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

1. 0:00 – 1:27

   Intro

   1. AMAugusto Marietti0:00

      He opens a closet, and there's, like, all the bananas falling off because it was one guy's all eating huge bananas. He open other closet, there's another mattress with another guy sleeping in the second closet. [laughs] I say, "Okay, this, th- this is real." We had no money. We, we, we, we just take 600 bucks last left to go to a United flight, and we had 90 days to just, uh, make it or break it. We knew that if we couldn't raise, so we would go back, uh, to Italy broke, and that was it.

   2. MCMartin Casado0:24

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

   3. AMAugusto Marietti0:35

      Every year we do the Founders Award. Uh, the Founders Award is 2,555 stock to the best employee of the company.

   4. MCMartin Casado0:43

      Yeah.

   5. AMAugusto Marietti0:43

      Why that? It's 255 days of struggle. It's just symbolic.

   6. MCMartin Casado0:48

      Yeah.

   7. AMAugusto Marietti0:48

      But to remember seven years of struggle, every year is a ritual. [instrumental music]

   8. MCMartin Casado0:55

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

   9. AMAugusto Marietti1:13

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

   10. MCMartin Casado1:17

       Ambitions. All right. So, so you're doing this kind of API thing. You come to the U.S. on a s- tourist visa?

2. 1:27 – 2:57

   The 90-Day Fundraising Mission

   1. AMAugusto Marietti1:27

      Tourist visa, yeah.

   2. MCMartin Casado1:28

      And the idea was to raise-

   3. AMAugusto Marietti1:29

      90 days

   4. MCMartin Casado1:30

      ... was the idea to raise funding?

   5. AMAugusto Marietti1:31

      Yeah. We had no money. We, we, we, we just take 600 bucks last left to go to a United flight through Cincinnati. We went through secondary room. Uh-

   6. MCMartin Casado1:41

      [laughs]

   7. AMAugusto Marietti1:41

      ... we landed up, and we landed up through... Sorry, Atlanta first time. Cincinnati was second, secondary room. And then we went right to San Francisco, and, um, and we had 90 days to just, uh, make it or break it. We knew that if we couldn't raise, so we would go back, uh, to Italy broke, and that was it.

   8. MCMartin Casado1:56

      So did you raise in those-

   9. AMAugusto Marietti1:57

      Yeah, we raised two weeks before departure, uh, from-

   10. MCMartin Casado1:59

       You ra- you ra- you raised in those-

   11. AMAugusto Marietti2:01

       Angel rounds. Uh, it was around, you know, that... We're talking about a decade ago, right?

   12. MCMartin Casado2:05

       Yeah.

   13. AMAugusto Marietti2:05

       Small checks. It was 50K angel round from a friend.

   14. MCMartin Casado2:07

       Who was it from?

   15. AMAugusto Marietti2:07

       Was the founding YouTube teams.

   16. MCMartin Casado2:10

       Oh, really?

   17. AMAugusto Marietti2:10

       There we go. And h- here's the funny story like-

   18. MCMartin Casado2:11

       How did you get introduced to them?

   19. AMAugusto Marietti2:13

       Uh, okay. That's, that's, um... So there's two interesting thing that you say, can you redo it again? I won't be able to redo it again.

   20. MCMartin Casado2:18

       Yeah.

   21. AMAugusto Marietti2:18

       So number one is we went to the Stanford Entrepreneurship Week. At that time, Stanford was doing the Stanford Entrepreneurship Week in February, and it was cool. You meet all entrepreneurs, all the VC were coming there, and, um, there was this entrepreneurship mixer, big party. We arrived, we left late. There was a, there was a big, uh... At that point, it was all paper with all the email and the registration. We steal-

   22. MCMartin Casado2:38

       [laughs]

   23. AMAugusto Marietti2:38

       ... the things with all the email and the registration, and we walk home with that. And that night till 5:00 AM, I write s- all the 400 emails-

   24. MCMartin Casado2:47

       Wow

   25. AMAugusto Marietti2:47

       ... about, "Hey, you need to know about Mashape. We didn't have time to catch up at the mixer, but I'm happy to give you a pitch tomorrow."

   26. MCMartin Casado2:53

       Wow.

   27. AMAugusto Marietti2:53

       I think-

   28. MCMartin Casado2:54

       300?

   29. AMAugusto Marietti2:55

       ... 470 didn't reply,

3. 2:57 – 4:49

   Cold Emailing 400 Investors Overnight

   1. AMAugusto Marietti2:57

      uh, 30 reply, and 10 were kind of interested. At the end, five or six went to meet us.

   2. MCMartin Casado3:02

      Wow.

   3. AMAugusto Marietti3:02

      And then this one person, called Kevin Donahu, who was the f- the, the VP, one of the VP or founding team of YouTube, came to our-

   4. MCMartin Casado3:09

      What's his name?

   5. AMAugusto Marietti3:10

      Kevin Donahu.

   6. MCMartin Casado3:11

      Kevin Donahu.

   7. AMAugusto Marietti3:12

      And then he start a company for baby books.

   8. MCMartin Casado3:14

      Yep, yep.

   9. AMAugusto Marietti3:14

      He sold it. But he, he said, "Look, I, I think this is something." So he wrote a $17,000 check on an air mattress.

   10. MCMartin Casado3:20

       17?

   11. AMAugusto Marietti3:21

       Thousands, yeah. And for us, 17,000 was life-

   12. MCMartin Casado3:24

       Yeah

   13. AMAugusto Marietti3:24

       ... versus debt.

   14. MCMartin Casado3:25

       Yeah.

   15. AMAugusto Marietti3:25

       'Cause we came from 600 bucks and few hundred bucks. And so then he brought two other founding team to write out a six... He said... He actually it was 16,000, 16,000, 16,000. We got 15,000. The problem with 15,000 divided three was six, six, six, six, six, six. There was too many sixes. He's like, "No, we don't, we don't want too many six in the captive." So we, we rounded up 17, 17, 17.

   16. MCMartin Casado3:42

       [laughs]

   17. AMAugusto Marietti3:42

       And we got 51,000 check. Now, the funny, the second funny part is we negotiated and closed the deal at Travis Kalanick house.

   18. MCMartin Casado3:51

       Travis Kalanick’s House. I remember there was an article about you sleeping on his couch-

   19. AMAugusto Marietti3:55

       Yeah

   20. MCMartin Casado3:55

       ... or something.

   21. AMAugusto Marietti3:55

       Yes, and Airbnb guys as well. But what, what happened during the negotiation with these guys, we're negotiating, and they didn't want... So, uh, uh, Travis, uh, had the, at that time, was this house up in Castro called the Jam Pad, where everybody would goes. Aaron Lev would go, and, uh, Drew from Dropbox was there. We're all going there on the weekends. And I didn't have a place to stay, so actually, Travis give me his place to stay a few, a few weeks, as long as I would cook carbonara for his better half once a week.

   22. MCMartin Casado4:19

       [laughs]

   23. AMAugusto Marietti4:20

       And I did that. And then, and then we need a help. He say, "Come to my kitchen. We negotiate." So we sit on the table. It was myself and Travis Kalanick, and there were the three YouTube investors negotiated this convertible notes are, like, 50% discount, something crazy. We were desperate. And so I say, "Okay. Well, I don't wanna take this deal. Like, you know, screw that." I say, "Okay, okay, we're gonna leave." I say... And I was very naive, 20 years old. "Okay, okay, we will come back." And Travis come to me, put the hands and say, "If this guy leave, you're never gonna see them again and nor the money."

   24. MCMartin Casado4:48

       Wow.

   25. AMAugusto Marietti4:48

       "So let me do something

4. 4:49 – 6:46

   Negotiating at Travis Kalanick’s House

   1. AMAugusto Marietti4:49

      else."

   2. MCMartin Casado4:49

      Wow.

   3. AMAugusto Marietti4:49

      "So you guys stay here and figure it out, the, the counteroffer. Aghi and I go to the bathroom. We close this salary, and we come back in 10 minutes." So Travis brought me to the bathroom, locked the door of the house so these guys don't leave. [laughs]

   4. MCMartin Casado5:02

      [laughs]

   5. AMAugusto Marietti5:03

      Went to the bathroom, and we sit there 10 minutes, go back, another round of negotiation, back to the bathroom. So three, four time. At the end, we handshake on the deal-

   6. MCMartin Casado5:11

      And what was it?

   7. AMAugusto Marietti5:12

      ... just tiny bit better.

   8. MCMartin Casado5:12

      What was it?

   9. AMAugusto Marietti5:12

      Like, 42% convertible instead of 50.

   10. MCMartin Casado5:15

       Wow.

   11. AMAugusto Marietti5:16

       And the no... And it was a higher cap, and that's it. And then we shake the hand, and, and that was it.

   12. MCMartin Casado5:21

       That's crazy. So I re- I remember you had the, um, you had the Quora, like, the top Quora post for living on, like, 14,000 a year in San Francisco. You'd raised 51,000.

   13. AMAugusto Marietti5:35

       Yeah.

   14. MCMartin Casado5:36

       And now you had to make that last as long as possible.

   15. AMAugusto Marietti5:38

       As long as possible.

   16. MCMartin Casado5:38

       So maybe talk about the, the next-

   17. AMAugusto Marietti5:40

       Yeah

   18. MCMartin Casado5:41

       ... stretch.

   19. AMAugusto Marietti5:43

       What happened is obviously we got to 50,000. We gotta go back. We are illegal in two weeks. So we went back to Italy, um, and we, we, we, we come back with a B1, which you could be there, we can be here six months. But how? We have no Social Security number. We have no credit score, nobody... So you have into this American system very different than Italy system. You, you, you, you had to enter into a new system, and we had zero anything. So we couldn't pay our salary 'cause we didn't have SSN. We didn't have a legal visa to pay ourself, all that. So the company-

   20. MCMartin Casado6:12

       Did you have employees at this point?

   21. AMAugusto Marietti6:14

       No

   22. MCMartin Casado6:14

       It's just you two

   23. AMAugusto Marietti6:15

       It was, uh, three of us. It was, uh, Michele was the third co- co-founder back then. But, um, we did 1,000 and about 1,100 monthly promissory note that the company would give us, and we would have to live in three with $1,000 a month. That would be for living

   24. MCMartin Casado6:31

       So you were liv- you were living off of $1,000 a month?

   25. AMAugusto Marietti6:34

       In three. 'Cause it's-

   26. MCMartin Casado6:35

       Three, three people were living off of $1,000 a month-

   27. AMAugusto Marietti6:37

       Yeah. Yeah, 14,000

   28. MCMartin Casado6:38

       ... in San Francisco?

   29. AMAugusto Marietti6:39

       Yeah.

   30. MCMartin Casado6:39

       How do you do that?
5. 6:46 – 9:18

   Living on $1,000 a Month in San Francisco

   1. MCMartin Casado6:46

      is impossible. $1,000 a month for three people?

   2. AMAugusto Marietti6:48

      I tell you how we did it.

   3. MCMartin Casado6:49

      Tell me.

   4. AMAugusto Marietti6:49

      So we live it in, uh, on Airbnb somewhere else at, like, 100 bucks, and all in the same mattress. Um-

   5. MCMartin Casado6:57

      Wow

   6. AMAugusto Marietti6:58

      ... and, uh, we were going to Valencia. I don't know if you do some Valencia-

   7. MCMartin Casado7:02

      Did, did you have an office?

   8. AMAugusto Marietti7:04

      No. We were working out of Starbucks. And-

   9. MCMartin Casado7:07

      That's incredible

   10. AMAugusto Marietti7:07

       ... we were living in Valencia, and we were buying rice, beans, and tuna, and pasta. And the reason is that we had to find the right amount of carbs and protein at the cheapest way possible.

   11. MCMartin Casado7:18

       [laughs]

   12. AMAugusto Marietti7:18

       And that was the combination of, I guess, amount of carbs and protein at the cheapest way possible. And that's how we made it. Like, we, we never eat out, we never buy anything. We did everything in the house. We cooked in the, in the kitchen Airbnb, rice, beans, or tuna pasta. In fact, we ate so much tuna pasta with tomato that Marco and I, when we see now tuna pasta, we almost throw up because we're just running on tuna pasta every single day.

   13. MCMartin Casado7:39

       So how... Wait, so how, how long did this-

   14. AMAugusto Marietti7:43

       Uh

   15. MCMartin Casado7:43

       ... last?

   16. AMAugusto Marietti7:44

       That last, uh, so March 2000, April 2010, uh, a year. A, a year and a few months.

   17. MCMartin Casado7:51

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

   18. AMAugusto Marietti7:55

       I was, I was writing blog, building the website, uh, calling, uh, pro- uh, the, the sign up, talking with all every sign up on the website that was talking to us and try it for hours. With mix of B- B devs, HTML, H- CSS slicer, um, talking with investor too as you start to build the seed rounds.

   19. MCMartin Casado8:12

       Yeah.

   20. AMAugusto Marietti8:13

       Um, trying to do some recruiting, that never worked because nobody wanted to work for illegal Italians that will disappears.

   21. MCMartin Casado8:19

       [laughs]

   22. AMAugusto Marietti8:20

       [laughs] So lot of, lot of mistakes and this, uh, yeah, figured things out.

   23. MCMartin Casado8:25

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

   24. AMAugusto Marietti8:31

       So then a year later, we, we, we re-architect. So we went, we went to Honolulu on the beach, on Mauna Beach, and we, we thought about, okay, all these APIs we're aggregating. I think the world is actually... Actually, we see now, finally now, but, uh, 10, 10, 15 years ago, it wasn't ready. There were to, like, build apps on the fly through APIs with drag and drop. We weren't- we were too far ahead. We're missing pieces. But I say, "Hey, we're, we're wrapping a lot of APIs." Actually, that assembly line visual still hold. We just have to pivot it and build an API marketplace where all the APIs, producer and consumers, they can come together.

   25. MCMartin Casado9:03

       Yeah.

   26. AMAugusto Marietti9:04

       And so we pivot that. We relaunch it, uh, with, with, you know, then Crunch, all the stuff.

   27. MCMartin Casado9:09

       Okay, so, so originally, we're doing this kind of drag and drop-

   28. AMAugusto Marietti9:12

       Drop, yeah

   29. MCMartin Casado9:12

       ... composable-

   30. AMAugusto Marietti9:13

       Apps builder. Yeah
6. 9:18 – 11:00

   Pivoting to the API Marketplace

   1. MCMartin Casado9:18

      like, "Okay-"

   2. AMAugusto Marietti9:18

      With HTML5.

   3. MCMartin Casado9:19

      Wow. And then you're like, "Okay, no, we need to build a marketplace."

   4. AMAugusto Marietti9:24

      Exactly. 'Cause, okay, the, the economy, this API economy will come. It's not just apps, it will be APIs. And we build a marketplace, we launch it, we got little... Decent tractions on long tail.

   5. MCMartin Casado9:33

      Yeah.

   6. AMAugusto Marietti9:33

      And that was already the summer of 2011-

   7. MCMartin Casado9:36

      Yeah

   8. AMAugusto Marietti9:37

      ... after pivoting a while. So we learned very fast, boom, boom, boom, and, um, and then we raised after a month-

   9. MCMartin Casado9:41

      Wait, was the, was the Hawaii on the last of the money from-

   10. AMAugusto Marietti9:44

       No, no, because, uh, San Francisco to Honolulu, I think at that time it was, like, 300 bucks. So we say with our 51K we would, we, we, we... You know, we're living, like, on tuna pasta, rice and beans in Valencia, in Mission, in this, in this historic building, middle of North Mission-

   11. MCMartin Casado9:59

       And you guys l-

   12. AMAugusto Marietti9:59

       And, like, was working-

   13. MCMartin Casado10:00

       Same, same mattress?

   14. AMAugusto Marietti10:01

       Same mattress and things. It's like-

   15. MCMartin Casado10:02

       That's unbelievable. I, I didn't know that

   16. AMAugusto Marietti10:03

       ... at some point I remember, I remember I woke up one morning, "I gotta go. I need, I need to go to Honolulu." We could do our walk on the beach and thinking about our future or no future-

   17. MCMartin Casado10:11

       Yeah. Yeah

   18. AMAugusto Marietti10:11

       ... because we knew this was going no future. Our money were starting to drain, and we needed to pivot. And that's where we had the idea, let's go for the pivot. And then we come back. We, we did crazy. I, I, I remember I was building the website. Marco was going crazy. The third co-founder was building all the Java backends and the launch it fast, and then got a little bit of TechCrunch press. At that time was read, write web.

   19. MCMartin Casado10:31

       Yep.

   20. AMAugusto Marietti10:31

       This other one was Mashable.

   21. MCMartin Casado10:33

       Yep. Yep. Yeah.

   22. AMAugusto Marietti10:33

       And so all the... We- somehow we got covered by all of them, which now like increase. And then, um, and boom, and then we raised, um, a- and then it started seed round, uh, phase.

   23. MCMartin Casado10:43

       From who?

   24. AMAugusto Marietti10:44

       So at that time, uh, we went through a lot of, lot of iterations, but w- where we ended up was NEA leading the seed round, and then Index co-leading 20A, and then we, and then we got a bunch, and then-

   25. MCMartin Casado10:58

       In the seed, so Volpi did

7. 11:00 – 14:19

   The Seed Round with NEA, Index, and Bezos

   1. MCMartin Casado11:00

      the...

   2. AMAugusto Marietti11:01

      Yeah, so what, what, what happened it is, um, actually the first checks were George Zachar from CRV back then. He didn't, like, lead the round, but he wrote... He was the first 100K commit. And so with that, he say, "We have CRV 100K." At that point they had a seed program, very, very unusual back then. So we went 20A, and he said, "We're gonna lead this round." At that point also they start a seed program, 500K, and then we went through... And then, and then I met Mike Volpi that just moved to San Francisco to launch Index US. It was, like, him and Danny Rimer through there somewhere. I said, "Ah," and they also start out Angel, a, a seed program, and they, they wrote another big checks. And then we got a long tail. It was, was likely Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt in-

   3. MCMartin Casado11:36

      Wow

   4. AMAugusto Marietti11:36

      ... into the funds. And so we, we got this, this combination.

   5. MCMartin Casado11:38

      How did you get Bezos and Eric Schmidt?

   6. AMAugusto Marietti11:39

      So again, that, that is a, a seed in DPD that I don't know we can replicate. So what happened it is Jeff Bezos... So Jeff Bezos, I knew he was special about marketplace as a business, APIs and developers. AWS was just starting to take off. It was this hidden secret. So-

   7. MCMartin Casado11:56

      This is 2011?

   8. AMAugusto Marietti11:57

      Yeah. So Amazon was maybe a $50 billion company then, $80 billion company. Um-So what happened is, uh, I, I, I, I hire the lawyer of his family office for Call-

   9. MCMartin Casado12:11

      Call

   10. AMAugusto Marietti12:12

       ... for Match Shape. And after we hire for doing the seed round, as the seed round was going along, I say, "By the way, since you're also the, the lawyer of the family office and Bezos Expeditions, can you introduce me, [laughs] can you introduce me to Jeff Bezos?" That's what we do. So it's a PG cold call, and then he was on the road with his brother, going around with his brother on the road in Texas, and, uh, he wa- he, he actually really want to put more and invest. Boom. So that was Jeff Bezos. What do you get from Jeff Bezos? You get the brands, and we got a dinners, uh, a year strategizing of things, but obviously it was the big brand. And then second, uh, Eric Schmidt, we were working this co-working space, and what happened is we were the only startup that stay the latest in the night after this other startup that was doing Expedia for cruise ships. They just raised from NEA and Eric Schmidt. And at the end, they saw us working till 3:00 AM, 4:00 AM, they will leave at 2:00. When... They knew we were fundraising, and they sa- and the investor asked, "Who is the hardest worker than you?" I say, "These guys next to us." And so they introduced us to the Eric Schmidt fund, and that's how Eric Schmidt invest.

   11. MCMartin Casado13:17

       Wow.

   12. AMAugusto Marietti13:18

       Totally unrelated.

   13. MCMartin Casado13:20

       All right. So now this brings us to thousand and-

   14. AMAugusto Marietti13:21

       A lot, a lot of luck in, in-

   15. MCMartin Casado13:22

       So what was your totals... What was your total seed funding you raised?

   16. AMAugusto Marietti13:25

       At that time it was very big. Uh, it was 1.5. It's like, wow, a huge seed round.

   17. MCMartin Casado13:30

       I gotta say-

   18. AMAugusto Marietti13:30

       In 2010, '11. [laughs]

   19. MCMartin Casado13:32

       I gotta say, there's a lot of optimism... It's an optimistic retrospective view to be like, there was three of you on [laughs] a mattress for a year-

   20. AMAugusto Marietti13:40

       Mattress

   21. MCMartin Casado13:40

       ... and then you say you were lucky.

   22. AMAugusto Marietti13:41

       Illegally.

   23. MCMartin Casado13:42

       [laughs] That sounds pretty unlucky.

   24. AMAugusto Marietti13:43

       Illegally. Going to jail.

   25. MCMartin Casado13:45

       [laughs] All right, so now you have your seed fund, Match Shape's going.

   26. AMAugusto Marietti13:49

       So then we raise the seed. Uh, all right, now it's real. We gotta get these visas. [laughs] We gotta... So we went back to Italy, go to the American Embassy, blah, blah, blah, do their letter of recommendations. Actually, Sam Altman was one of the guys that wrote me a letter of recommendation when he was, um, a CEO of Loopt.

   27. MCMartin Casado14:06

       No kidding.

   28. AMAugusto Marietti14:06

       Which I met on the... We were going to the NEA retreat, and I sit next to him in the bus, and we went to Pebble Beach to the NEA retreat, and we spent three hours together, and I said, "By the way, I'm illegal here. Can you write me a letter of recommendation for my O-1 visa?"

   29. MCMartin Casado14:17

       No kidding.

   30. AMAugusto Marietti14:18

       And he wrote me, so I

8. 14:19 – 17:14

   Getting U.S. Visas and Help from Sam Altman

   1. AMAugusto Marietti14:19

      have this big thing of how great I am. [laughs] From Sam Altman.

   2. MCMartin Casado14:22

      From Sam Altman, that's great. [laughs]

   3. AMAugusto Marietti14:22

      From Sam Altman, he's like, "Write the recommendation. You gotta get this guy in the country no matter what." So we got these five letters-

   4. MCMartin Casado14:29

      [laughs]

   5. AMAugusto Marietti14:30

      ... and, uh, a- and I get this O-1 visa, and finally I got the visa. So finally I can come here, I can get a WeWork space, and we start to hire, and we got seven people, and Marco also get the visa. Marco is also, because of the love book, he never got, uh, to college or nothing, so it was the hardest visa to do. So we, we figured it out, more letter of recommendations for him, and we brought him there. We stay here, blah, blah, blah. We build a year, we grow. That... But, you know, at that time, like, you needed, like, a million, let's say a million revenue to, to take a, a good Series A. For a marketplace, you need a million in gross volume. We were, like, at 50K, so lot of traction, but not a lot of revenue. Um, but we went through a three, four-month Series A raise, and, um, and CRV, uh, led, and then Index co-led the round.

   6. MCMartin Casado15:14

      Was it, was it, was it Dev. that-

   7. AMAugusto Marietti15:15

      Yeah

   8. MCMartin Casado15:16

      ... that-

   9. AMAugusto Marietti15:16

      Yeah.

   10. MCMartin Casado15:16

       That-

   11. AMAugusto Marietti15:16

       Yeah, because, uh-

   12. MCMartin Casado15:17

       That's right

   13. AMAugusto Marietti15:17

       ... George Zachary was more a consumer-

   14. MCMartin Casado15:19

       Right

   15. AMAugusto Marietti15:19

       ... so he passed the, the thing to Dev that just joined more on the enterprise side. I remember Dev, like, called me, like, a Sunday at 6:00 AM to go for a walk, uh, to decide to invest or not, and he knows I'm a night owl. And, and he just Sunday, 6:00 AM to go to-

   16. MCMartin Casado15:34

       6:00 AM

   17. AMAugusto Marietti15:34

       ... go down to Palo Alto, which I had, I had to rent a Zipcar. There, there's, there were the Zipcars.

   18. MCMartin Casado15:38

       [laughs]

   19. AMAugusto Marietti15:38

       There was no Uber. And, uh, and go down there, and, and, uh, and then go for a few walks, and I decided to, to invest, 'cause he was, he was always actually a big believer on APIs as assembly line. He could see that.

   20. MCMartin Casado15:48

       Yeah, yeah.

   21. AMAugusto Marietti15:49

       It maybe wasn't sure marketplace was the right execution-

   22. MCMartin Casado15:52

       Yeah

   23. AMAugusto Marietti15:52

       ... but the theme, he was a big believer. And I think he liked us, like, he came to see us sleeping in the same mattress. He wanted to really see that we're not, like, bullshitting the big drama story. It was really drama.

   24. MCMartin Casado16:00

       Yeah, yeah.

   25. AMAugusto Marietti16:01

       Actually, he opens... He came to the Aker house, 'cause we moved to Aker house in, uh, South Park effect at that time, where we're sleeping and working there with the seven team, and he opens a closet, and there's, like, all the bananas falling off-

   26. MCMartin Casado16:12

       [laughs]

   27. AMAugusto Marietti16:12

       ... because there was one guy who's only eating huge bananas.

   28. MCMartin Casado16:14

       Yeah.

   29. AMAugusto Marietti16:14

       He opened another closet, there's another mattress with another guy sleeping, a second closet. [laughs]

   30. MCMartin Casado16:18

       Wow.
9. 17:14 – 19:22

   Series A, CRV, and Proving the Model

   1. AMAugusto Marietti17:14

      there was nothing to talk about from business.

   2. MCMartin Casado17:15

      The issue was you, is you couldn't monetize, or there was churn-

   3. AMAugusto Marietti17:18

      So there's a, there's a lot of-

   4. MCMartin Casado17:19

      ... there's a graduation problem, like, I mean, some-

   5. AMAugusto Marietti17:21

      There's... Yes

   6. MCMartin Casado17:21

      ... these marketplaces are very tough.

   7. AMAugusto Marietti17:22

      So the, the idea of the marketplace, when I was, uh, staying with Airbnb founders, I learned that the marketplace are, could be the biggest, more powerful business in the world. Like, you don't even have to innovate once you get liquidity. It's just, you can't disrupt it.

   8. MCMartin Casado17:35

      Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah.

   9. AMAugusto Marietti17:35

      Look at eBay. Look at eBay. You can't kill.

   10. MCMartin Casado17:37

       Yeah.

   11. AMAugusto Marietti17:37

       So I thought, like, there's all this API, you can build a marketplace liquidity, it'll be like the W- the AWS of market. And so we, we noticed, though, that in our case, it was a developer API marketplace, so to have... To a marketplace to work, you need to have a long tail of low-power people. If you have concentrated in a few high-power, marketplace doesn't work. Like, Airbnb houses, like, millions of people with low power. So that was one. Two, you need to have exclusivity somewhat, like, the door to access that-That marketplace supply has to be through the marketplace. APIs, you could Google and go through the website, you wouldn't go through, go through the marketplace. APIs at that time, power of law for public APIs was on the Twilio, the Stride, or 30 that matters and 3,000 that didn't matter much. So it was also this long tail power. And third thing is, was quality. Like, you couldn't... You were running a cloud marketplace, you couldn't actually maintain the quality of the supply. You would always get blamed for it, and there was no trust. And, and so I think because of that, it got to a million and a half in gross revenue, but it never became this Airbnb or Uber of APIs.

   12. MCMartin Casado18:38

       What was, what was the net at a million and a half gross?

   13. AMAugusto Marietti18:38

       Eh, that is like 10%, yeah.

   14. MCMartin Casado18:39

       Yeah, nothing.

   15. AMAugusto Marietti18:39

       And it was, it was also losing margin to AWS. So they, I could never make the economics in that model, I could never make the economics works, even if this thing would've scaled. So then we go there, it's like, okay, this is, we're a year, we're burning out, we're running out of money. And so we build this massive API engine behind the marketplace API gateway that was powering 20,000 APIs of this long tail, doing billing, rate limiting, routing, caching, authentication, authorization, logging, all of that. We build it three times, and the third time was the great one. And we say, "Wait a second, every company will become an API company. Why we don't take this, this engine and we give it to the whole world?" And that was the beginning of open source Mongo, and so boom, we, we open source, uh, Kong API gateway.

   16. MCMartin Casado19:21

       What was your, what was

10. 19:22 – 20:59

    The Pivot That Created Kong

    1. MCMartin Casado19:22

       your runway at the time that you open sourced Kong?

    2. AMAugusto Marietti19:26

       Uh, so we open sourced in April '15. We had to take a bridge of, uh, 2 million to go another year because-

    3. MCMartin Casado19:34

       Was it, was it an insider bridge?

    4. AMAugusto Marietti19:35

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

    5. MCMartin Casado19:40

       From, from Dhavdhan and Mike?

    6. AMAugusto Marietti19:41

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

    7. MCMartin Casado19:46

       Wow. So you, you release K- I remember when Kong released. It was actually a really big deal. When was that? Two thousand...?

    8. AMAugusto Marietti19:52

       '15.

    9. MCMartin Casado19:52

       '15.

    10. AMAugusto Marietti19:53

        Yes. I think it was 2015.

    11. MCMartin Casado19:54

        That was a, that was a really big deal. I remember-

    12. AMAugusto Marietti19:55

        It took off, boom.

    13. MCMartin Casado19:56

        Yeah. So this is when you and I started talking about your raise.

    14. AMAugusto Marietti19:59

        Yeah.

    15. MCMartin Casado19:59

        You were raising the B.

    16. AMAugusto Marietti20:00

        You, you, you came at the right time. So before, like, the, uh, these guys make no sense. Okay, now it starts to make sense. [laughs]

    17. MCMartin Casado20:06

        [laughs] Well, that was even a tough raise for you, just because the company had been around for seven years.

    18. AMAugusto Marietti20:11

        Yeah. Yeah, I remember.

    19. MCMartin Casado20:11

        Like a marketplace, like Kong had just come out, and it was taking off, but, like, it only been a couple of weeks-

    20. AMAugusto Marietti20:19

        It was tough

    21. MCMartin Casado20:19

        ... maybe a couple of months. And so honestly, I'll tell you what, what did it for me is, um, you know, we're, we're doing all the work, and, like, the GitHub stars checked out, your story is phenomenal, your command of the business is great, but it just wasn't enough. But then while we were doing the diligence, like, I kept getting these kind of serendipitous, like, somebody had used Kong and loved it. I remember, didn't, like, somebody stay in like your Airbnb-

    22. AMAugusto Marietti20:45

        Yes. Yeah

    23. MCMartin Casado20:45

        ... and, like, loved Kong-

    24. AMAugusto Marietti20:46

        Yeah

    25. MCMartin Casado20:46

        ... and, like, and then you forwarded that to me.

    26. AMAugusto Marietti20:48

        Yeah.

    27. MCMartin Casado20:48

        And so they're just kind of like all of this-

    28. AMAugusto Marietti20:50

        Signs

    29. MCMartin Casado20:51

        ... you know, zeitgeist around Kong, and as a result of that, I'm like, "Oh, this is clearly a phenomenon."

    30. AMAugusto Marietti20:56

        Yeah. I remember I was spamming you with emails of every

11. 20:59 – 21:55

    Launching Open Source and Surviving on a Bridge Round

    1. AMAugusto Marietti20:59

       prospect or customer-

    2. MCMartin Casado21:00

       Everything, yeah

    3. AMAugusto Marietti21:00

       ... user that were saying.

    4. MCMartin Casado21:01

       Yeah.

    5. AMAugusto Marietti21:01

       It was just, you say, "Kong, Kong usage, Kong usage," just nonstop.

    6. MCMartin Casado21:05

       Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

    7. AMAugusto Marietti21:05

       Like it was blowing up the inbox.

    8. MCMartin Casado21:07

       Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    9. AMAugusto Marietti21:08

       Yeah.

    10. MCMartin Casado21:08

        So how, how close, how close were you to running out of money [laughs] for the B?

    11. AMAugusto Marietti21:12

        Uh, so after the bridge, there were, eh, weeks.

    12. MCMartin Casado21:16

        Jesus.

    13. AMAugusto Marietti21:18

        Yeah. But I was very-

    14. MCMartin Casado21:19

        Nothing, nothing is ever gonna stress you again-

    15. AMAugusto Marietti21:21

        Very calm

    16. MCMartin Casado21:21

        ... in your entire life because you've been so close to at least business-

    17. AMAugusto Marietti21:26

        Two times

    18. MCMartin Casado21:26

        ... so many times. 'Cause I, I actually remember-

    19. AMAugusto Marietti21:29

        Yes

    20. MCMartin Casado21:29

        ... when we went to the office, it felt dead.

    21. AMAugusto Marietti21:32

        Dead.

    22. MCMartin Casado21:32

        It felt like basically-

    23. AMAugusto Marietti21:33

        We, we... No, no, we were dead.

    24. MCMartin Casado21:34

        Yeah, it was-

    25. AMAugusto Marietti21:34

        We just didn't know about it yet.

    26. MCMartin Casado21:36

        You were, like, two weeks from being dead. I mean, it felt-

    27. AMAugusto Marietti21:37

        We were as, like, bumblebee, you know, that it flies, but it's not supposed to fly, and we keep, we keep going. [laughs]

    28. MCMartin Casado21:42

        [laughs] No, I remember that very, very well.

    29. AMAugusto Marietti21:44

        I- I, yeah, and you, and you were like, you're like, "Yeah, these guys been there a while. I think they're gonna, you know, they, whatever, they raise more money, then they're gonna give up." You were... I said, I said... And it was tough. Uh, and I, I think, I think if, if we go

12. 21:55 – 23:40

    Raising the Series B with a16z

    1. AMAugusto Marietti21:55

       back and say, I don't know we were able to replicate w- all the sequence that happens, all, all the things that happens. And I remember we went, uh, yeah, and then, uh, then we had that, that, uh, great sushi with, uh, with Marc Andreessen, you and I, and we sealed the deal.

    2. MCMartin Casado22:08

       Yep.

    3. AMAugusto Marietti22:08

       And Marco.

    4. MCMartin Casado22:09

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

    5. AMAugusto Marietti22:17

       A year and a half ago, yeah.

    6. MCMartin Casado22:18

       A year and a half ago.

    7. AMAugusto Marietti22:19

       Yeah.

    8. MCMartin Casado22:19

       So-

    9. AMAugusto Marietti22:20

       We, we... Yeah, it was in, in a year and a half, it's 10 years where we were like, when you invested, we were ARR less than a million.

    10. MCMartin Casado22:29

        Yeah, yeah. Yeah, is it, I mean-

    11. AMAugusto Marietti22:30

        Less than a million of ARR

    12. MCMartin Casado22:32

        ... do you remember, do you remember-

    13. AMAugusto Marietti22:32

        Not even a million ARR.

    14. MCMartin Casado22:33

        Do you remember-

    15. AMAugusto Marietti22:33

        500K probably.

    16. MCMartin Casado22:34

        Do you remember once, I remember, so yeah, so you had a great first year, and then I told you, I said, "Listen, if you [laughs] if, if you hit 10 million or whatever it was, I'll buy you a car." Remember that?

    17. AMAugusto Marietti22:44

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

    18. MCMartin Casado22:47

        Well, there's a funny story about this, and so, like, you know, you, um, you do it.

    19. AMAugusto Marietti22:52

        I did it.

    20. MCMartin Casado22:52

        So, like, I think you grow, like, 10X that year or eight, 8X.

    21. AMAugusto Marietti22:56

        So that year we went from 2 million of ARR-

    22. MCMartin Casado22:59

        Yeah

    23. AMAugusto Marietti22:59

        ... to 10.

    24. MCMartin Casado23:00

        That was right.

    25. AMAugusto Marietti23:00

        And the planning was six or seven.

    26. MCMartin Casado23:02

        Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I went and I-

    27. AMAugusto Marietti23:04

        So 5X

    28. MCMartin Casado23:04

        ... I went and I checked with compliance, and I'm like, "Can I buy Aghi a cheap car?" And they said, "The maximum for a gift is whatever it is." And so I'm like, "Crap." [laughs]

    29. AMAugusto Marietti23:13

        [laughs]

    30. MCMartin Casado23:13

        So I ended up buying you the best model car I could find.
13. 23:40 – 25:57

    Hitting Growth Milestones and the Car Bet

    1. MCMartin Casado23:40

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

    2. AMAugusto Marietti24:06

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

    3. MCMartin Casado24:12

       Yeah, yeah.Yeah, may-may-maybe we should just describe what Kong is right now-

    4. AMAugusto Marietti24:15

       Exactly, yeah

    5. MCMartin Casado24:15

       ... before we actually do that.

    6. AMAugusto Marietti24:16

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

    7. MCMartin Casado25:23

       But, but, but in a way, when you were starting the company, you were drafting on a big transition, right? Which was the breaking down of the monolith-

    8. AMAugusto Marietti25:29

       Yes

    9. MCMartin Casado25:29

       ... and the shift to cloud.

    10. AMAugusto Marietti25:30

        That was the killer.

    11. MCMartin Casado25:31

        Right. And so-

    12. AMAugusto Marietti25:32

        That was the key.

    13. MCMartin Casado25:32

        Yeah.

    14. AMAugusto Marietti25:33

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

    15. MCMartin Casado25:54

        I, I gotta say, I, I think a lot of people

14. 25:57 – 28:52

    Kong’s Breakout and API Leadership

    1. MCMartin Casado25:57

       don't know or maybe don't appreciate how fast Kong grew when it actually happened. So there was seven years of starvation, right? I mean-

    2. AMAugusto Marietti26:04

       Yeah

    3. MCMartin Casado26:04

       ... it was just basically wasn't working.

    4. AMAugusto Marietti26:06

       No. Actually, I find... And you know, and you don't, you know this, but, like, every year we do the Founders Award.

    5. MCMartin Casado26:11

       Yeah.

    6. AMAugusto Marietti26:12

       Uh, the Founders Award is two thousand and five hundred and fifty-five stock to the best employee of the company.

    7. MCMartin Casado26:17

       Yeah.

    8. AMAugusto Marietti26:18

       Why that? It's two hundred and fifty-five days of struggle to remember-

    9. MCMartin Casado26:22

       No kidding

    10. AMAugusto Marietti26:23

        ... every day, which is seven years.

    11. MCMartin Casado26:24

        That's, that's amazing.

    12. AMAugusto Marietti26:24

        It's seven years.

    13. MCMartin Casado26:25

        I didn't, I didn't know that.

    14. AMAugusto Marietti26:25

        Every year the company has to go, they get two thousand and fifty-five. It's, it's just, it's just symbolic-

    15. MCMartin Casado26:30

        Yeah, yeah, of course

    16. AMAugusto Marietti26:30

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

    17. MCMartin Casado26:34

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

    18. AMAugusto Marietti26:45

        And we had forty-five competitors when we started.

    19. MCMartin Casado26:47

        Oh, I remember that, yeah.

    20. AMAugusto Marietti26:48

        Now it's probably thirty. [laughing]

    21. MCMartin Casado26:51

        [laughing] But even then at the ti... Yeah. Well, Kong broke away pretty quickly. So I mean, you know, in, in, in recent years it's just clearly been the leader on this.

    22. AMAugusto Marietti26:58

        Yeah.

    23. MCMartin Casado26:58

        And that only happens, I think, if there's just clearly a market need. The market also kind of did you a favor in that, like, MuleSoft got acquired and Apigee got acquired too.

    24. AMAugusto Marietti27:07

        Yeah.

    25. MCMartin Casado27:07

        Right? It was like-

    26. AMAugusto Marietti27:08

        It was right, yeah, '17 MuleSoft got acquired. Apigee got acquired in '16.

    27. MCMartin Casado27:12

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

    28. AMAugusto Marietti27:45

        Yeah. I-I think, and again, it's, it's not like it was like any me those things, but the market came at us in AI by creating more APIs. What that means, agents are gonna consume internet in a very different way than how human did. It's not anymore websites, scroll, click, up and down, applications. They, they're gonna be there, but not as relevant as before. Agents are gonna programmatically exchange labor, get tasks done through programming interface, whether it's classic APRS, MCP protocols, which is like Duolingo for APIs, makes them speak English, whatever it is the protocol. But machines consuming internet is gonna be very different than human consuming internet. Human consuming internet would be through UI. Machine consuming internet is u- is, is through programming interface. That's the huge shift that we, we are now capturing and powering and making sure the enterprise, um, think about AI connectivity. And at the end of the day, behind the scene, it's all APIs.

    29. MCMartin Casado28:45

        We, you know, we had that board meeting, what was it, yesterday?

    30. AMAugusto Marietti28:48

        Yes.
15. 28:52 – 34:27

    AI, APIs, and the Future of Connectivity

    1. MCMartin Casado28:52

       many more banal use cases there are around AI, right? We can talk about agents, and I think it's worth talking about, and I agree with you, but it also s- feels like there's, like, a lot of just basic stuff like, like key management for... You know, like a lot of the companies are spending a lot of money on these AI models, right? So it's great to be able to have like, you know, monitoring, billing, key rotations, all of that stuff. So are you actually seeing like a non-agentic draft now?

    2. AMAugusto Marietti29:21

       Yeah. I think, I think... So where I think the, the, the world is a bit of stuck, okay, you have these AI companies like Poor that are just building models, yada, yada. And then, then you have this wrapper company that are trying to solve, you know, HR issue, whatever, through AI.

    3. MCMartin Casado29:32

       Yeah.

    4. AMAugusto Marietti29:33

       Then you have these LLMs that have APIs to talks, um, companies like Entropy, a lot of revenue through APIs, all that. What, what is missing is the infrastructure to make those, uh, those AI talks and run, and that's, that's what we do now with the AI Gate and a lot of products. But at the core, the boring problem, like you mentioned, authentication, authorization. You can be AGI as much as you want, but at the end, an agent gets stuck if it has to authenticate. And to authenticate, you gotta get an API key. You need a human in the loop to get the API key authenticate. But if you can provide infrastructure at the beginning, you can provision and auto- and automate key provision and key rotation authentication. So once you're there, you can unleash your LLM, your agents to just roam free.Without getting stuck every time for authentication, authorization, because you're already provisioning all these keys. I think that's where, that's where we want to our customers.

    5. MCMartin Casado30:25

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

    6. AMAugusto Marietti30:57

       I think you cannot do AI if you're not API first. It, it's just you don't have the mouth and the ears to a model. Um, and so that's how AI talks. So the way we know about API, API infrastructure, it will evolve, it won't-- it change, but API traffic and AI traffic, they're converging. So the classic API calls, yes, but also when you move tokens, it's an API call. And intelligent, let's say intelligent will be sold through tokens. Every earning release is about tokens. But behind in each tokens, there are calls. The payloads move tokens. So they're kind of converging, and what we are calling our building is a unified API and AI connectivity platform that it helps you navigate this transition as you're managing classic API traffic, as you're managing agent traffic, as you manage MCP traffic, as you manage LLM traffic. I think it will all converge into a unified like broker. And that's how I think intelligence will move, and, uh, based on evolutionary steps in like two, three years. But we already see MCP traffic growing every quarter.

    7. MCMartin Casado32:00

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

    8. AMAugusto Marietti32:46

       Yeah. I think, I think you can, you can think you can-- we can be an enabler to help large companies, small companies to, to get into the hands of more developers or more Cursor. Because it all start with API. We can provide you that infrastructures and, and, and all of that. Uh, we, as you see from yesterday morning, we have a, a very exciting roadmap that is going in all in that direction. Uh, so th-those are all enabled. I think h-here's the big bet. The big bet is i-- what happened in micro-- I, I, because I grew up in Italy, and you don't really study a lot of math, you just study history. But what you learn from history is that it doesn't exactly repeat, but it reads. It's just there's always an analogy. So you, you... So what we see with microservices, what happened? We, we first build rate limiting and authentication ten times, hundred times, fifty times into the Python framework, the JavaScript framework, the TypeScript framework, the Java framework, whatever, PHP, blah, blah, blah. At some point, it didn't make any sense. Let, let's abstract everything to a gateway pattern, and we move all this connectivity logic to the gateway and that dispatch to the right service, no matter what language. The same thing I think is gonna happen in LLMs. At first, you have one enterprise use one big LLMs. Now they're gonna use five, ten, hundred, small LLM, medium, large, whatever. Once you get to, you don't do tokens rate limiting, token authentication in each LLM using the framework, the lang chain, whatever. Eventually, w-- same thing happened in microservice, you will abstract that to a gateway pattern once again. And that's where I think AI gateway will have the, the same analogy and dispatcher to write connectivity logic to the right LLM versus rewriting in each LLM. I think that's the big bet that we make that happens in microservices, happens in how enterprise will run and govern

16. 34:27 – 37:23

    Lessons for Founders

    1. AMAugusto Marietti34:27

       hundreds of LLMs.

    2. MCMartin Casado34:29

       Great. Well, listen, as we wrap this up, I think it'd be great to kind of end with like any sort of recommendations for people that are listening to learn a bit more about how kind of AI is shifting the API landscape or maybe, you know, some advice on-

    3. AMAugusto Marietti34:43

       Don't start a company. I'm joking. [laughing]

    4. MCMartin Casado34:49

       [laughing] Maybe advi- advice on kind of like, you know, um, uh, you know, how to start thinking about getting ready for that.

    5. AMAugusto Marietti34:57

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

    6. MCMartin Casado35:26

       And for the, uh, listen, the budding founders that are listening to like the most hardcore Silicon Valley-

    7. AMAugusto Marietti35:32

       Do not pass go

    8. MCMartin Casado35:32

       ... struggle story ever, [laughs] what advice do you give to them?

    9. AMAugusto Marietti35:37

       I think what, what I learned over a decade of life-

    10. MCMartin Casado35:39

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

    11. AMAugusto Marietti35:47

        Never.

    12. MCMartin Casado35:48

        No.

    13. AMAugusto Marietti35:48

        Never. Never. The, the reason is I could never visualize myself going back to the airport in Italy and my dad picking me up and say, "How's it going?" And it's just like would fail with my tails and my legs, like I could never-- I would have died here without food. Like I cannot do that.

    14. MCMartin Casado36:06

        [laughs]

    15. AMAugusto Marietti36:06

        And so that, that never crossed through, through the head.

    16. MCMartin Casado36:09

        I had shivers. That was so good.

    17. AMAugusto Marietti36:10

        But never. Like that's, that's the visual that every time I even start to... I, I had that visual and immediately say, "I'm not going back like that."

    18. MCMartin Casado36:18

        Wow.

    19. AMAugusto Marietti36:19

        And so, and then, but the, the thing to advise is it always take longer than what, uh, we thinks. Um, it is good to take a, a trend the last ten years, twenty years because you have time to grow into and do a lot of mistakes and building, and just you have to generally believe it in this trend versus following glitters because it's gonna take longer than what you think. As a leader, as a human, as a market, as a product, as a revenue, it's always gonna take longer. So take something that lasts and just put a hundred and ten percent on it every day, and then it will compound. Uh, keep the burn rate low in the early days.

    20. MCMartin Casado36:52

        Don't die.

    21. AMAugusto Marietti36:53

        Is ri-- don't die, like don't quit. Uh, those, those are, um, those, those are I think the things I learned along the way.

    22. MCMartin Casado37:01

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

    23. AMAugusto Marietti37:07

        Likewise. Thank you, Martin. [outro music]

Episode duration: 37:29