And so do you view this as directly impactful, adjacent, accretive? How are you as CEO viewing this?

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Yeah, I think again it's not like was like any me does things, but the market came at us in AI by creating more APIs. What that means 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 labor, get us done through programming interface, whether it's classic APRS MCP protocols, which is like duolingo for APIs, makes them speak English, whatever it is the protocol. But machines consuming Internet is going to be very different than human consuming Internet. Human consuming Internet would be through ui. Machine consuming Internet, it's through programming interface. That's the huge shift that we are now capturing and powering and making sure the enterprise think about AI connectivity. And at the end of the day, behind the scene it's all APIs.

[Martin Casado]

We had that board meeting, what was it yesterday?

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Yes.

[Martin Casado]

And what I found actually pretty remarkable is how many more banal use cases there are around AI. We can talk about agents and I think it's worth talking about and I agree with you. But it also feels like there's a lot of just basic stuff like key management for a lot of the companies are spending a lot of money on these AI models. Right. So it's great to be able to have monitoring, billing, key rotations, all of that stuff. So you're actually seeing a non agentic draft now.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Yeah. So where I think the word is a bit of stack. Okay. You have these AI companies like poor that are just building models, yada yada, and then you have this wrapper company that are trying to solve HR issue, whatever through AI. Then you have these LLMs that have APIs to talks, companies like Entropy, a lot of revenue through APIs, all that. What is missing is the infrastructure to make those AI talks and run. And that's what we do now with the idea to a lot of products. But at the core the boring problem like you mentioned, authentication authorization, you can be AGI as much as you want, but at the end an agent gets stuck if he has to authenticate. And to authenticate you got to get an API key. You need a human in the loop to get the API key authenticate. But if you can provide infrastructure at the beginning. You can provision and automate key provision in key rotation authentication. So once you're there, you can unleash your LLM, your agents to just roam free without getting stuck every time for authentication authorization, because you're already provisioning all these keys. I think that's where we want to our customers.

[Martin Casado]

So maybe just assume for this part of our discussion that whoever's listening is pretty familiar with API infrastructure, right? Do you think that the way API infrastructure looks in six months or a year or two years is dramatically different because of AI? Or is it that the infrastructure that we have in place, that we understand today evolves to also service agents in ways that are pretty obvious? To what extent do you think this is transformational on the infrastructure layer versus more of a transition?

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

I think you cannot do AI if you're not API first. It's just you don't have the mouth in the years to a model. And so that's how AI talks. So the way we know about API 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 intelligence will be sold through tokens. Every earning release is about tokens. But behind on each token there are calls that payloads move tokens. So they're kind of converging. And what we are calling are building is a unified API and AI connectivity platform that helps you navigate this transition. As you're managing classic API traffic, as you're managing agent traffic, as you manage MCP traffic, as you manage LLM traffic, I think it will all converge into a unified like broker. That's how I think intelligence will move and based on evolutionary steps in like two, three years. But we really see MCP traffic growing every quarter.

[Martin Casado]

I mean I see even like really basic things like for developers, this is evolving very quickly. So for example, you know, for fun, I develop using cursor. You know, I used to be a professional developer. You know, in a previous life, Even knowing what APIs existed in a company required a ton of reading through docs or some weird search. And it feels like now especially like if you have have something like Kong, which has all the metadata and has the catalog, and then you can integrate into something like cursor. And so not only does the agent itself know about the APIs, but you can expose it to you. I mean it feels like a lot of like even the development paradigm is shifting now. Because we can start surface these things to developers.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Yeah, I think you can think we can be an enabler to help large companies, small companies to get into the hands of more developers or more coursers. Because it's all starting with API. We can provide you that infrastructures and all of that. As you see from Yase Burme, we have a very exciting roadmap that is going in that direction. So those are all enabled. I think here's the big bet. The big bet is what happened in micro because I grew up in Italy and you don't really study a lot of math, you just study histories. But what you learn from is that even it doesn't exactly repeat but it reads, it's just there's always an analog. So what we see with microservices what happens we first build rate limiting and authentication 10 times, 100 times, 50 times into the Python framework, the JavaScript framework, the TypeScript frame or the Java frame, whatever PHP, blah blah blah. At some point it didn't make any sense, let's abstract everything to a gateway pattern and we move all this connectivity logic to the gateway and that dispatch to the right service no matter what language. The same thing I think is going to happen in LLMs. At first you have one enterprise use one big LLM. Now they're going to use five, ten, hundred small LM, medium, large, whatever. Once you get to you don't do tokens relimiting token authentication in each LLM using the frame or the LangChain, whatever. Eventually same thing happening Microsoft, you will abstract that to a gateway partner once again. And that's where I think AI gateway will have the same analogy and dispatcher to write connectivity logic to the right levels rewriting in each of them. I think that's the big bet that we make that happens in microservices happens in how enterprise will run and Govern Hundreds of LLMs.

[Martin Casado]

Great. Well listen, as we wrap this up I think it'd be great to kind of end with like any sort of recommendations for people that are listening to learn a bit more about how kind of AI shifting the API landscape or maybe some advice on don't start a.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Company.

[Martin Casado]

Maybe advice on kind of like you know, how to start thinking about getting ready for that.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

I think I said before like there is a lot of focus on model pre training, tuning, all of that. But a key thing is the connectivity layer. How LLMs, agents, whatever will talk to each other, how you run. I think a lot of the traffic will be very strategic and yet to build in the startups of the enterprise to manage that AI connectivity into your next apps, your next internal tools, your next customers.

[Martin Casado]

And for the listen the budding founders that are listening to the most hardcore Silicon Valley story ever. What advice do you give to them?

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

I think what I learned over a decade of like do you ever think.

[Martin Casado]

I just have to do you ever think that like maybe you should have cut your losses and try to start it over again? Like do you ever think that that would have been the right thing?

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Never. No. Never. Never. The 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 cannot do that. And so that that never crossed through.

[Martin Casado]

Through the heads shivers that was so good.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

But never like that's that's the visual that every time I even start to I had that visual and immediately say I'm not going back like that and so and then but the thing to advice is it always take longer than what we thinks. It's 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 falling glitters because it's going to take longer than what you think as a leader, as a human, as a market, as a product, as a revenue is always going to take longer. So take something that lasts and just put 110% on it every day and then it will compound keep the bar rate low in the early days.

[Martin Casado]

Don't die.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Don't die. Like don't quit. Those are I think the things I learned along the way.

[Martin Casado]

AGI, it's been a privilege and an honor working with you these past few years and thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

[Augusto 'Aggie' Marietti]

Likewise. Thank you, Martin.

[Podcast Host/Narrator]

Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Follow us on x16z and subscribe to our [e-mail] thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only. Should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the company's discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com disclosures.