20VC: a16z's Martin Casado on Anthropic vs OpenAI: Where Value Accrues | Cursor vs Replit vs Lovable: Who Wins and Who Loses | The One Sin in AI Investing | Why Open Source is a National Security Risk with China

Summary

Summary of 20VC Episode: Martin Casado on AI Investing and Market Dynamics

Podcast Information:

• Title: The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
• Host: Harry Stebbings
• Guest: Martin Casado, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)
• Episode Release Date: July 28, 2025

---

1. Introduction

In this episode of The Twenty Minute VC, host Harry Stebbings engages in an in-depth conversation with Martin Casado, a prominent venture capitalist from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Martin brings his extensive experience in leading the firm's $1.25 billion infrastructure fund, with investments in groundbreaking companies like Cursor, DBT Labs, and Fivetran. The discussion delves into the current landscape of AI investing, market dynamics, open-source implications, and the future of venture capital in the rapidly evolving tech environment.

---

2. The One Sin in AI Investing: Zero-Sum Thinking

Martin Casado emphasizes the detrimental impact of zero-sum thinking in AI investing. He argues that viewing the market as a zero-sum game—where one player's gain is another's loss—limits the potential for value creation across different layers of the AI ecosystem.

Martin Casado [00:00]: "There's only been one sin, and that one sin is zero-sum thinking."

He underscores that every layer of the AI stack has the potential to generate value and that embracing a non-zero-sum perspective fosters a more collaborative and expansive market environment.

Martin Casado [05:10]: "Every layer has gotten value, every layer has winners. These markets are so large and they're growing so fast."

---

3. Open Source AI and National Security Risks

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the open-source movement in AI and its implications for national security, particularly concerning China's proficiency in leveraging open-source technologies.

Martin Casado [00:22]: "I think that right now, open source is most dangerous because China is better at it than we are."

He warns that the widespread availability of open-source AI models could empower adversarial nations, posing risks akin to those seen in cybersecurity. Martin suggests that the U.S. should bolster its open-source initiatives to counteract China's advancements.

Martin Casado [29:05]: "Right now open source is most dangerous because China is better at it than we are.... The right way for us to respond is to fuel our open-source efforts against that."

---

4. Market Dynamics: From Monopolies to Oligopolies

Martin draws parallels between the AI model market and the cloud computing industry, predicting a shift from potential monopolies to oligopolistic structures as more players enter the field.

Martin Casado [09:24]: "Oligopoly. This is how the cloud played out. I think probably the best analog we have is the cloud."

He explains that initial dominance by major players like AWS led to an oligopoly, a pattern he expects to replicate in the AI sector with multiple robust competitors.

Martin Casado [10:06]: "They just spent their way into it. And then you ended up with an oligopoly on the clouds."

---

5. The Role of Brand in AI Adoption

The conversation highlights the critical role of brand recognition in the adoption and success of AI models. Martin observes that during phases of rapid market expansion, brand leaders can establish significant market shares due to their household names.

Martin Casado [15:23]: "We actually talk about this a lot internally and here's one thesis... these markets are so large and they're growing so fast."

He cites examples like ChatGPT and MidJourney, which have become synonymous with their respective categories, leveraging brand effects to maintain leadership positions.

Martin Casado [16:12]: "Anthropic would love to have the same brand as ChatGPT as a household name. How do you reach that frontier?"

---

6. Venture Investing Strategies in AI

Martin discusses Andreessen Horowitz's (a16z) investment strategy, emphasizing the importance of ownership over mere pricing considerations. He outlines two primary approaches to investing in AI:

1. Specialization: Focusing on specific markets with strong networks and deep expertise.
2. Adaptability: Utilizing a broad array of funds and products to navigate the competitive and dynamic nature of the AI landscape.

Martin Casado [48:44]: "Everything comes down to ownership for us, not price."

He advises against relying solely on predicting market trends, advocating instead for thorough due diligence within viable spaces.

Martin Casado [55:05]: "I think it's philosophically different on the approach... you can't predict the future of technology adoption."

---

7. AI and Developer Productivity

The impact of AI on developer productivity is another focal point. Martin shares his transformation from being virtually unable to code effectively to leveraging AI tools like Cursor to streamline the development process.

Martin Casado [36:30]: "I just couldn't work without them... their ability to offload all of the shit I didn't want to learn is remarkable."

He notes that while AI enhances coding efficiency and reduces bug rates, it doesn't diminish the complexity of developing new frontier models, which still require deep technical expertise and innovative thinking.

Martin Casado [40:20]: "The hard thing isn't the two lines of code. That's actually quite easy... what's hard is the specific deployment environment and market."

---

8. Safety and Policy in AI Development

Safety in AI development is addressed with Martin reflecting on his background in cybersecurity and the parallels between historical internet security measures and current AI safety challenges.

Martin Casado [25:14]: "We have to fuel our open source efforts against that. Chinese open source can be a national security issue for sure."

He argues for leveraging historical insights from cybersecurity to guide AI safety policies, stressing the need for proactive measures rather than reactive fear-based approaches.

Martin Casado [27:48]: "We should draw on the information that we've learned from in the past and the approaches we've taken in the past."

---

9. Personal Insights and Reflections

Towards the end of the conversation, Martin offers personal anecdotes and reflections on work-life balance, the emotional toll of entrepreneurship, and the importance of stable relationships in professional success.

Harry Stebbings [59:00]: "I sold a very successful outcome from a company and I could have retired on that day. And I, I still have not taken a day off where I haven't worked since basically forever."

He shares his struggles with managing newfound wealth and the importance of staying grounded, highlighting the challenges faced by entrepreneurs even after achieving financial success.

Martin Casado [61:25]: "It's something I have to deal with all the time... it's important for us and you should value them and treat them as such."

---

10. Conclusion

The episode concludes with a rapid-fire segment where Martin and Harry share their candid thoughts on various topics, showcasing their straightforward and honest perspectives. Martin expresses optimism about the future of AI while acknowledging the inherent uncertainties and risks involved.

Harry Stebbings [58:21]: "Open source is bad for national security."

Harry Stebbings [58:30]: "Michael Tru... he's just remarkable."

Overall, Martin Casado provides a comprehensive overview of the current AI investment landscape, emphasizing the importance of strategic ownership, the nuanced role of open-source technologies, and the critical balance between innovation and security.

---

Notable Quotes:

• Zero-Sum Thinking:

  "There's only been one sin, and that one sin is zero-sum thinking." — Martin Casado [00:00]

• Open Source Danger:

  "I think that right now, open source is most dangerous because China is better at it than we are." — Martin Casado [00:22]

• Market Dynamics:

  "Oligopoly. This is how the cloud played out. I think probably the best analog we have is the cloud." — Martin Casado [09:24]

• Brand Recognition:

  "Anthropic would love to have the same brand as ChatGPT as a household name." — Martin Casado [16:12]

• Ownership Over Price:

  "Everything comes down to ownership for us, not price." — Martin Casado [48:44]

• AI and Developer Productivity:

  "Their ability to offload all of the shit I didn't want to learn is remarkable." — Martin Casado [36:30]

• AI Safety:

  "We should draw on the information that we've learned from in the past and the approaches we've taken in the past." — Martin Casado [27:48]

• Personal Reflections:

  "It's something I have to deal with all the time.... it's important for us and you should value them and treat them as such." — Martin Casado [61:25]

---

For a deeper dive into Martin Casado’s insights on AI investing and market strategies, listen to the full episode available on 20VC’s website or YouTube.

Transcript

[Martin Casado]

There's only been one sin, and that one sin is zero sum thinking. Oh, is this defensible? Oh, will this layer get margin?

[Harry Stebbings]

Will this layer get value?

[Martin Casado]

And the answer has kind of been unilaterally yes. The answer has been every layer has gotten value, every layer has winners. These markets are so large and they're.

[Harry Stebbings]

Growing so fast, we're actually seeing brand.

[Martin Casado]

Effects take place in this phase of model scaling. A lot of the approaches to scaling don't generalize. This gives a ton of room for the application developers to build their own models. I think that right now, open source is most dangerous because China is better at it than we are.

[Unknown Host]

This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now Stay is an incredible show with one of my favorite guests.

[Unknown Guest]

I've had him on before, but I.

[Unknown Host]

Thought there was no better person for this moment in time. So much crazy shit is happening in AI and I wanted his thoughts and clarity. Martin Casado, general partner at Andreessen, where he leads the firm's $1.25 billion infrastructure fund. Now at Andreessen, he's led investments in companies like Cursor, DBT Labs, fivetran, and many more incredible businesses. But before we dive into the show.

[Unknown Advertiser]

Today, I love seeing the team come together to make this show happen. What I don't love is trying to keep track of all the information, the data and the projects that we're working on across dozens of platforms, products and tools. That's why we use Coda, the all in one collaborative workspace that's helped 50,000 teams all over the world get on the same page. Offering flexibility of docs with the structure of spreadsheets, Coda facilitates deeper teamwork and quicker creativity. And their turnkey AI solution, the intelligence of Coder Brain is a game changer. Powered by Grammarly, Coda is entering a new phase of innovation and expansion, aiming to redefine productivity for the AI era. Whether you're a startup looking to organize the chaos while staying nimble, or an enterprise organization looking for better alignment, Coda matches your working style. Its seamless workspace connects to hundreds of your favorite tools, including Sales, Salesforce, Jira, Asana, and Figma, helping your teams transform their rituals and do more faster.

[Unknown Host]

Head over to Coda iO20VC right now and get six months off the team plan for startups for free. That's Coda. Coda IO 20 VC and get six months off the team plan for free. 20 VC and while Coda keeps our team sharp, Angellist keeps our fund sharper. If you're listening to 20 VC, you know we have a really freaking high bar. Well, Angellist is the modern platform used by the best in class venture funds where over 40% of top endowments and banks are LPs. Their customers include a top five venture firm 20VC and they now have, check this out, $171 billion of assets on the platform. They combine an all in one software platform with a dedicated service team that moves as fast as you do. One manager said this awesome quote, angellist feels like an extension of my fund. Another said angellist give me total peace of mind. The attention to detail, lightning fast response time and just real sense of ownership from the team are exactly what I need to stop worrying about back office ops. So if you're starting a new fund, don't be a moron. Just use Angellist. They're incredible. Head over to angellist.com 20vc to learn more. And once you've set up your fund the right way, it's time to make sure your startup's brand looks just as sharp. Have you heard about tech? It's the domain extension for startups with tech at their core. While most.coms are taken or cost as much as Bay Area rent, tech gives you a sharp, clean domain that tells the world exactly what you do. Don't settle for a long and awkward domain name, signal, focus, clarity and intent with your own tech domain. It's trusted by over 500,000 tech startups worldwide and just makes sense. You're building a tech startup and your domain should say it too. Go to www.get.tech20vc. That's 20 spelt out or your favorite registrar like GodAdd or Namecheap and grab your tech domain today. That's Get Tech 20 VC.

[Harry Stebbings]

You have now arrived at your destination.

[Unknown Guest]

Martin man, I love our conversations. I was so excited when you said.

You'D join me again. Thank you so much for doing this man.

[Harry Stebbings]

So excited to be here.

[Unknown Host]

Dude I frickin hate these how did.

[Unknown Guest]

You get into venture intro questions.

[Unknown Host]

So I just want to dive right in.

[Unknown Guest]

It is a frickin nuts time.

How do you evaluate where we're at today in the AI investing landscape?

Peak hype cycle.

[Unknown Host]

Great.

[Unknown Guest]

Super excited both.

How do you evaluate it?

[Martin Casado]

So I'm kind of of two minds of one mind is I do feel like my intuition doesn't really work like it has the last 20 years. It's just the future is very uncertain and one of the reasons is is because you know this is really the first time like software development and software.

[Harry Stebbings]

Creation is being disrupted.

[Martin Casado]

And so on one hand I was like, I don't really know what to think. On the other hand, observationally, there's only been one sin. And that one sin is zero sum thinking. We always worry about like, oh, is this defensible? Oh, will this layer get margin? Will this layer get value? And the answer has kind of been unilaterally yes. The answer has been every layer has gotten value, Every layer has winners. Things that we thought were silly are making money, it's been solved, there's profitable companies. I mean, the business case is there, et cetera. And so I think the one sin.

[Harry Stebbings]

Is not playing the game.

[Unknown Guest]

Do you agree with the playing the game on the field sentiment? And when we look back at 21, you know, I remember everyone was saying, playing the game on the field. I wish I hadn't played the game on the field to be transparent. Martin, do you agree that you have to play the game on the field in Mancha?

[Harry Stebbings]

I think behavior should follow business. It shouldn't follow Marx. And I think in 2021, behavior was following Marx. Right.

[Martin Casado]

It was like the public Marcus just.

[Harry Stebbings]

Decided these companies were valued a whole bunch.

[Martin Casado]

Tiger came in with a ton of.

[Harry Stebbings]

Money and deployed it a whole bunch.

[Martin Casado]

And so like, I think behavior following.

[Harry Stebbings]

Investment in Marx is a bad idea. But in this case, you have some of the fastest growing companies we've ever.

[Martin Casado]

Seen by users, by revenue. I mean, the amount of value that's.

[Harry Stebbings]

Kind of shifted to this is so significant. And so I think investors behavior should follow that. If not, I mean, what are we.

[Unknown Guest]

Doing when you think about shifting value Again, I'm diving right in. But this isn't our first gone roundabout. Like a lot of people have fun. And you said about kind of disruption of software development. There is a ton of players in the vibe coding space. They are predominantly all sitting on top of anthropic. Claude code is gaining more and more dominance. How do you think about these providers reliance on a tool that could eventually shut them off?

[Martin Casado]

There are two futures to code. In one future you've got anthropic as a monopoly. Another future you have, let's call it an oligopoly or maybe even a bit more of a market of these coding models. And they're just very different futures. And I think when you answer this.

[Harry Stebbings]

Question, you have to consider both of these.

[Martin Casado]

I will say the timing of this conversation you and I are having right now is like pretty soon after Cloud 4 launched and that's like a major model launch. And these models are so episodic. Every time one launches, everybody's like, it's the future, everything's going to happen. Like remember, like the whole Ghibli OpenAI launch and we're like, oh, image is going to change forever. And then it comes, we're excited and then it kind of, you know, passes. And maybe that'll happen here, maybe that won't, I don't know. But like, for sure, like our perception is colored by that launch. So let's consider both of these. I'm going to consider the first one. So historically models don't really keep much.

[Harry Stebbings]

Of an advantage because they're so easy to distill.

[Martin Casado]

And so we've even in the last week have seen launches of models Quinn and I forgot Kimmy, that came out and they're great and people like them.

[Harry Stebbings]

And they adopt them.

[Martin Casado]

And in that world where you continue to have new models from different providers, I would never count out Google, their.

[Harry Stebbings]

Coding models are fantastic.

[Martin Casado]

The rumor is that GPT5 coding is going to be great. So in this world where you've got lots of models coming out from lots of providers, providers, you need to have.

[Harry Stebbings]

A consumption layer that's independent, right?

[Martin Casado]

And so then all of these companies are going to add that consumption layer value like for example to non technical users or to Python users or to professional coders or whatever it is.

[Harry Stebbings]

And that's going to be a very healthy layer.

[Martin Casado]

The other features, let's assume that anthropic.

[Harry Stebbings]

Is just a monopoly on coding models.

[Martin Casado]

And in that case you have what.

[Harry Stebbings]

You normally have in these situations is.

[Martin Casado]

They will decide kind of where it's.

[Harry Stebbings]

Not profitable for them to enter or it'll change their business model.

[Martin Casado]

Like maybe they, they're like, listen, want to have the consumption layer but we're never going to be like an app dev tool company.

[Harry Stebbings]

It's just, it's a different sales motion, a different sales team and nobody knows where that stops.

[Martin Casado]

But they will put pressure on anybody.

[Harry Stebbings]

That they view in their core focus and they will do whatever that they can to either capture that margin or to capture that market share.

[Martin Casado]

I just think it's just the wrong time to have this conversation right after.

[Harry Stebbings]

A major model launch because like I.

[Martin Casado]

Said, these models are so episodic and we always think like, we always assume.

[Harry Stebbings]

Every time a model launches it's going to be a monopoly and it just really hasn't been the case.

[Unknown Guest]

Going to your zero sum thinking, if you were to put a bet on which future is more likely, which future do you think is more likely?

[Harry Stebbings]

Oligopoly.

[Martin Casado]

This is how the cloud played out. I think probably the best analog we.

[Harry Stebbings]

Have is the cloud, right?

[Martin Casado]

The other companies that are behind models.

[Harry Stebbings]

Can subsidize these things arbitrarily. I think about Gemini and they don't have to do this in a way.

[Martin Casado]

Where they have the same economics as an independent company. And so if you look at how the cloud, remember the cloud AWS was.

[Harry Stebbings]

Like 70 or 80% market share early on. Nobody thought they could ever catch up to them.

[Martin Casado]

They were the massive market leaders that created the category. I mean they had way more dominance.

[Harry Stebbings]

Than Anthropic has now.

[Martin Casado]

And Microsoft and Google, like, you know, that's an important big market, we have to be in it.

[Harry Stebbings]

And they just basically spent their way into it. And then you ended up with a noligopoly on the clouds.

[Martin Casado]

I see no reason.

[Harry Stebbings]

I mean Gemini 2.5 is a great model.

[Martin Casado]

It's a great model and if you actually look at it on the price.

[Harry Stebbings]

Performance, I would say in many use cases it's the one that I actually use as my standard model. It's better than Anthropic if you actually take into account price performance.

[Martin Casado]

And Google can arbitrarily subsidize that too. Never count out OpenAI.

[Harry Stebbings]

They started the party.

[Martin Casado]

They haven't had a major model release.

[Harry Stebbings]

In a while, certainly around code. So that's going to show up. And so I just feel like the.

[Martin Casado]

Players, the money behind the players. The fact that these models distill this.

[Harry Stebbings]

Will end up in an oligopoly.

[Unknown Guest]

To what extent do you think the large model providers in 10 years time have already been created or are they yet to be founded?

[Martin Casado]

I think that you end up with models with different flavors and there's going to be a lot of new flavor.

[Harry Stebbings]

Models that will come out.

[Martin Casado]

You know, Mira and Ilya are out there creating models. You've got these very legit teams that.

[Harry Stebbings]

Were some of the pioneers.

[Martin Casado]

We're just starting up models for the sciences. And as you get more into RL territory, these models really get a certain flavor. They don't generalize nearly as much. And so like that's going to naturally from a technical perspective, perspective fragment the models. And so I would say the core base model for like language, search and code, it's still so early. I mean it's very, very early in the super cycle. In previous super cycles, remember it took.

[Harry Stebbings]

Two or three generations for the winners to emerge.

[Martin Casado]

I mean Google was third generation search, Facebook was third generation social networking.

[Harry Stebbings]

Remember there's MySpace there was Friendster and then MySpace before that.

[Martin Casado]

And so there's a lot of change to come. But I do think that Both Anthropic and OpenAI have done a remarkable job.

[Harry Stebbings]

With brand independence and market share.

[Martin Casado]

And so I suspect they'll continue to.

[Harry Stebbings]

Be stalwarts in the industry.

[Unknown Guest]

Are you in either of them?

[Martin Casado]

We're investors in OpenAI.

[Harry Stebbings]

Yeah.

[Unknown Guest]

Do you think models are fundamentally good investments for venture firms? When you look at employee stock compensation and the dilution that comes from it and then the dilutive nature of the.

[Unknown Host]

Businesses, it's a hard sell.

[Martin Casado]

Okay, so if there's one thing I've learned, honestly, for anybody that's listening to.

[Harry Stebbings]

This, this would be worth, like, your time.

[Martin Casado]

There is no one way to think of AI and there is no, like.

[Harry Stebbings]

One way to think about models.

[Martin Casado]

And the models themselves are entirely different.

[Harry Stebbings]

Businesses, depending on how you talk about the models.

[Martin Casado]

So to even answer that question, we.

[Harry Stebbings]

Have to tease apart what you mean by model.

[Martin Casado]

So, for example, if you look at the diffusion models, say, like 11 Labs Midjourney, Black Forest Labs, Ideogram, these are wonderful businesses that have great economics because the models are smaller, the ecosystem isn't subsidized in the same way Google subsidizes language and code and video, but not speech. And so from an investor, these are clearly great investments because, you know, if you just look on a metrics alone, on the other hand, the frontier language space, it's much more complicated because there's so much subsidization, Meta and Google, a bunch of Chinese players that are entering it. So for a subset of the players, and this is why it's a tricky question, for a subset of the players.

[Harry Stebbings]

You'Re like, yeah, clearly these are the.

[Martin Casado]

Fastest growing companies we've ever seen. There's tons of value.

[Harry Stebbings]

These are very valuable entities. Right? You know, anthropic OpenAI, but at the.

[Martin Casado]

Same time, even three years in, there have already been a number of companies.

[Harry Stebbings]

That have had to exit early.

[Martin Casado]

And so I would say it's kind of a high stakes game where the winners really win, but, like, it requires a lot of capital to enter the game. And if you're not in one of.

[Harry Stebbings]

The leaders, like that, capital is forfeit.

[Unknown Guest]

We do a show every week with Rory o' Driscoll and Jason Lemkin. And Rory, very aptly, I think, just said, listen, with the transition to AI, every investor's just accepted a willingness to go massively up the risk curve on investing. Do you agree with that?

[Martin Casado]

I think it's the requirement of the game. These are very capital intensive companies to build. They have to get the capital from somewhere. They're also the fastest growing companies. You know, for the winners it's justified. And so I think it's not that investors are willing to go up. I mean we'd be very happy not to.

[Harry Stebbings]

I mean, I know you would. Right. It'd be great to have great returns with low risk, but the nature of the system and the game which we're playing requires it.

[Martin Casado]

By the way, this is the dissonance in all of this. It's just so important to call out, which is on one hand you do have these great businesses that are very fast growing and zero sum thinking has been tremendously wrong.

[Harry Stebbings]

I mean, Nvidia is continuing to grow in value.

[Martin Casado]

The hosting providers, which everybody wrote off as being kind of non defensible business, continue to grow in value. The model companies, which I can't tell.

[Harry Stebbings]

You how many investors wrote off the models.

[Martin Casado]

I mean this question's been around for three years. They continue to grow in value. So every layer of the stack continues.

[Harry Stebbings]

To grow in value.

[Martin Casado]

So on one hand you're like, it's all working, you should be in the leaders on every, you know, in every layer of the stack. On the other hand we've seen tons of wipeouts already for the non leaders. And so it's almost this bipolar or paradoxical situation where you kind of have.

[Harry Stebbings]

To play but it's very, very high risk.

[Martin Casado]

And if you don't play, I mean, you're kind of missing one of the fastest growths in value that we've seen.

[Harry Stebbings]

In what, 20 years.

[Unknown Guest]

Do you think you see the concentration of value to one or two players across markets? In every market, whether you look at Voice, it's, you know, obviously your 11 labs. Whether you look at it, it's kind of a replied and lovable and open AI and anthropic curse.

[Harry Stebbings]

This is such a great question.

[Martin Casado]

This is such a great question. So, so here's one thesis. It's so early, we don't know and maybe in a month all this gets proven wrong. But we actually talk about this a lot internally and here, here's one thesis and this is the one that I'm attached to which is these markets are so large and they're growing so fast.

[Harry Stebbings]

We'Re actually seeing brand effects take place.

[Martin Casado]

And we haven't seen that since the Internet. And by brand effects I mean if you become the household name, you will get the adoption because it just does not require a lot of education. It does not require a lot of competitive discussion or competitive positioning in the field for many of these models, I mean, is one better than the other? Yeah, maybe, but they're pretty close.

[Harry Stebbings]

But like, people know ChatGPT, it's like.

[Martin Casado]

It'S a household name.

[Harry Stebbings]

My mom knows ChatGPT.

[Unknown Guest]

Honestly, why did I do lovable? For the exact same reason that ChatGPT wins. I thought it was the consumer brand.

[Martin Casado]

That would win 100%. And I just think these markets are so large, brand effects work. I mean, let's talk about mid journey.

[Harry Stebbings]

Midjourney was the first that got above the quality bar. It's taken zero investment from institutions.

[Martin Casado]

It's still the market leader and it continues to do great. And this is meanwhile what a bunch of other people have entered, entered the market. And so I do think it's not unreasonable to assume that these markets are very large. Leaders are going to have brand monopolies and brand moats, and they'll be able to maintain them until things slow down. And in general, I've found markets do this, which is. So markets tend to expand and then contract, right?

[Harry Stebbings]

Think about cloud, right?

[Martin Casado]

It's. It was kind of like this funny thing, and it became very massive. And then of course, it slows down. When it slows down, then you have the consolidation and then, you know, competitive dynamics come in. I mean, we're clearly in a massive market expanse phase.

[Harry Stebbings]

It's just very clearly the case, and.

[Martin Casado]

In which case the leaders are going to continue to have, you know, a.

[Harry Stebbings]

Distribution advantage just through brand recognition.

[Unknown Guest]

When does that tail off or does.

It not tail off? When does the importance of brand and brand recognition dwindle and product prioritization or product quality trample?

[Martin Casado]

I mean, I think it's as soon as the market growth slows down. Take cloud as an example.

[Unknown Host]

Do you think these are actually tools.

[Unknown Guest]

Of market growth or actually just consumer intrigue, which is. There's a lot of people who want to try building a website on Replit or Lovable or Bolt or any of them.

[Unknown Advertiser]

There's a lot of people who want.

[Unknown Guest]

To try voice with 11 labs.

To what extent is it market intrigue.

Versus expansion of market?

[Martin Casado]

Well, I just think the expansion of market provides the dynamic so that you don't saturate the user with competing messages. The idea of market expansion is the frontier continues to expand, and the first thing the frontier hears is the household names. And so the household names win. You know, that's a natural artifact of expansion. As soon as, like the expansion slows, then that frontier is going to Hear both names and then all of a sudden now you're in a discussion of.

[Harry Stebbings]

Which one to use and not to use.

[Martin Casado]

For the longest time when the cloud market was expanding, everybody knew AWS, it was the leader, it was 70, 80% market share. And then as soon as that growth slowed down, then all of a sudden.

[Harry Stebbings]

Market share started to shift dramatically and it just wasn't obvious. Do you do gcp, do you do Azure, et cetera.

[Martin Casado]

But I would say that's less an artifact of the fact that Google, Microsoft decided to enter the game and much more that the market growth itself started to slow down.

[Unknown Guest]

So we see market growth slow down and then we see the dispersion of value across players more so that's right.

[Martin Casado]

So, so, so the market slows down and once that happens, the frontier, it becomes more saturated just because we're not adding people as much. And so they will get more of the educated message, they'll start making more decisions and you can have more of a conversation like of course Anthropic would love to have the Same brand as ChatGPT as a household name. How do you reach that frontier? You know, if it's growing that fast, it's just, it's operationally tough to do. Kind of the only way that you do it is, is just through brand.

[Harry Stebbings]

Recognition, which is kind of this word of mouthy type thing. It's like on every podcast and you know, the friends and, and, and so.

[Martin Casado]

I do think, I do think we're seeing brand effects happen now. And we saw these in the early Internet. The brand leader tends to get 80% of the market. It just tends to break out Pareto for a while and then over time it'll slow down and these things even out.

[Harry Stebbings]

Based more on product differentiation.

[Unknown Guest]

How do you factor that into your thinking when investing today?

[Harry Stebbings]

Well, you just try to invest in.

[Martin Casado]

The leader and it's worth, and it's.

[Harry Stebbings]

Worth paying up for the leader, honestly.

[Martin Casado]

I mean it's. For me, I ask two questions. Question number one is like for the.

[Harry Stebbings]

Area that it's focused on, is it the leader? If it is, it's definitely worth paying up.

[Martin Casado]

And then the second one is the story actually has been that in a competitive space, almost everybody just found kind.

[Harry Stebbings]

Of a new niche white space.

[Martin Casado]

So let's just take the example of OpenAI. I mean, OpenAI was the first to.

[Harry Stebbings]

Code with GitHub Copilot. I mean they provided the weights and they lost that.

[Martin Casado]

And they were first to image with Dall E and they lost that and they were the first to video with Sora.

[Harry Stebbings]

And as far as I can tell, they lost that.

[Martin Casado]

And yet they're still the massively dominant.

[Harry Stebbings]

Player in language and continue to be so and will be so.

[Martin Casado]

And arguably that was the right thing for them because that's by far the.

[Harry Stebbings]

Largest market by far. And so OpenAI acted totally rationally and.

[Martin Casado]

Has the largest market. But that gave the ability for midjourney.

[Harry Stebbings]

To take image or BFL to take image. Google seems to have grabbed video with VO3 code.

[Martin Casado]

I mean, on the model side, Anthropic.

[Harry Stebbings]

Has turned that into, you know, this wonderful business.

[Martin Casado]

And so when markets expand, not only do you have these brand effects that we were talking about, they also tend to fracture a bunch. And what seems to have been a.

[Harry Stebbings]

Submarket will emerge as a leading market.

[Martin Casado]

And you even see this kind of.

[Harry Stebbings]

On the image side, right?

[Martin Casado]

You've got a bunch of viable image.

[Harry Stebbings]

Players that focus on different things, right? Like Ideogram is great for designers, a professional design community.

[Martin Casado]

BFL is the open source community, especially for developers that use these things in products. And then midjourney is for, you know, more of the fantasy, you know, also professional designers. But it's a very stylized kind of opinionated view. And all of these are independent, viable companies. So I think we're going to see.

[Harry Stebbings]

Fragmentation for quite a while before we see consolidation.

[Unknown Guest]

I need your advice. You know, Abridge in the us I'm not sure if you're in it, but I'm sure you know it very simple. As a European player that does like medical transcription for nurses, they went from 1 to 8 million in a year. And we're looking at leading their A. And I'm thinking exactly the same. You're going up against Abridge because you're going to need to compete in the US if this is going to be a big business. Is that a losing game where you are a European competitor?

[Harry Stebbings]

This is a great question.

[Martin Casado]

So another very interesting thing that we.

[Harry Stebbings]

Haven'T seen in a very long time.

[Martin Casado]

Is we do have geographic biases showing.

[Harry Stebbings]

Up with AI and the regulatory environments are quite Balkanized.

[Martin Casado]

You know, there's language and cultural biases.

[Harry Stebbings]

That are also balkanized.

[Martin Casado]

And so we're actually seeing a lot.

[Harry Stebbings]

Of regional players show up. And so I think it's very legitimate.

[Martin Casado]

Now, the thesis cannot be European company.

[Harry Stebbings]

X wins the American market.

[Martin Casado]

But I promise when it comes to.

[Harry Stebbings]

AI, the European market is large enough. I promise that. And so I think a very legit thesis is this becomes a regional player in Europe and then maybe a portion of the US market.

[Unknown Guest]

Can I ask you, a lot of people denigrate these businesses that we've discussed because of their margins. They're simply pass through funnels to the large language models. Do you think that is something that changes over time? And it's the same for all great businesses. Uber started off with shit margins, now.

They have better margins.

[Martin Casado]

I just don't buy that these are.

[Harry Stebbings]

Endemic to the business model. Like this is certainly not my experience at all.

[Martin Casado]

And so there's always this question, if.

[Harry Stebbings]

You'Re a founder and you get access to relatively cheap private capital and you.

[Martin Casado]

Can do a trade off between margins.

[Harry Stebbings]

And distributions and it's land grab time, what would you do?

[Martin Casado]

And the argument is the incremental user.

[Harry Stebbings]

Someone you can monetize forever down the road.

[Martin Casado]

And then if you don't get that.

[Harry Stebbings]

User during landground, you could never monetize it. The rational business decision is to sacrifice margin for distribution. It's just the rational business decision. And we've seen this forever.

[Martin Casado]

I mean, hell, the web wasn't even monetized literally. I mean like this time we can actually monetize these things. Forget like break even or negative margins. That was literally like massively negative because we didn't even have a business model.

[Harry Stebbings]

Until advertisements come up.

[Martin Casado]

So this is like the most rational thing that markets have been doing, at least tech markets forever. And it's no different this time with AI. I do think there's a question of, okay, so if you do want to then turn on margins, how do you.

[Harry Stebbings]

How do you do it?

[Martin Casado]

You'll either have to build a traditional moat, two sided marketplace, a brand moat, the long tail kind of integration and domain understanding. So for example, let's say your healthcare company, if they really crack the European market and they understand all the regulation like anthropic is not going to take.

[Harry Stebbings]

The time to do that, you know.

[Martin Casado]

So there's clearly pricing power you have on that side or you have to do actual technical differentiation. One thing that we're learning is in this phase of model scaling, a lot of the approaches to scaling don't generalize. So if I want to be much better at like coding, I may not be so good at something else. This gives a ton of room for the application developers to build their own models that service certain areas that the.

[Harry Stebbings]

Large models just aren't focused on.

[Martin Casado]

And so I think there's even a.

[Harry Stebbings]

Ton of technical level to differentiate.

[Martin Casado]

So my sense is most of these companies that are like, let's say breakeven margins, it's like A board level specific choice to prioritize distribution. Not just because this is systemically something.

[Harry Stebbings]

They have to do.

[Unknown Guest]

We mentioned their sovereignty. I am intrigued how you think about safety and safety around AI and models. We've had vinoncosa be like, we have to lock this down. If this was not locked down, it would be like nuclear secrets being handed out. I remember then model Mark came and was like, fuck that.

No way.

How do you feel about the future of safety within this landscape?

[Martin Casado]

I mean, it's crazy to have VCs.

[Harry Stebbings]

Talking against open source, right?

[Martin Casado]

I mean, founders Fund, pro innovation, sectors of the economy, academia too have decided.

[Harry Stebbings]

That like open, transparent innovation is somehow an antithesis of safety.

[Martin Casado]

And I know that's not what you.

[Harry Stebbings]

Asked, but like, I just want to make the point.

[Martin Casado]

It's just a. We're. We were in very bizarro land for.

[Harry Stebbings]

A while and it seems like we're coming out of that now.

[Martin Casado]

So let me just draw a bit of a.

[Unknown Guest]

Do you think we're coming out of that? I think we're moving more and more into that. Meta and Alex are going to turn Llama fully closed.

[Martin Casado]

Great. So let's go back to that in just one second. I want to answer the question because you actually asked a great question on how I view this. And let's go to whether we're coming out or not.

[Harry Stebbings]

So how do I think about safety?

[Martin Casado]

I was actually very, very close to security during the rise of the Internet. I worked for the intelligence community. I worked for Livermore National Labs. And then, you know, when I did.

[Harry Stebbings]

My PhD, like 50% of my work was in security.

[Martin Casado]

I taught cybersecurity policy course. And the thing with the Internet is you had these very specific examples of new types of attacks that like impacted nation states, like critical infrastructure would go down. You know, you'd have things like the Morris worm. Like, you know, I mean, you had these really significant examples and that kind of kicked off this large discussion on how you handle it. And it was so significant at the time that at the nation state level, you know, we started thinking that we have to actually change our, our doctrine. You know, you were kind of this Cold War era mutually assured destruction. We had to change it to this notion of like defense asymmetry, which meant the more we relied on these things.

[Harry Stebbings]

The more vulnerable we were. Right.

[Martin Casado]

As opposed to like a country that didn't rely on them because you could be attacked. And then of course kind of the whole terrorist information warfare stuff. And so, so the implications were so absolute. And you had so many proof points, and you could articulate them incredibly well. And so if you look at the AI stuff for every computer system, you have security considerations. But we've got this 30, 40 year, very robust discourse around this that we can draw from and use from. And the thing that I don't understand is how all of a sudden we've decided that these are not computer systems, they don't obey the same laws, and we have to kind of throw out everything that we've learned and kind of like revisit the discourse, even though we don't even have the same proof points. I mean, like, nobody can make a.

[Harry Stebbings]

Strong argument on asymmetry or need a shift to doctrine.

[Martin Casado]

And if they can, let's go ahead.

[Harry Stebbings]

And have that discussion.

[Martin Casado]

You know, I still have yet to see the dramatic new attack. It's going to come for sure, but.

[Harry Stebbings]

We haven't seen it yet.

[Martin Casado]

And so I just feel like the discourse around this is not in line.

[Harry Stebbings]

With the reality, it's not in line with historical precedents.

[Martin Casado]

And so we should absolutely take these.

[Harry Stebbings]

Things seriously, but we should draw on the information that we've learned from in the past and the approaches we've taken in the past.

[Martin Casado]

The biggest difference this time is in the past, the people creating the technology were kind of pro tech and the people that were like selling security solutions.

[Harry Stebbings]

Were like the fear mongers, right?

[Martin Casado]

So you'd have somebody create like the Internet and they're like, this is safe and it's great for everybody. But then you'd have somebody to create a firewall and like, oh, the Internet's dangerous. Every sociopath, your next door neighbor. So you had both the same voices, but in two different bodies based on interest. The interesting thing this time is they're in the same body. So the person that's creating the thing is also like, oh, this thing is very dangerous. I don't recall the last time we had something like that. But it's created a dynamic that's just.

[Harry Stebbings]

Been very confusing for everyone.

[Unknown Guest]

Do you not think open source increases the opportunity set for hostile actors like China and Russia to harm us?

[Martin Casado]

I think it's tautologically true. I think tautologically you can say, do you believe computers and the availability of computers increase their ability to harness And I'd say absolutely. Computers and availability of computers do, but.

[Unknown Guest]

Very specifically open source over closed source.

[Martin Casado]

So I think that right now open source is most dangerous because China is better at it than we are. And as a result of that, we're seeing a proliferation of Chinese open source.

[Harry Stebbings]

Models everywhere.

[Martin Casado]

Now, unfortunately, we don't have control over Chinese regulation. And so I would say the answer is yes, because of China, not because of us. And the right way for us to respond is to fuel our open source efforts against that. Chinese open source can be a national.

[Harry Stebbings]

Security issue for sure.

[Martin Casado]

And any of the software that produced.

[Harry Stebbings]

By a nation state that we view, you know, quasi adversarially, the way that.

[Martin Casado]

We combat that is we also are incredibly open and we also do a proliferation of technology.

[Unknown Guest]

What do you think we can learn from China, regulatory wise that would enable us to have the same or better open source ecosystem environments?

[Harry Stebbings]

You know, the United States has a long history of being pro innovation. Pro innovation for national security, pro innovation for national defense. I think we should be funding this stuff like crazy. I think we should get the national labs involved, we should get academia involved. You know, we should make this a national priority just like China does. And we should just, you know, a full throated endorsement of all of this stuff. I think we should do closed stuff. I think we should dope and stuff. And we've done this forever.

[Martin Casado]

My first job out of college, this is, you know, 1999, was working at Lawrence Livermore National Labs and the ASCII program. And what were we doing then? We were, I mean, the broad program.

[Harry Stebbings]

Was stipulating nuclear weapons. I mean, this is what it was.

[Martin Casado]

And a lot of the, the concerns we have today were concerns we had then around computer. I mean, we actually stopped Saddam hussein from importing PlayStations because we were worried about using them for simulation. We'd put export controls on the hardware and we'd say the same things like, oh, you know, computers out there, like computers, you know, they're going to enable the enemies and all sorts of stuff. And this is like nuclear weapons. This isn't like some abstract AI thing. This is like actual, actual on the ground weapons. The posture that we took at the time and the conclusion is we're just going to be the leaders in all.

[Harry Stebbings]

Of this stuff, stuff.

[Martin Casado]

And we funded academia, we funded the labs and we won and we were able to control like the technical discourse of the planet going forward. And this time instead we want to put our head in the sand and.

[Harry Stebbings]

Let somebody else do it.

[Martin Casado]

So like they're going to learn from our, our success and somehow we're not.

[Unknown Guest]

Do Trump's cuts to universities, research labs not impact your ability to do what you just said? You not actively going against what you should be doing?

[Harry Stebbings]

I am very pro investing in academia and in the national labs.

[Martin Casado]

I think there's always a political shift in money depending on what they view is in line with administration. You know, I, you know, I did.

[Harry Stebbings]

My PhD at Stanford.

[Martin Casado]

I've done a bunch of NSF grants. I don't remember ever somebody saying we like indirect costs. Every researcher, every professor, every single one was like, indirect costs are terrible. Obama, Obama tried to get rid of indirect costs. He's like, you know what universities, they have a tax exempt status, so why don't we just have them, you know, spend 5% of their endowments. Any other tax exempt organization, you know, that will cover a lot of indirect costs. And he couldn't get it through. So this is a bi kind of partisan issue that is longstanding. I would say that like a change is needed. I think these things are very hard to implement. But I would say concretely, yes, we should invest in these things. Yes, we need a shift in how funding happens. I do think that indirect costs have gotten way out of hand. And until it was like Trump doing it, everybody that I know in academia totally agreed. But yes, of course change and shifts.

[Harry Stebbings]

In funding will be disruptive. And so I think all things are true.

[Martin Casado]

I just don't want to do it. I don't want to do this to a simple like, like Trump does bad.

[Harry Stebbings]

Things because I don't think that is the case.

[Martin Casado]

And then funding science is arbitrarily good.

[Harry Stebbings]

Because I don't think that's the case. I mean, I definitely think we should.

[Martin Casado]

Fund as much or more. I definitely think that shift in funding.

[Harry Stebbings]

And change to the system is needed and the right path through that is complex. I don't quite know it.

[Unknown Guest]

You very kindly said that.

I asked a good question on the reversion back to closed source. When we mentioned Alex joining Meta, what it meant for Llama, I said quite zero sum wise to your point. We're clearly seeing a movement back towards closed and away from open. How do you see that and do you disagree with my statement there on the transition?

[Martin Casado]

I agree on the ground 100% that.

[Harry Stebbings]

I think we're seeing a movement away from open source. But the rhetoric around open source has shifted. Right? I mean, we just had the AI.

[Martin Casado]

Policy and recommendations as a full throated.

[Harry Stebbings]

Endorsement for open source. So I think discourse wise, there's more support for open source than ever before. I think ecosystem wise, you're right. I do think it's quite likely that we're going to see less open Source. Now listen, OpenAI has said that they're.

[Martin Casado]

Going to open source.

[Harry Stebbings]

That would be wonderful. And if they do that. I think that would be very, very positive.

[Unknown Guest]

Do you think they will?

[Harry Stebbings]

I have no idea. I hope so.

[Martin Casado]

We say open source, but it's such.

[Harry Stebbings]

A misnomer when it comes to AI.

[Martin Casado]

I mean, the standard model of open sourcing AI is you open source, the smaller model and you keep the more.

[Harry Stebbings]

Capable model, closed source.

[Martin Casado]

And it's a way that you get.

[Harry Stebbings]

Distribution and brand recognition, but you don't actually erode your business.

[Martin Casado]

This has been very, very successful as a business model. And unlike actual software open source, just because you release your model doesn't mean.

[Harry Stebbings]

Somebody can replicate it.

[Martin Casado]

Like to replicate it, you'd have to.

[Harry Stebbings]

Recreate the data pipeline and the training pipeline.

[Martin Casado]

And so I think that there's just a lot of concern of investing hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of.

[Harry Stebbings]

Dollars to train something and then just giving all of that away.

[Martin Casado]

Very confident that the business justification is.

[Harry Stebbings]

There and behavior will always follow business.

[Martin Casado]

And we're going to continue to see.

[Harry Stebbings]

Open source be a large part of the ecosystem.

[Martin Casado]

And remember, historically, open source has only.

[Harry Stebbings]

Been about 20% of the total market value. I would say it's much higher than that for AI.

[Martin Casado]

So in a way we're doing better.

[Harry Stebbings]

Than software has historically.

[Unknown Guest]

What did you believe about the AI landscape that you now no longer believe? We've touched on so many different elements. My mindsets have changed around so many.

[Martin Casado]

I mean, the one for me that.

[Harry Stebbings]

I've just, I've just consistently got wrong is just how fast these coding models advance. And this is probably just sunk cost fallacy. My entire life, I've just been this nerdy program and programming since the 90s. I mean, it's like, it's my happy place. And I just never thought that they would advance to the level that they, they have.

[Martin Casado]

I mean, I still develop most evenings.

[Harry Stebbings]

And it's just, you know, instead of watching a sitcom, I just goof off and mostly writing like old video games or whatever, just for fun. Like it's, it's silly stuff.

[Martin Casado]

And I'm already at the point that I just, I just couldn't work back.

[Harry Stebbings]

To working without them.

[Martin Casado]

And I've spent, you know, 30 years without them and it's just their ability to offload all of the shit I.

[Harry Stebbings]

Didn'T want to learn is remarkable.

[Martin Casado]

The thing that kept me away from code for a while, which is I would, I would kind of dabble with it, I would drop it, is you have to just learn all of this, like all these weird frameworks. None of the knowledge is foundational. It's just like some random dev came up with some weird way to do something and you've got to kind of of learn some poor design decision to do it. And none of it made any fucking sense. And it just felt like you're wasting your brain space on poor decisions made by random open source developers.

[Harry Stebbings]

And that was programming in the past.

[Martin Casado]

Let me just put it in context. In, in the late 90s, programming was you download your IDE, you'd sit down your computer, you program something, it would turn into a binary and then you'd run that binary. And so like you could like really get a lot done just by sitting down and writing code. I would say like 2015 or so. You know, writing with something is like, you'd have to like, like download like 50 million packages and like to run it. You got to run some stupid dev server and to like actually have anybody else use it, you gotta like learn how to host it. And it was a bunch of libraries that were like dealing with incompatibilities for all. This is a weird platform. So like 90% of your time had nothing to do with code. Like 90% of your time was just dealing with all the environment platform bullshit. And so what's so nice now is you can just focus on your code. So like now I literally just, I.

[Harry Stebbings]

Mean I use cursor and I just.

[Martin Casado]

Have like the AI tell me how to host the thing and tell me what package to use and whatever. And I just strictly focus on what.

[Harry Stebbings]

I want in the logic. And so it's almost like it's brought coding back.

[Martin Casado]

And, and you can see this across the industry. Like all of like I've got, I mean I grew up in the industry. I know a bunch of very strong developers that have been developing for a very long time that have basically stopped. They're like running companies now or whatever.

[Harry Stebbings]

And they're all back to programming at night.

[Martin Casado]

And I, I really think that, you know how like there's like the adage of like, I don't know, like the old man that goes into the garage and like makes the train set for like nostalgic reasons. I think like the, the modern version of it is these old systems programmers like vibe coding at night just because.

[Harry Stebbings]

It'S become pleasant again.

[Martin Casado]

And so I know you asked about the thing that's kind of surprised me the most, but I, I really think.

[Harry Stebbings]

Is such a marvel what these coding models are able to do.

[Martin Casado]

And they add very real value.

[Unknown Guest]

Do you think they make 1x engineers 10x or 10x engineers 100x?

[Harry Stebbings]

10X engineers 100x would be what I said.

[Martin Casado]

But I don't, I don't actually think it's that.

[Harry Stebbings]

I think they make 10x engineers 2x. I would say every company I work with uses cursor.

[Martin Casado]

And then if I actually look at has that increased the velocity of the products coming out? I don't think that much.

[Unknown Guest]

So what's changing then? Because dev productivity is going up, so is the quality of product going up. If the product release cadence isn't.

[Martin Casado]

I just think the things that are hard remain really hard. So let's say I'm creating a new.

[Harry Stebbings]

Model, a new frontier model.

[Martin Casado]

And to create that new frontier model I've got to collect data and I've got to run a pipeline and I've got to like sit with my, my jupyter notebook and I've got to like look at the loss curves and I've got to rerun it. That's just a lot of kind of experimentation and you know, there's no coding model that's going to do that for you. But, but if I wanted to run create tests or a test suite or visualization or. Right. Documentation is actually really good at that. And so I would say that probably in the long run having more robust maintainable code bases with less bugs is just as likely to be the impact as feature velocity. Because you know, in startups, again, I'm an infra guy. This is probably different for the apps. Like I've always thought apps had no technology to begin with. Like every time I look at vertical SaaS I'm like, why do we even care about the technical team? It's fucking crud, man. It's like crud is like create, you know, read, update, delete. It's like they all do the same thing. They all just kind of look like a web app. Who cares about the technology? The technology is simple. These are all these kind of go to market things and whatever. But infrastructure is different. Infrastructure is like very real trade offs in the design space that only somebody that understands computer science would know. So for infrastructure companies I think it's quite unlikely that AI will really help speed that up because it comes down to something that the developer has to decide on, has to articulate the trade off. But I do think it could really help with the development process so you have less bugs and things like that. And so I actually view it more as like a more robust development methodology that necessarily speeds up the core product.

[Unknown Guest]

Given the kind of dev productivity changes that occur because of these tools. How does that Impact defensibility within companies today. If time to copy it, which is Misha at Fiver said this on the show. He said time to copy has basically been reduced to nothing. To what extent does that change defensibility for companies?

[Martin Casado]

I still think we should just go back to the split between apps and infrastructure for apps. How long does it take to copy it anyways? I mean you know that there are entire companies that their stated purpose is just to copy another company in the app space. It's just so easy to do. I mean there is no core technology for random app. I mean there's no like differentiation technology for random app. Let's say that you're creating, I don't know, some healthcare vertical SaaS thing like, like you could contract and you have been forever. The actual app, I mean the business.

[Harry Stebbings]

Is actually the long tail of understanding that domain.

[Martin Casado]

So I just don't think it changes that paradigm at all. And then when it comes to core.

[Harry Stebbings]

Infrastructure, which is what I focus on.

[Martin Casado]

Things like databases, foundation models, there's no way that right now models can just copy. And the reason there's no way is it's not that the models aren't capable of doing the technology, it's just that that there is a long tail of understanding of the trade offs for the particular use case and domain. And because it's a new market often then you understand that through market exploration. And so I think these models really help with the software development process for non deeply technical areas like apps, sure they can help speed it up, but over time all of these reduce to.

[Harry Stebbings]

A long tail understanding of the market.

[Martin Casado]

Aaron Levy said, it's so beautiful. What do you think the average PR is? Pull request is for a production code base. Like how many lines of code is the average change that gets accepted?

[Harry Stebbings]

Would you guess for like some production enterprise app?

[Unknown Guest]

12.

[Harry Stebbings]

It's actually 2, but let's say it's 12, right?

[Martin Casado]

And what does that 2 or 12 lines signify? That 2 or 12 lines signify probably some learning in the field or some.

[Harry Stebbings]

Understanding of what is needed.

[Martin Casado]

And so the long tail, the thing that's the hard thing is to understand the specific deployment environment and market you go into. That's the hard thing. The hard thing isn't the two lines of code. That's actually quite easy. And so in many ways I would say the AI is getting rid of the middle.

[Harry Stebbings]

Right.

[Martin Casado]

Like very new computer science like models, they don't know how to do just because nobody's done it before. And that's kind of pushing the State of the art. And then in the app space, all of the hard stuff is the business anyways. And this is why like the changes are very small and like you learn everything through go to market which the models don't know, just because you're exploring a new market and it's all the bullshit in the middle that they're helping us with. And so, so, you know, for me.

[Harry Stebbings]

It'S just kind of net accretive.

[Unknown Guest]

Do you think that CS holds the same weight as a study and education discipline that it always did and you would always recommend it? Or does that change in a world that's more democratized in terms of creation like we discussed?

[Harry Stebbings]

I mean I feel very strongly that.

[Martin Casado]

Like it's very hard to work with.

[Harry Stebbings]

Computer systems and be effective if you don't understand how the computers, how they, how they work.

[Unknown Guest]

What do you think we do today, Martin, that we will look back on in five or 10 years time and you go, I can't believe we did that. It could be prompting, it could be choose the model that we're working on. I find it ridiculous that we are supposed to choose which model. Like Grok 3, Grok 4, Grok 5, Grok shopping, Grok weather, what the fuck, just figure it out.

[Harry Stebbings]

Well, I'm just taking it from a programmer's view. I mean, I just think hopefully we'll just stop worrying about frameworks altogether and maybe even languages, maybe even a proto language evolves and we can just focus on logic and fundamental trade offs.

[Martin Casado]

I mean, we've gotten this very backwards world where these days programmers think about.

[Harry Stebbings]

All the non fundamental stuff and they don't think about the fundamental stuff.

[Martin Casado]

Let me give you an example. So I always worry this is going to be this weird philosophical rant, but I always worried, you know, while I was doing grad school and when I was doing research, that we kind of entered a space where there's so much research that's been done over the years that you never know if you're doing something new. Like you just couldn't do the literature search. There's so much. And so like the entire industry just spent all of its time redoing research. It's like you're cleaning a room and you're trying to sweep out the dust, but rather than sweep it out the door, you're just kind of moving it. You'd move it to the bed or you move it to the wall and then that's all you do is just kind of sweep the dust around, but you never actually get it out of the house. That's what research felt to me. It was like we're in this mad delusion. And on top of that, it also felt like many of the most important problems were kind of between disciplines. And so in order to even solve them, you just have to know too many things. And we couldn't do that. And so I just felt like there's like the entire scientific industrial establishment was just kind of redoing the same stuff. And so in a way, I think AI has the ability to pull out of this mass craziness, this mass ineffectiveness, which A, it's very good at telling.

[Harry Stebbings]

You if you've done it before, you.

[Martin Casado]

Know, it's very good at that. It actually knows all the literature, knows all the history, and it's also very good at tying different disciplines.

[Harry Stebbings]

Right.

[Martin Casado]

It is an expert in all of these things. And so I think we've been stuck in this barras and it's a bit of a liberator, so we could actually focus on the new problems and know we're doing new things. And so I've got this very optimistic view of where it's pulling us. And so I know it's more of a philosophical answer to the question that you asked, but in a way I think it needed to happen to get to the next level of problems that we need to solve.

[Unknown Guest]

The worst question ever is like, oh, the job displacement question. But I am intrigued because, like in the one hand I see intense job displacement happening faster than ever. And then I'm also very aware of there of. Brad Feld wrote a brilliant post where he basically said every single cycle, every time, we've always said, oh, what are we going to do? Calculators. What are we going to do? Computers? What are we going to do?

AI now, what are we going to do?

To what extent does this actually require the what are we going to do? Versus another? For sake, don't we see the pattern?

[Harry Stebbings]

Yeah, yeah. So I'm very sympathetic to concerns around job displacement and I think we should take him very seriously. As a society, I'm in no way libertarian. I think that this is kind of where governments do step in and we do help out, but first we have to understand and it's actually very unclear. Let me tell you just a quick anecdote.

[Martin Casado]

You know, my cousins are all pretty.

[Harry Stebbings]

I think high end's the wrong term, but they're pretty established translators and they have been for a long time, multiple languages. And, you know, they visited recently. This is a husband and wife pair and they're like, listen, like, we have to change jobs because translation is all going to AI. And I asked, I said, no, they're shifting.

[Martin Casado]

And now instead we've got to spot check these AIs. And the only way we can hold.

[Harry Stebbings]

It up to our standards, if we rewrite the entire thing. But they won't pay for that, by the way. These are Italian, so they speak this way, but they're like, I can't work on something without a soul.

[Martin Casado]

And I think that their dilemma is a good microcosm for the broader dilemma. Which is one thing that's very unique about AI is that it actually requires today a human handler. I mean, they're just so unpredictable. Most of the use cases that we.

[Harry Stebbings]

Know, all the monetized use cases have a human on the other side of it.

[Martin Casado]

Coding.

[Harry Stebbings]

You've got a professional coder.

[Martin Casado]

All the creative stuff.

[Harry Stebbings]

You've got, you know, somebody like, doing all of the creation. I mean, these are.

[Martin Casado]

It's kind of an enabler, and that's a tool. But the nature of what you do does shift. And that's very different than, for example, electricity, where, like, it doesn't require a human. Either you light the fire or there's no fire to light. And so. So I think we as a society.

[Harry Stebbings]

Need to understand the level of displacement.

[Martin Casado]

We have to understand it. I think it's very important that we do.

[Harry Stebbings]

I think these are things that governments.

[Martin Casado]

Should get involved in.

[Unknown Guest]

Do you just have to turn to your venture investing just before you do a quick fire? Do you enjoy it as much as you did before? It is a much faster landscape. The money is much bigger. Do you enjoy it as much as you did before? I spoke to many of your founders and they said that they didn't think you enjoyed the administrative work that you now have to do with the size and scale of Andreessen.

[Martin Casado]

Oh, well, those are two different questions. I love the investor.

[Harry Stebbings]

I mean, the investing is great.

[Martin Casado]

It's just the most exciting time in.

[Harry Stebbings]

The industry since the late 90s. It's great to be part of a super cycle. I love it.

[Unknown Guest]

I'm a venture investor too. I'm with you. And I say the same to our LPs. Is your price elasticity more on deals because of the super cycle entry point that we're in, or less because of the risk or uncertainty level that we're in?

[Harry Stebbings]

Philosophically, I just think the market sets the price. I just.

[Martin Casado]

I just don't have the hubris to.

[Harry Stebbings]

Think I can somehow outsmart the market or like a single deal is Going to like, bend to my will.

[Unknown Guest]

Do you walk away because of price often?

[Martin Casado]

Price, no.

[Harry Stebbings]

Ownership, yes.

[Unknown Guest]

What is the ownership you need?

[Harry Stebbings]

It all depends on the fund, the market, the size of the market, the understanding, risk.

[Martin Casado]

Everything comes down to ownership for us, not price. I mean, you just can't make the.

[Harry Stebbings]

Fund mechanics work, work if you don't get the ownership.

[Martin Casado]

Now for very, very, very, very, very large markets that are obviously very large.

[Harry Stebbings]

For very large checks, then we don't care as much. But that tends to be growth territory anyways. For early stage investments, you kind of.

[Martin Casado]

Need to understand what the median outcome.

[Harry Stebbings]

Is and you have to be able to size the median outcome in a way that at least returns, say a fifth of the fund or half of the fund.

[Unknown Guest]

Is that not the joy of being at Andree Easton? You can take a 5% ownership on first check because you can size up into the next and size up into the next. Is it not my challenge that I have to get as much as possible on the seed or the A?

[Martin Casado]

So the way that I view it is a bit different, which is, I think there's two legit ways of investing.

[Harry Stebbings]

Now that have emerged.

[Martin Casado]

One of them is you're very much a specialist and you've got special networks, special value. You understand the special size of the market. Like you're very, very much a specialist. And that is kind of how you win deals. Get the ownership, keep the ownership and then make your company successful. The other one is, and I wouldn't say it's like an AOM thing, but it's like you have all of the products so that you can be adaptive in the market. Because, you know, I've been doing this for 10 years. The strategy that works has shifted this entire time. Sometimes it's early, sometimes it's mid stage, sometimes it's collaborating with growth, honestly, sometimes it's credit, which we don't have a credit fund. But I can understand why people do it. The market is competitive and everybody's scrambling for deals. And if you don't have the different funds or products to offer, then often that's kind of where people are going to try and squeeze you out or get alpha, et cetera. And so I think that for the game that we play, it's very, very important that you have all of these funds and the ability to enter at all stages for exactly that reason. And so again, I don't think it's a you me thing. I think you play a very different game than we do. Because I do think that on one side it's you know, you have to go very specialized, very focused, very early. Where for us, you know, we're trying to find out what is the right time to enter to get the ownership that we need.

[Unknown Guest]

What's the size of fund that you primarily invest out of day to day?

[Harry Stebbings]

I know you have 1.2 billion.

[Martin Casado]

So I run the infrastructure fund, which.

[Harry Stebbings]

Is $1.2 billion fund.

[Unknown Guest]

So my challenge here is your cost of capital is just so much less than mine. Your ability to put a larger check in bluntly, with much more confidence is there because I'm investing out of a $275 million Series A fund and $125 million C fund. It's just like, much more meaningful dollars for me than it is for you, which will affect my willingness.

[Martin Casado]

My challenge is we have to live with these investments forever.

[Harry Stebbings]

And conflicts are very, very, very difficult for us to do. And so we don't enter very often at the stage that you do for this reason.

[Unknown Guest]

I mean this respectfully. Everyone chastises Andreessen for their conflicts and for investing in many conflicting companies. Do you think that's unfairly?

[Martin Casado]

Yeah, it's so hard to keep your nose clean on this one because especially with a shift towards AI companies, pivot all the time after you invest. Like, one of the top reasons we.

[Harry Stebbings]

Don'T invest in companies because of conflicts.

[Martin Casado]

I mean, we do it.

[Harry Stebbings]

I mean, I just did it. I mean, just recently. I can't say the name of the company.

[Martin Casado]

We didn't invest because it was a hard conflict. And even though, like, by the way, the company, the portfolio company, was not doing the thing, but it was on the roadmap.

[Harry Stebbings]

And the founder called me. He's like, martin, you just can't invest this company. I said, okay, okay, if it's not.

[Unknown Guest]

On the roadmap, I'm really sorry, founder, I have as much faith and conviction as you as possible, but if it's not on the roadmap, I'm not having you tell me how to do my job.

[Martin Casado]

So here's my talk track, and it's evolved over the years. And I stole this from Chris Dixon, which is, I say, listen, you have one mortal enemy, and you choose whoever that mortal enemy is. And whoever it is, I'm with you.

[Harry Stebbings]

We're going to go kill that mortal enemy together. But you get one. You don't get an arbitrary number of mortal enemies. And so in this case, I'm like, listen, is this it? Is this your one mortal enemy? And the founder said, yes, this is the one Moral enemy. I'm like, all right, fuck them. Let's go kill them.

[Martin Casado]

Listen, we have a number of companies where they pivot midstream and they start competing after we've invested. It happens all the time. And we also do have the venture and the growth fund and we try to minimize conflicts there. But sometimes they happen, you know, just very different stage companies, very different teams working on it. But I would say that we try.

[Harry Stebbings]

Very, very hard to steer away from.

[Unknown Guest]

Conflicts given the nature of, as you said that the volume of pivots that occur today. Given your entry point, I always advocate wholeheartedly for being 98% founder. And then you have wonderfully smart people like Elad Gill wholeheartedly advocate for being market first. How does the pivot frequency and experiences you've had impact your prioritization mechanism around where you spend time?

[Martin Casado]

So I don't want to speak for a lot of.

[Harry Stebbings]

But that's not my experience working with a lot and I've done many deals with him. A lot is very, very focused on the founder.

[Martin Casado]

I think the one thing I would say is he's very good with founder.

[Harry Stebbings]

Market fit, maybe the best in the industry. I have a huge respect for how Allah invests.

[Unknown Guest]

Unpack that. Why and how does he do found a market fit that's the best.

[Martin Casado]

He will find a market that he really likes and sometimes it's like even a fast follow market and then he will find who he thinks is a great founder for that market. And so he's very good at like this kind of boy band construction based on the market. The primary point I want to make is very much in his investment cycle.

[Harry Stebbings]

The founders have always mattered any of this.

[Martin Casado]

He's followed on deals I've done, I've followed on deals he's done. We've done a bunch of deals together. I've never gotten the impression, I mean I've actually always got the impression that.

[Harry Stebbings]

Actually the founder is the primary decision.

[Martin Casado]

Once he's chosen the market. So I would say it's a primary concern for him.

[Unknown Guest]

When you have misjudged a founder, what did you not see that you should have seen?

[Martin Casado]

The only sin in investing and I've sinned so much.

[Harry Stebbings]

The only sin investing is missing the winner.

[Martin Casado]

It's fine to like invest in a category that doesn't work.

[Harry Stebbings]

It's fine to lose money.

[Martin Casado]

But like if you choose the wrong.

[Harry Stebbings]

Company, like that's, that's not okay. And listen, it's just so hard to, to get it right all of the time.

[Martin Casado]

And so the way that we view it is we just look for viable, you know, what are viable spaces? And it's, it's determined viable because someone.

[Unknown Guest]

Said to me the other day, I'm so sorry to interrupt you, that andreess, and you get killed for choosing the wrong company, but being right about the space. You won't get killed if you were just wrong about a space.

[Harry Stebbings]

Correct, that's exactly right.

[Martin Casado]

There's basically no amount of work you.

[Harry Stebbings]

Can do to determine if a space is going to work or not.

[Martin Casado]

I mean, that's just, you know, that's like weather prediction. But given a set of companies, you can actually do the work to understand which one of those is the best. The question is, can you beat the.

[Harry Stebbings]

Market with that strategy? Yes, I think you can beat the market.

[Martin Casado]

No, I do not think that you.

[Harry Stebbings]

Can equivocally tell the best.

[Martin Casado]

Can you beat the expectation of the.

[Harry Stebbings]

Market by running this strategy? I would say yes.

[Martin Casado]

Can you specifically pick the winner every time?

[Harry Stebbings]

Absolutely not.

[Unknown Guest]

You mentioned sins there. What was a big sin that comes to your mind?

[Martin Casado]

I mean, I can answer the opposite. There's a bunch of markets that just haven't really worked. The entire streaming market has been very, very tough. It's just turned out to be a.

[Harry Stebbings]

Subset of the analytics batch market.

[Martin Casado]

And so Clickhouse is. Aaron Katz is doing phenomenal with, and.

[Harry Stebbings]

I'm not an investor, but he's doing phenomenal.

[Martin Casado]

But that may be the one breakout since Confluent.

[Harry Stebbings]

But like, that's just been a very, very tough space historically.

[Martin Casado]

Whether you're at the dashboard layer, you're at the transformation layer, you have the feature store layer. It's like there's been entire spaces where we played multiple bets where like, it.

[Harry Stebbings]

Just didn't work out.

[Martin Casado]

And so many, many, many times we'll.

[Harry Stebbings]

Invest the space where just none of them work.

[Martin Casado]

You know, I will tell you, there's definitely been companies reinvested where at the time the company was the very, very clear leader.

[Harry Stebbings]

And then something happened, some macro shift, some, you know, something else happened.

[Martin Casado]

And, you know, I think that's just.

[Harry Stebbings]

How the game goes.

[Unknown Guest]

I just find it hard that if you pick the right market and the wrong horse. Bad Martin. But if you don't pick the right market, fine. To me, some points need to be given for the insightfulness to pick the right market and some forgiveness to be seen for that. It's fucking hard to pick the horse almost. I'd fire the one who picked the wrong market entirely. Where was your insight at least?

[Harry Stebbings]

Yeah, and this is why you run.

[Martin Casado]

Your own venture firm and you can.

[Harry Stebbings]

Have whatever strategy you want.

[Martin Casado]

I just.

[Unknown Guest]

Is that not. Is that moronic of. No, I learned.

[Martin Casado]

No, no, no, no, it's not. I know. I just think it's. I just think it's philosophically different on the approach.

[Harry Stebbings]

Right.

[Martin Casado]

And so I actually don't believe you can predict the future of technology adoption. It's a very tough thing.

[Harry Stebbings]

Right?

[Martin Casado]

I mean, you don't know what a big company is going to do, can wipe out an entire market. You don't know when an innovation will wipe out entire markets. This happens all the time. I mean, you could argue that AI is really invalidating tons of markets, and I don't think anybody could have seen that happen. But if you have, say, 10 companies that have some traction and you can talk to the founders, you can diligence the teams, you can diligence the market, diligence the project, you can diligence the technical approach, I think you could just say something a lot more concrete than is some future innovation going to wipe.

[Harry Stebbings]

Out this entire market?

[Unknown Guest]

Do you think it's paradoxical or opposing to believe that both AGI will be dominant and present in a set time period and to at the same time be Investing in enterprise SaaS?

[Harry Stebbings]

I don't know. I mean, I would say humans are AGI and we still invest in enterprise SaaS.

[Martin Casado]

This is the problem, is everybody somehow, they somehow think that AGI just means like unlimited powerful and anything I want to disappear in the future disappears. Come on. Your aggressive AGI.

[Unknown Guest]

I think, to be honest, Sam Altman, that's the definition of what AGI is. So whatever him and Microsoft decide is AGI will be AGI. Dude, I want to do a quick fire round. So I say a short statement. You give me your immediate thoughts. Yeah, yeah. What's one of the most overhyped AI categories today?

[Harry Stebbings]

Asi.

[Unknown Guest]

What's one of the worst VC takes on AI you've heard recently?

[Harry Stebbings]

Open source is bad for national security.

[Unknown Guest]

What one founder would you back in in any category. Whatever they did, I just want to wire them the money.

[Harry Stebbings]

Michael Tru.

[Unknown Guest]

Why?

[Harry Stebbings]

I've worked with him for a year. He's just remarkable.

[Unknown Guest]

What makes him remarkable?

[Harry Stebbings]

He has three things. He knows what he wants, he's got an intuition that's impeccable and he listens incredibly well and gathers information and that's a very, very potent combination. And then of course, he's incredibly smart and he's got great product taste.

[Unknown Guest]

What's your favorite trait in yourself that has Been most impactful to your own success.

[Harry Stebbings]

Deep seated anxiety from being poor. I mean, listen, I grew up like, you name it, food stamps, dirt road.

[Martin Casado]

I mean, I come from Montana, so funny.

[Harry Stebbings]

People hear the name Martin and they're like, oh, he must be.

[Martin Casado]

And you know, I was actually born.

[Harry Stebbings]

In Spain, so I'm a Spanish citizen. So they're like, you know, he must be some like, sophisticated European. I'm like, motherfucker.

[Martin Casado]

Dude.

[Harry Stebbings]

I grew up on a dirt road in Montana. Like, when there was hunting season, my school shut down. Like, I'm a, like a western country boy. And so, like, you know, we kind of muddled our way through, but you go through that and you see how hard your parents work and you just don't take anything for granted. And you know, listen, I sold a very successful outcome from a company and I could have retired on that day. And I, I still have not taken a day off where I haven't worked since basically forever.

[Martin Casado]

Now, listen, I'll, like, I'll, I'll take like a week off while I have a job, but I've never not had.

[Harry Stebbings]

A job job in what, 20 years? It's just.

[Unknown Guest]

Did that day feel awesome coming from a dirt track and food stamps? As you said, you can retire today. I know you didn't, but did it feel as good as you thought it would?

[Martin Casado]

You know, it's kind of an interesting thing. No, I mean, I, you know, I.

[Harry Stebbings]

Mean, it was, it was very bittersweet. I think actually selling companies is very bittersweet for any founder. Right? It's like, you know, it's a death in a way. I mean, you know, you spend so much time with something and then it shifts.

[Martin Casado]

But here's the interesting thing, and maybe.

[Harry Stebbings]

This is kind of advice to other founders, which is you always think about that thing you'll do when you like, you know, make the, a hundred million dollars or whatever.

[Martin Casado]

You're like, you know, I'm gonna go do that thing. But you only think about that thing.

[Harry Stebbings]

In the most stressful times. So my thing was, so my, my, my cousin's a movie director, his name is Vincenzo Natali. Pretty legit guy.

[Martin Casado]

And I was like, you know what I'm gonna do? As soon as, like, I, you know.

[Harry Stebbings]

The money hits the bank, I'm gonna drive down to Hollywood and I'm gonna help him make movies and be an actor and just kind of be one of those people.

[Martin Casado]

It happened.

[Harry Stebbings]

The wire hit and I was driving down the five and I'm like, what the fuck am I doing? I Love technology. I love my job. I hate Hollywood.

[Martin Casado]

I have nothing in common with these people. You know, I probably got two hours.

[Harry Stebbings]

Out of town and I just turned my car around and came right on.

[Martin Casado]

Back because I was like, you know, you only have those visions at the most stressful time.

[Harry Stebbings]

And when you're not stressed, you realize that there's something that brought you to this place and it's genuine interest and genuine in love of it.

[Martin Casado]

And so my only, my only advice to other people going through this is just don't use those dreams that you concocted when you were like really in the pressure cooker, like not sleeping.

[Harry Stebbings]

Your relationships are falling apart.

[Martin Casado]

That whole thing, like, that's not the.

[Harry Stebbings]

Thing that steady state you're going to want to do.

[Martin Casado]

You're probably where you are because of.

[Harry Stebbings]

For the love of.

[Martin Casado]

And letting that go tends to be.

[Harry Stebbings]

Pretty disastrous to some people.

[Unknown Guest]

Was making money or having money what you thought it would be?

[Martin Casado]

You know, I had to play all of these tricks.

[Harry Stebbings]

I actually borrowed one, which was very helpful.

[Martin Casado]

So I just have a, had a.

[Harry Stebbings]

Hard time spending money just because, like.

[Martin Casado]

I mean, I mean like for me, like, you know, when I got into.

[Harry Stebbings]

Like the Stanford PhD program. This is so embarrassing, but like, we.

[Martin Casado]

Always thought like $20 was like a.

[Harry Stebbings]

Lot of money growing up.

[Martin Casado]

Like, you know, and we'd call it like the yuppie food stamp because it was like 20 bucks. And I remember I was like, I was gonna go to Bites Cafe and.

[Harry Stebbings]

I was gonna pay with twenty dollars.

[Martin Casado]

Like a twenty dollar bill because like, that's kind of like some like stamp of like having money. So I was just, you know, I was just so naive to all of these things. And so like, it was just very hard for me to like, once, you know, I made enough, you know, generational, you know, I made generational wealth to do it. And so I talked to a friend of mine who went for a similar thing.

[Harry Stebbings]

He's like, you know what I did?

[Martin Casado]

He said I came up with let's.

[Harry Stebbings]

You know, let's call him Brad. I came up with a Brad coin.

[Martin Casado]

And the Brad coin, let's say I'm worth, you know, 10 times more than.

[Harry Stebbings]

Like an average rich person.

[Martin Casado]

So my, the Brad coin is worth.

[Harry Stebbings]

Worth 10 times more.

[Martin Casado]

So I buy thing in Brad coins. Let's say it's a business class flight. I mean, that's $10,000, but in Brad.

[Harry Stebbings]

Coins it's only $1,000.

[Martin Casado]

And $1,000 sounds a lot better than 10,000. So I feel good. So I actually had to adopt a lot of these mechanisms where like, I'll make a Martin coin and it's worth this much money.

[Unknown Guest]

What got worse with money, man, my.

[Martin Casado]

I mean, it was, I, I, I, this is something I, I have to deal with all the time. But like, man, my wife forces me.

[Harry Stebbings]

To keep it real, real, and she just won't abide by any of this. So, man, I got three dogs that are crazy.

[Martin Casado]

Like, she doesn't like helping the house.

[Harry Stebbings]

Like, I drive a Volkswagen.

[Martin Casado]

We have three chickens in the back. You know, I'm like schlepping the kid all the time. I mean, like, listen, man, if it were me, I would be living your life, man. I'll be like 100, being New York in the penthouse with the private jet. And instead I'm in a Volkswagen with three dogs in a messy house and no hell. So I was like, I, dude, you're so whipped. You know, it's not, it's not even that, right? It's like, you know, like, I mean.

[Harry Stebbings]

This is what marriage is, man.

[Unknown Guest]

Like, you know, what's your biggest lessons on marriage? For me, I'm 29, I got a great relationship, but not quite there yet. What would you tell me about greatness in marriage that I should know?

[Martin Casado]

Well, listen, I got it wrong once.

[Harry Stebbings]

I'm not sure I can. I'm the right guy to ask here.

[Martin Casado]

Like my, my start, my startup was really tough, tough.

[Harry Stebbings]

And I think that burned through my first marriage. And she's, she was great. Yeah, it, I'm the wrong guy to ask.

[Martin Casado]

I'm really the wrong guy to ask. I mean, I, I will say, I will say something. I mean, which is a different question than he asked, but I think it's important, which is I have found that men in particular that have stable relationships.

[Harry Stebbings]

Just do a much better job in work.

[Martin Casado]

They're just much more stable. I think the best founders I have.

[Harry Stebbings]

Tend to be like, have families and.

[Martin Casado]

Et cetera, you know, I don't want to make it a gender thing.

[Harry Stebbings]

Maybe it's not.

[Martin Casado]

It may.

[Harry Stebbings]

Just my observation, I worked with a.

[Martin Casado]

Lot of men that like, families are.

[Harry Stebbings]

Really, really, really good for men, even though they can be a pain in the ass.

[Martin Casado]

And so I, I just think the only high level view is like, it's.

[Harry Stebbings]

Just these things are super important and.

[Martin Casado]

So like whoever you have and you're.

[Harry Stebbings]

Working with it, like it's an important thing that like it really is keeping you grounded. I mean, in my case, listen, like.

[Unknown Guest]

I mean, you got chickens, baby.

[Martin Casado]

Like, I mean, you know, it's like the. It's like the. What, what. What is Zorba the Greek say. Say it's the full catastrophe. But I know it's the only way.

[Harry Stebbings]

I can do what I do. There's. There's no other. There's no other way, right? I mean, like the level of pressures, the amount of work that I do. I mean, I probably work all in 80 to 100 hours a week. I've been doing it for 10 years. I mean, the amount of demands, I just. It's very, very hard to do with. Without like support and grounding in a.

[Martin Casado]

Way, again, like, I'm not the right person to answer. Like, how do you treat your wife? Like, I just.

[Harry Stebbings]

Whatever.

[Martin Casado]

Like I'm.

[Harry Stebbings]

I'm a fucking autistic nerd. Like, I have no idea.

[Martin Casado]

But I do know that these things.

[Harry Stebbings]

Are incredibly important for us and you should value them and treat them as such.

[Unknown Guest]

You can change one thing about the way Andreessen works and operates. What would you change?

[Harry Stebbings]

This is a very dangerous question, Harry.

[Unknown Guest]

I'm a very good interviewer.

[Martin Casado]

You're exceptional.

[Harry Stebbings]

You're an exceptional interviewer.

[Martin Casado]

There's a lot of small things I'd change.

[Harry Stebbings]

I don't have an obvious one big thing.

[Unknown Guest]

If you think about Andreessen in 10 years time, where do you think Andreessen will then? The 10 years ago, when you remember it, it. It was a fucking different firm. Amazing and innovative in its own time. But it was from where it is now, night and day. Where is the 10 year Andreessen in 2035?

[Harry Stebbings]

The most remarkable thing about the firm, in my opinion, is that it's able to evolve and adapt very aggressively. Because the way it's structured, I mean, Mark and Ben really are the top of the firm. They really are. And I think it's a feature, not a bug.

[Martin Casado]

And I think it's very. I mean, it's kind of a historical quirk that VC was created around a partnership model. Like that's the same thing you'd use.

[Harry Stebbings]

For a dentist office or a law firm.

[Martin Casado]

There's positives in that. There's a bunch of different agendas that kind of, kind of sit at the same level, but for like decision velocity and disruptive change.

[Harry Stebbings]

It's death.

[Martin Casado]

And so I think that that's a.

[Harry Stebbings]

Massive benefit to the firm. I'm just delighted that this is the way it is because they can make these big aggressive.

[Martin Casado]

So I don't know what it's going to look like in 10 years.

[Harry Stebbings]

I guarantee it's going to look different as it evolves with with the landscape.

[Unknown Guest]

Martin, I so appreciate you, dude. You are fantastic. You're open, you're honest. I love the last 15 minutes there, but I really appreciate you man.

[Harry Stebbings]

Yeah, likewise. Harry, always a pleasure. You're the best. Seriously.

[Unknown Guest]

I just love that, man.

[Unknown Host]

I'm just a freaking autistic nerd. I'm always schlepping the kid around.

[Martin Casado]

I have three chickens.

[Unknown Guest]

What a fantastic dude.

[Unknown Host]

Martin, what a special show that was was.

[Unknown Guest]

If you want to watch the episode.

[Unknown Host]

You can find it on YouTube by searching for 20VC. That's 20VC on YouTube. But before we leave you today, I.

[Unknown Advertiser]

Love seeing the team come together to make this show happen. What I don't love is trying to keep track of all the information, the data and the projects that we're working on across dozens of platforms, products and tools. That's why we use Coda, the All In One collaborative workspace that's helped 50,000 teams all over the world world get on the same page. Offering the flexibility of docs with the structure of spreadsheets, Coda facilitates deeper teamwork and quicker creativity. And their turnkey AI solution. The intelligence of Coda Brain is a game changer. Powered by Grammarly, Coda is entering a new phase of innovation and expansion, aiming to redefine productivity for the AI era. Whether you're a startup looking to organize the chaos while staying nimble, or an enterprise organization looking for better alignment, Coda matches your working style. Its seamless workspace connects to hundreds of your favorite tools including Salesforce, Jira, Asana and Figma, helping your teams transform their rituals and do more faster.

[Unknown Host]

Head over to Coda iO20VC right now and get six months off the team plan for startups for free. That's Coda c o d a.

[Unknown Advertiser]

20.

[Unknown Host]

VC and get 6 months off the team plan for free. Coda IO 20 VC and while Coda keeps our team sharp, Angellist keeps our fund sharper. If you're listening to 20 VC you know we have a really freaking high bar. Well, Angellist is the modern platform used by the best in class venture funds where over 40% of top endowments and banks are LPs. They're customers include a top five venture firm 20 VC and they now have. Check this out, $171 billion of assets on the platform. They combine an all in one software platform with a dedicated service team that moves as fast as you do. One manager said this awesome quote angellist feels like an extension of my fund. Another said angellist gives me total peace of mind, the attention to detail, lightning fast response time and just real sense of ownership from the team are exactly what I need to stop worrying about back office ops. So if you're starting a new fund, don't be a moron. Just use Angellist. They're incredible. Head over to angellist.com 20vc to learn more and once you've set up your fund the right way, it's time to make sure your startup's brand looks just as sharp. Have you heard about tech? It's the domain extension for startups with tech at their core. While most.coms are taken or cost as much as Bay Area rent, tech gives you a shy, sharp, clean domain that tells the world exactly what you do. Don't settle for a long and awkward domain name, signal, focus, clarity and intent with your own tech domain. It's trusted by over 500,000 tech startups worldwide and just makes sense. You're building a tech startup and your domain should say it too. Go to www.get.tech20vc. That's 20 spelt out. Or your favorite registrar like GoDaddy or Namecheap and grab your tech domain today. That's Get Tech 20 VC.

[Unknown Guest]

As always, I so appreciate all your.

[Unknown Host]

Support and stay tuned for an incredible episode coming on Thursday with Jason Lemkin, Rory o' Driscoll and me shooting the shit on the biggest and best tech news.