He opens a closet and there's like all the bananas falling off, because it was one guy's only eating huge bananas.
He opened another closet, there's another mattress with another guy sleeping in a second closet.
It's okay.
This is real.
We had no money.
We just take 600 bucks last left to go to United flight.
And we had 90 days to just make it or break it.
We knew that if we couldn't race, we wouldn't go back to Italy broke.
And that was it.
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.
Every year we do the Founders Award.
The Founders Award is 2,555 stocks to the best employee of the company.
Why that?
It's 255 days of struggle.
It's just symbolic.
But to remember seven years of struggle, every year is a ritual.
What if the backbone of modern software was forged on $1,000 a month and a borrowed couch?
Today's guest is Augusto Agui Marietti, CEO and co-founder of Kong.
He joins A16Z general partner Martin Casado to trace an improbable path from a garage in Milan to building one of the world's leading API platforms.
We get into the seven-year grind before breakout, the near-death moments that forced reinvention, and how APIs became the assembly line of software.
Augie also explains how Kong sits in the flow of everything from microservices to AI agents and why the next wave of autonomous systems will make APIs more essential than ever.
Let's get into it.
So Aki is the founder and CEO of Kong, which was previously MassShape.
And we're covering his background, from a garage in Milan to now being the CEO of a at-scale company with, I dare say, IPO ambitions.
Long way to go, but that's one of the steps along the way.
Ambitions.
All right, so you're doing this kind of API thing.
You come to the US on a tourist visa?
Tourist visa, yeah.
And the idea was to raise- 90 days.
Was the idea to raise funding?
Yeah, we had no money.
We just take 600 bucks last left to go to a United flight through Cincinnati.
We went through secondary room and we landed up sorry, atlanta first time.
Cincinnati was second secondary room and then we went right to san francisco and we had 90 days to just make it or break it.
We knew that if we couldn't race we would go back to italy, broke and that was it.
So did you raise them?
Yeah, we raised two weeks before departure.
You raised them those?
Angel rounds.
We're talking about a decade ago, right?
Small checks.
It was 50K angel round.
Who was it from?
It was the founding YouTube teams.
Oh, really?
There we go.
And here's the funny story.
How did you get introduced to them?
So there's two interesting things that you say, can you redo it again?
I won't be able to redo it again.
So number one is we went to the Stanford Entrepreneurship Week.
At that time, Stanford was doing the Stanford Entrepreneurship Week in February.
And it was cool.
You made all the entrepreneurs, all the VC were coming there.
And there was this entrepreneurship mixer, big party.
We arrived, we left late.
At that point, it was all paper with all the email and the registration.
We still the things with all the email and the registration and we walk home with that and that night till 5 am i writes all the 400 emails wow about.
Hey, you need to know about my shot.
We didn't have time to catch up at the mixer but i'm happy to give you a pitch tomorrow.
Wow, i think.
470 didn't reply, 30 replied.
And 10 were kind of interested.
And at the end, five or six went to meet us.
And then this one person called Kevin Donow, who was one of the founding team of YouTube, came to our.
What's his name?
Kevin Donahue.
Kevin Donahue.
And then he started a company for baby books.
He sold it.
But he said, look, I think this is something.
So he wrote a $17,000 check on an earmatch.
17?
Thousands.
Yeah.
And for us, 17,000 was life.
Yeah.
Versus debt.
Yeah.
So we came from 600 bucks and a few hundred bucks.
And so then he brought two other phoning teeth.
It actually 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.
It was too many sixes.
Like we don't want too many six in the captive.
So we rounded up 17, 17, 17, and we got 51,000 check.
Now, the second funny part is we negotiated and closed the deal at Travis Kalanick's house.
Travis Kalanick's house.
I remember there was an article about you sleeping on his couch.
Yes, and Airbnb guys as well.
But what happened during the negotiation with these guys, we're negotiating and they didn't want.
So Travis had.
At that time was this house up in Castro called the Jam Pet, where everybody would go.
Aaron Lee would go and drew from drawball was the data.
We're all going there on the weekends and i didn't have a place to say so.
Actually, travis gave me his place to stay a few weeks as long as i would cook carbonara for his better half once a week and i did that.
And then we need to help and 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 these convertible notes at like 50 discount something crazy.
We were desperate.
And so I said, okay, well, I don't want to take this deal.
Screw that.
I said, okay, okay, we're going to leave.
And I was very naive, 20 years old.
Okay, okay, give a comeback.
And Travis come to me, put the hands and say if these guys leave, you're never going to see them again, and nor the money.
Wow.
So let me do something else.
So you guys stay here and figure it out, the counteroffer.
Aggie and I go to the bathroom.
We close his 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.
Went to the bathroom and we sit there 10 minutes.
Go back, another round of negotiation, back to the bathroom.
So three, four times.
At the end, we handshake on the deal.
And what was it?
Just finally better, like 42% convertible discount instead of 50.
Wow.
And it was a higher cap.
And that's it.
And then we shake the hand and that was it.
That's crazy.
So I remember you had the Quora like the top Quora post for living on like 14000 a year in San Francisco.
You had raised $51,000 and now you had to make that last as long as possible.
So maybe talk about the next stretch.
What happened is obviously we got $50,000.
We got to come back.
We are illegal in two weeks.
So we went back to Italy and we came 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 have to enter into a new system.
And we had zero anything.
So we couldn't pay our salary.
Because we didn't have SSN, we didn't have a legal visa to pay ourselves, all that.
So the company... Did you have employees at this point?
No.
It's just you two?
It was three of us.
It was Mikel, who was the third co-founder back then.
But we did about 1100 monthly promissory notes that the company would give us and we would have to leave in three months with 1000 a month.
That would be forgiven.
So you were living off $1,000 a month?
In three.
Three people were living off $1,000 a month?
Yeah.
In San Francisco?
Yeah.
How do you do that?
It was cheaper.
Now, what year was this?
2009, 2010.
Even then, it's impossible.
$1,000 a month for three people?
I'll tell you how we did it.
So we leave it in an Airbnb somewhere else at a hundred bucks and all in the same mattress.
And we were going to Valencia.
I don't know if you did this in Valencia.
Did you have an office?
No, we were working out of Starbucks.
And we were living in Valencia and we were buying rice, beans, and tuna and pasta.
And the reason is that we had to find the right amount of carbs and product the cheapest way possible.
And that was the combination of...
I guess amount of carbs and product the cheapest way possible.
And that's how we made it.
Like we never eat out.
We never buy it.
We did everything in the house.
We cooked in the kitchen, Airbnb, rice, beans, or tuna pasta.
In fact, we eat so much tuna pasta with tomato that Marco and I, when we seen our tuna pasta, we almost threw up because we just running on tuna pasta every single day.
Wait, so how long did this last?
That last, so March, April 2010, a year, a year and a few months.
And what were you doing this time?
I know what Marco was doing this time.
He's writing code.
What were you doing?
I was writing blog, building the website, calling the sign up, talking with every sign up on the website that was talking to us and trying to figure out.
I was doing big stuff.
So B devs, HTML, CSS slicer, talking with investor too as you start to build the seed rounds.
Yeah.
Trying to do some recruiting.
That never worked because nobody wanted to work for illegal Italians.
That will disappear.
So a lot of mistakes.
And this yeah, all right, so take us to the seed round.
So somebody decided to give you a proper round at some point.
So then, a year later, we re-architected.
So we went to Honolulu on the beach, Moana Beach, and we thought about okay, all these APIs we're aggregating.
I think the word is, actually, we see now, finally now, but 10, 15 years ago, it wasn't ready.
They were to build apps on the fly through APIs with drag and drop.
We were too far ahead.
We're missing pieces.
But I say, hey, we are wrapping a lot of APIs.
Actually, that assembly line visual is still whole.
We just have to pivot it and build an API marketplace where all the APIs producer and consumers they can come together.
And so we people that we relaunch it, then crunch all the stuff.
Okay.
So, so you originally were doing this kind of drag and drop composable builder apps builder thing.
So funny how many companies go through this exact journey.
And then you're like, okay, HTML five.
Wow.
And then you're like, okay, no, we need to build a marketplace.
Exactly, because the economy, this API economy will come.
It's not just apps, it will be APIs.
And we built a marketplace, we launched it, we got decent traction on long tail.
And that was already the summer of 2011. after a pivot in Hawaii.
So we launched very fast, boom, boom, boom.
And then we raised.
Wait, was that Hawaii on the last of the money?
No, no, because San Francisco to Honolulu, I think at that time it was like 300 bucks.
So I say, with our 51K, you know we're living like on tuna pasta, rice and beans in Valencia, in Mission, in this historic building, middle of nowhere in Mission.
And you guys, same mattress?
Same mattress and things.
It's unbelievable.
At some point, I remember, I woke up in the morning, I need to go to Honolulu.
We could do our walk on the beach and thinking about our future or no future, because we knew this was going.
No future.
Our money were starting to drain and we needed to pivot.
And that's where we had the idea, let's go for the pivot.
And then we come back, we did crazy.
I remember us building the website.
Marco was going crazy.
The third co-founder was... building all the Java backends and the launch it fast.
And I've got a little bit of TechCrunch press.
At that time was ReadWriteWeb.
This other one was Mashable.
And so somehow we got covered by all of that, which is now like Chris.
And then boom.
And then they start to see the round face.
From who?
So at that time We went through a lot of iterations, but where we ended up was NEA leading the seed round and then Index co-leading to NEA.
And then we got a bunch... So Volpe did the...
Yeah, so what happened is, actually, the first checks were George Zachary from CRV back then.
He didn't lead the round, but he was the first 100K to meet.
And so with that, he said, we have CRV, 100K.
At that point, they had a seed program, very unusual back then.
So we went to NEA, and he said, we're going to lead this round.
At that point, also, they started a seed program, 500K.
And then I met Mike Volpe that just moved to San Francisco to launch Index US.
It was like him and Danny Reimer to there somewhere.
And they also started Angel, a seed program, and they wrote on other big checks.
And then we got a long tail, which was likely Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt into the funds.
And so we got this combination.
How did you get Bezos and Eric Schmidt?
So again, this is a state in DPD that I don't know we can replicate.
So what happened is Jeff Bezos.
So Jeff Bezos, I knew he was special about marketplace as a business, APIs and developers.
AWS was just starting to take off.
It was this hidden secret.
This is 2011?
Yeah.
So Amazon was maybe a $50 billion company then a $80 billion company.
So what happened is I hired the lawyer of his family office for my shape.
And after we hired for doing the seed round, as the seed round was going along, I said by the way, since you're also the lawyer of the family office and Bezos Expeditions, can you introduce me?
He introduced me to Jeff Bezos.
That's what we do.
So it's a PG call call.
And then he was on the road with his brother, going around with his brother on the road in Texas.
And he actually really wanted to put more and invest.
Boom.
So that was Jeff Bezos.
What do you get from just baseball?
You get the brand.
So we got a dinner, a year strategy of things.
But obviously it was the big brand.
And then second, Eric Schmidt, we were working in this co-working space.
And what happened is we were the only startup to stay the latest in the night, after this other startup that was doing Expedia for cruise ships that just raised from NEA and Eric Schmidt.
And at the end, they saw us work until 3 a.m., 4 a.m.
They would leave at 2.
They knew we were fundraising and the investor asked, who's the hardest worker?
They knew and said, these guys next to us.
And so they introduced us to the Eric Schmidt fund and that's how Eric Schmidt invest.
Wow.
Wow.
Totally unrelated.
All right, so now this brings us to... A lot of luck.
So what was your total seed funding raised?
At that time, it was very big.
It was 1.5.
It's like, wow, huge seed round.
I gotta say... In 2010, 11.
I gotta say, there's a lot of optimism...
It's an optimistic retrospective view to be like there was three of you on a mattress for a year and then you say you were lucky.
Illegally.
That sounds pretty unlucky to me.
Illegally.
No longer jail.
All right, so now you have your seatbelt and mask shapes going.
So then we raise the seat.
All right, now it's real.
We got to get these visas.
We got a middleman.
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 a CEO of Loopt, which I met on.
We were going to the NEA retreat and I see next to him in the bus and we were 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?
No kidding.
And he wrote me.
So I have this big thing of how great I am.
You've got to get this guy in the country no matter what.
So we got these five letters, and...
And I get this 01 visa and finally got the visa.
So if I can come here, I can get a wee workspace.
And we start to hire and we had seven people.
And Mark also got the visa.
Mark also, because of the love book, he never got to college or nothing.
So it was the hardest visa to do.
So we figured it out, more or less recommendations for him.
We brought him there.
We stay here, blah, blah, blah.
We build a year, we grow.
Now.
But you know at that time like you needed like a million, let's say a million revenue to take a good series A.
For a marketplace, you need a million in gross volume.
We were like at 50K.
So a lot of traction, but not a lot of revenue.
But we went through a three, four-month series, A race and CRV led and then Index Go led the round.
Was it Dev.net?
Yeah.
Yeah, because George Zachary was more a consumer so he passed the link to Devnet just more on the enterprise side.
I remember Dev.net called me like, Sunday at 6 a.m. to go for a walk to decide to invest or not.
And he knows I'm a night owl.
And he just Sunday 6 a.m. to go down to Palo Alto.
I had to rent a zip car.
There was no Uber.
And go down there and and then go for a few walks, and I decided to invest.
Because he was always actually a big believer on APIs as assembly line.
You could see that.
Maybe he wasn't sure Marketplace was the right execution, but the theme, he was a big believer.
And I think he liked us.
He came to see us sleeping in the same mattress.
He wanted to really see that we're not bullshitting the big drama story.
It was really drama.
Actually he opens.
He came to the Acker House because we moved to Acker House in South Park at that time, where we're sleeping and working there with the 7TP.
And he opens a closet and there's like all the bananas falling off, because it was one guy's only eating huge bananas.
He opened another closet, there's another mattress with another guy sleeping in a second closet.
Wow.
Okay, this is real.
Wow.
How big was your pay?
6.5 million.
Oh, so for you, that must have been a lot of money.
6.5 million.
Yeah, I went out with this PowerPoint.
Let's raise a 10 million seriously.
At that point, I was like the big thing.
We ended up at 6.5.
And I say, that's science.
It was like, when we saw it, it was like, yeah, like maybe we got a shot.
So at some point you decided that the market wasn't working.
The marketplace wasn't working.
And I think so.
We raised this and we hired more.
We moved to a new office 25 people, like the usual post-raise honeymoon.
And I remember this thing like six months after, the business wasn't really doing anything.
So it was one board meeting that we just cooked pasta for the board members at that time, because that was like two years before you joined us.
And it was nothing to talk about from business.
The issue was you couldn't monetize or there was a graduation problem.
These marketplaces are very tough.
So the idea of the marketplace.
When I was staying with Airbnb founders, I learned that the marketplace 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.
Look at eBay.
You can't kill.
So I thought, like, there's all this API.
You can build a marketplace with liquidity.
It'll be like the AWS.
And so we noticed, though, that in our case, it was a developer API marketplace.
So to have, to have 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 the marketplace.
APIs.
At that time, power of law for public APIs was on the Twilio, the Stride, where 30 that matters and 3000 that didn't matter much.
So it was also this long tail power.
And third thing 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 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 or APIs.
That is like 10%, yeah.
And it was also losing margin on AWS.
So I could never make the economics in that model.
I could never make the economics works, even if this thing would have scaled.
So then we go there, it's like, okay, this is where 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 firing 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.
What was your runway at the time that you open sourced Kong?
So we open sourced in April 15.
We had to take a bridge of $2 million to go another year.
Was it an insider bridge?
Yeah, we had to take an extension because we were out of gas.
From DepthEd and Mike.
Yeah.
They gave us an extension on the two millions because we were out of gas.
Like we would have died otherwise.
Wow.
So you released... I remember when Kong released.
It was actually a really big deal.
When was that?
2015.
2015.
Yeah, 2015.
That was a really big deal.
I remember... It took off, boom.
Yeah, so this is when you and I started talking about your raise.
You're raising the B. You came at the right time.
Before, like, these guys make no sense.
Okay, now it starts to make sense.
Well, that wasn't even a tough raise for you just because the company had been around for seven years.
Like a marketplace like Kong had just come out and it was taking off, but like it only been a couple of weeks, maybe a couple of months.
And so honestly, I'll tell you what.
What did it for me is We were doing all the work, and the GitHub stars checked out.
Your story is phenomenal, your command of the business is great, but it just wasn't enough.
But then while we were doing the diligence, Like, I kept getting these kind of serendipitous, like, somebody had used Kong and loved it.
I remember didn't like somebody stay in, like your Airbnb and like loved Kong, and then you forwarded that to me.
And so there's just kind of, like, all of this...
You know, zeitgeist around Kong.
And as a result of that, I'm like, oh, this is clearly a phenomenon.
Yeah, I remember it was spamming you with emails of every prospect or customer user that we're saying.
It's just, you say, Kong, Kong usage, Kong usage, just nonstop.
It was blowing up the inbox.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So how close were you to running out of money for the B?
So after Breach, there were weeks.
Jeez.
Yeah, but I was very.
Nothing is ever going to stress you again in your entire life because you've been so close to at least business so many times.
Because I actually remember when we went to the office, it felt...
No, no, we were dead.
We just didn't know about it.
You're like two weeks from being dead.
We were like Bumblebee, you know, that it flies, but it's not supposed to fly.
We keep going.
No, I remember that very, very well.
Yeah.
You were like, you're like, yeah, this guy's been there a while.
I think they're going to, whatever, they raise money and then they're going to give up.
It was tough.
And I think if, If we go back and say I don't know, we were able to replicate all the sequence that happens, all the things that happens.
And I remember we went yeah, and then we had that great sushi with Marc Andreessen, you and I, and we sealed the deal.
And Marco...
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.
A year and a half ago, yeah.
A year and a half ago.
Yeah.
So... We...
Yeah, it was in a year and a half.
It's 10 years where we were like, when you invested we were ARR less than a million.
Yeah, yeah.
Less than a million over an hour.
Not even a million over an hour.
500K probably.
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 hit 10 million or whatever it was, I'll buy you a car.
Remember that?
Oh, actually, we have it in the new office now.
I need to send you a picture.
Well, there's a funny story about this.
And so like, you know, you do it.
So like, I think you grow like 10x that year.
So that year we went from 2 million of ARR to 10.
That was right.
And the plan, I think, was six or seven.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then I went and I checked with compliance and I'm like, can I buy Augie a cheap car?
And they said the maximum for a gift is whatever it is.
So I'm like, crap.
So I ended up buying you the best model car I could find.
From Japan, I think.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I spent a long time actually looking for this model car.
Is the 280 GT.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
So great.
So I would love to shift.
I think this is the most remarkable...
Silicon Valley startup story that I know of that I'm close to and I kind of having one.
That will make a movie one day.
They will have to make a movie one day.
Yeah.
I would love to like kind of shift towards how you think about product, how you think about markets, and then kind of move towards AI.
So you actually have seen a number of shifts now, right?
You saw the cloud come.
You saw the shift to APIs.
So maybe just talk a little bit about how you view this current shift with AI.
Is it fundamentally different?
Is it the same?
Does it change how you think about yourself as a leader?
How is your view at a high level?
So the big thing is, I'll start with API first.
So obviously, we've become this API infrastructure company.
Yeah, maybe we should just describe what Kong is right now before we actually do that.
So we left with this pivot and we open sourced.
Kong API Gateway took off and we became an enterprise company.
We rebranded Kong Inc And we 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 10, 100,000 of APIs.
We're kind of this... highways that makes them run, and you have rate limiting.
Like if APIs were cars.
You got guardrails, speed bump, speed cameras, gas stations stalls bumps guardrails everything ambulance, and we provide all the infrastructure to make sure that the API connectivity runs for small company, big company, all of that.
Now, In this transition, you mentioned what really drove, I think, this explosion of cloud APIs was the workload moving from on-prem to the cloud.
The second transition is breaking down the monolith microservice.
It recreates more and more apis, the big data and all that it creates event streaming, all that.
So this just data in motion is much higher than it's becoming much higher than like data rest or data data and use than before.
But in a way, when you were starting the company, you were drafting on a big transition, right.
Which was the breaking down of the monolith and the shift to cloud.
Right.
That was the key.
Yeah.
I think before there were all these archive legacy solutions in APIs, but they were not built for the transition to the cloud and breaking down the model.
It's into microservices and high scale decentralized architecture.
I mean, you know from your time and it's here like we, we kind of invented a control plane, data plane separation at the api management, api control plane level.
Nobody was doing it before.
I got to say I think a lot of people don't know or maybe don't appreciate how fast Kong grew when it actually happened.
So there was seven years of starvation, right?
I mean, it was just basically wasn't working.
No, actually, I know you don't, you know, despite like, Every year we do the Founders Award.
The Founders Award is 2,555 stock to the best employee of the company.
Why that? is 255 days of struggle to remember every day, which is seven years.
That's amazing.
It's seven years.
I didn't know that.
Every year the company has to go, they get 2,055.
It's just symbolic.
Yeah, yeah, of course.
To remember seven years of struggle, every year is a ritual.
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.
And we had 45 competitors when we started.
Oh, I remember that.
Yeah.
Now it's probably 30.
But even then at the time, yeah, well, Kong broke away pretty quickly.
So, I mean, you know, in recent years, it's clearly been the leader on this.
And that only happens, I think, if there's just clearly a market need.
The market also kind of did you a favor in that like MuleSoft got acquired and Apogee got acquired too.
Yeah right, it was right.
Yeah 17, you also got acquired.
I think you got acquired in 16.
That's right, yeah.
So like in a way kind of like, there was consolidation and you broke out this later.
So you kind of navigated this transition from Cloud to break up the microservices.
You built the control plane for APIs.
You're considered now the leader independent.
For sure, in the API, space Kong is the leader independent.
There's no question of that.
But now you're facing another market shift, which is kind of this movement to AI.
And so do you view this as directly impactful, adjacent, accretive?
How are you as CEO viewing this?
Yeah.
I think it's not like it was like any meters things, but the market came at us in AI by creating more APIs.
What that means.
Agents are going to consume internet in a very different way than how human did.
There's not any more websites, scroll, click, up and down, applications.
They're going to be there, but not as relevant as before.
Agents are going to programmatically exchange labor, get 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 going to be very different than human consuming internet.
Human consuming internet would be through UI.
Machine consuming internet is through programming interface.
That's the huge shift that we are now capturing and powering and making sure the enterprise think about AI connectivity.
And at the end of the day, behind the scene, it's all APIs.
We had that board meeting, what was it, yesterday?
Yes.
And what I found actually pretty remarkable is how many more banal use cases there are around AI.
We can talk about agents and I think it's worth talking about and I agree with you.
But it also feels like there's a lot of just basic stuff, like like key management, for you know, like a lot of 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 you're actually seeing like a non-agentic draft.
Yeah, so when I think the word is a bit of stack okay, you have these AI companies like PUR that are just building models yada, yada.
And then you have this wrapper company that are trying to solve, you know, HR issue, whatever through AI.
Then you have these LLMs that have APIs to talks companies like Entropy.
A lot of revenue through APIs, all that.
What is missing is the infrastructure to make those AI talks and run.
And that's what we do now.
We delegate to a lot of products.
But at the core, the booting problem, like you mentioned, authentication, authorization.
You can be AGI as much as you want, but at the end, an agent gets stuck if he has to authenticate.
And to authenticate, you got to get an API key.
You need a human in the loop to get the API key authenticate.
But if you can provide infrastructure at the beginning, you can provision and automate key provisioning, key rotation, authentication.
So once you're there, you can unleash your LLM, your agents, to just roam free without getting stuck every time for authentication authorization, because you're already provisioning all these keys.
I think that's where we want to our customers.
So maybe just assume for this part of our discussion that whoever's listening is pretty familiar with API infrastructure, right?
Do you think that the way API infrastructure looks in six months or a year or two years is dramatically different because of AI?
Or is it that the infrastructure that we have in place, that we understand today, evolves to also service agents in ways that are pretty obvious?
Like.
To what extent do you think this is like transformational on the infrastructure layer versus like more of a transition?
I think you cannot do AI if you're not API first.
It's just, you don't have the mouth and the ears to a model.
And so that's how AI talks.
So the way we know about API infrastructure, it will evolve.
It won't change.
But API traffic and AI traffic, they're converging.
So the classic API calls yes, but also when you move tokens is an API call, and intelligent, let's say intelligence, will be sold through tokens.
Every earning release is about tokens, but behind and each token there are calls that 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 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 program.
And that's how I think intelligence will move.
And it's an evolutionary steps in like two, three years.
But we already see MCP traffic growing every quarter.
I mean, I see even like really basic things like for developers, this is evolving very quickly.
So for example, you know, for fun, I develop using cursor.
You know I used to be a professional developer.
You know, in a previous life, even knowing what APIs existed in a company required a ton of reading through docs or some weird search.
And it feels like now, especially 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 cannot 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.
Yeah, I think we can be an enabler to help large companies, small companies, to get into the hands of more developers or more Coursera.
Because it's also an API.
We can provide you with that infrastructure and all of that.
As you see from Yasir Burme, we have a very exciting roadmap that is going in all in that direction.
So those are all any of them.
I think here's the big bet.
The big bet is What happened in micros, 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 it is that even if it doesn't exactly repeat, but it reads.
It's just that it's always on and out.
So what we see with microservices, what happened?
We first build rate limiting and authentication 10 times, 100 times, 50 times into the Python framework, the JavaScript framework, the JavaScript framework, the Java framework, whatever PHP.
Blah blah, blah.
At some point, it didn't make any sense.
Let's abstract everything to a gateway pattern and we move all this connectivity logic to the gateway and then dispatch to the right service, no matter what language.
The same thing, I think, is going to happen in LLMs.
At first, you have one enterprise use one big LLMs.
Now they're going to use 5, 10, 100, small LLM, medium, large, whatever.
Once you get to, You don't do tokens relimiting, token authentication in each LLM using the framework, the long chain, whatever.
Eventually...
Same thing happened in Microsoft, but you will abstract that to a gateway partner once again.
And that's where I think AI Gateway will have the same analogy and dispatcher to write connectivity logic to the right LLM versus rewriting.
I think that's the big bet that we make.
That happens in microservices, happens in how enterprise will run and govern hundreds of LLMs.
Great.
Well, listen, as we wrap this up, I think it'd be great to kind of end with like any sort of recommendations for people that are listening to learn a bit more about how kind of AI shifting the API landscape or maybe, you know, some advice on... Don't start a company, I'm joking.
Maybe advice on kind of like, you know, how to start thinking about getting ready for that?
I think I said before, like, there is a lot of focus on model pre-training, tuning, all of that.
But a key thing is the connectivity layer how LLMs agents whatever, will talk to each other.
How you will run.
I think a lot of the traffic will be very strategic and you have to build in the startups or the enterprise to manage that AI connectivity into your next apps, your next internal tools, your next customers.
And for the budding founders that are listening to the most hardcore Silicon Valley struggle story ever what advice do you give to them?
I think what I learned over a decade of like Do you ever think I just have to?
Do you ever think that?
Like, maybe you should have cut your losses and try to start it over again?
Like, do you ever think that that would have been the right thing?
Never.
No.
Never.
Never.
The reason is I could...
Never visualized 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.
And so that never crossed through the head.
Shivers, that was so good.
But never like.
That's the visual that every time I even start to.
I had that visual and immediately say I'm not going back like that.
And so, and then, but the thing to advise is, It always takes longer than what we think.
It's good to take a trend that lasts 10 years, 20 years, because you have time to grow into and do a lot of mistakes and building.
And just you have to generally believe it in this trend versus falling glitters.
Because it's going to take longer than what you think.
As a leader, as a human, as a market, as a product, as a revenue, it's always going to take longer.
So take something that lasts and just put 110% on it every day and then it will compound.
Keep the burn rate low in the early days.
Don't die.
Don't die, like don't quit.
Those are...
Those are, I think, the things I learned along the way.
Agi, it's been a privilege and an honor working with you these past few years.
And thanks so much for coming on the podcast.
Likewise.
Thank you, Martin.
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