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

Episode Date: October 21, 2025

Augusto Marietti, CEO and cofounder of Kong, has one of the most remarkable founder stories in Silicon Valley history.In this conversation with Martin Casado, Aghi shares how he went from a garage in Milan to building one of the world’s leading API infrastructure companies, surviving years of rejection, living in the U.S. on $1,000 a month, and raising his first $50K while sleeping on Travis Kalanick’s couch. They talk about the near-death moments that defined Kong’s journey, the seven-year grind before breakout success, and how APIs became the “assembly line of software.” Aghi also explains how Kong evolved into the backbone of modern API and AI connectivity, and why the coming wave of AI agents will make APIs more essential than ever. Resources:Follow Aghi on X: x.com/sonicaghiFollow Kong on X: https://x.com/kongFollow Martin on X: x.com/martin_casado Stay Updated: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends!Find a16z on X: https://x.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zListen to the a16z Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bC65RDvs3oxnLyqqvkUYXListen to the a16z Podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z-podcast/id842818711Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenbergPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Stay Updated:Find a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Podcast on SpotifyListen to the a16z Podcast on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

He opens a closet and there's like all the bananas falling off because one guy is only eating huge bananas. He opened another closet. There's another mattress with other guys leap in a second closet. Say, 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 stock to the best employee of the company. Why that is 255 days of struggle. It's just symbolic. But to remember seven years of struggle, every year is a ritual. What if the backbone of modern software was forged on $1,000 a month in a borrowed couch? Today's guest is Augusto Aghi Marietti, CEO and co-founder of Kong. He joins A16Z general partner, Martine Casado, to trace an improbable path from a garage in Milan to building more of the world-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 Agi is the founder and CEO of Kong, which was previously MASHApe, 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 at some point? Long way. We're a long way to go, but that's one of the steps along the way. Ambitions. All right. So you're, you're, doing this kind of API thing, you come to the U.S. on a tourist visa? Tourist visa, yeah.

And the idea was to raise... 90 days. Is 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. We landed up, sorry, Atlanta first time. Cincinnati was second secondary room.

And then we went, we arrived 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 have go back to Italy broke and that was it. So did you raise in those? Yeah, we raised two weeks before departure. You raised in those. Inger rounds. We're talking about that kind of go, right, small checks. It was 50K.

And Geron. Who was it from? It was the founding YouTube teams. Oh, right. There we go. And here's the funny story. How did you get introduced to that? So there's two interesting thing that you say, can you redo it again?

I won't be able to redo it again. Yeah. 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 interproship mixer. big party. We arrived. We left late. At that point, it was all paper with all the email and the

registration. We steal the things with all the email and the registration. And we walk home with that. And then night till 5 a.m., I writes all the 400 emails about, hey, you need to know about Michelle. 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 reply. And 10 were kind of interested. And at the end, five or six went to meet us. And then this one person, called Kevin Donahue, who was one of the people,

a founding team of YouTube, came to our... What's the name? Kevin Donahue. And then he started a company for baby books. He sold it. But he said, look,

I think he said something... So we wrote a $17,000 check on an ear match. 17,000? Yeah. And for us, 17,000 was life. Yeah. Versus dead.

Yeah. So we came from a 600 bucks and a few hundred bucks. And so then he brought two other funding teeth. The right out of six. It actually was 16,000, 16,000, 16,000. We got 15,000. They're probably 15,000 divided three.

It was 6, 6, 6, 6, 6. It was too many 6. It's like, we don't want too many 6 in the captive. So we run it up 17, 17, 17, and we got 51,000 check. Now, the second funny part is we negotiated and closed the deal at Travis Kalanick house. 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 at that time was this house up in Castro called it a jam pad, where everybody would go, Aaron leave would go. And Drew from Dropball 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 a help. And say, come to my kitchen. We negotiate. So we sit on the table. It was myself and Travis Kalanik. And there were the three YouTube investors negotiated these convertible notes are like 50% discount. Something crazy.

We were desperate. And so I said, okay, well, I don't want to take this deal. Screw that. And say, okay, okay, we're going to leave. And I was very naive, 20 years old. Okay, okay, he will come back. And Travis come to me, put the hands and say, if this guy leave, you're never going to see them again and nor the money.

Wow. So let me do something else. So you guys stay here and figure it out the counteroffer. Agi 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. the bathroom. So three, four time. At the end, we handshake on the deal, just tiny better, like 42% convertible. It's kind of a 50. 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 14,000 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 55, we've 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 can 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? It was just you two. It was three of us. It was, Michael was the third co-founder back then. But we did about 1,900 monthly promissory note that the company would give us and we would have to live in three with $1,000 a month. So you were living off $1,000 a month?

In three. Three people were living off $1,000. Yeah, yeah, in San Francisco. Yeah. How do you do that? It was cheaper. No, what year was this? 2009, 2010.

Even then. Even then, it's impossible, $1,000 a month for $3,000. people? I tell you how we did it. So we live 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 or B&B, rice, beans, or tuna pasta. In fact, we'd so much tuna pasta with tomato that Marco and I, when we see now with tuna pasta,

we almost threw up because we're just running on tuna pasta every single day. So how, 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 all every sign up on the website that was talking to us and tried for hours. I was doing big of B-Devs, HTML, CSS slicer, talking with investor to as you start to build the seed rounds, 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, figure things out.

All right. So take us to the C-Round. So somebody decided to give you a proper round at some point. So then a year later, we re-architects. So we went to on Oluo, on the beach, on Moana Beach. We thought about, okay, all these APIs were aggregating. I think the word is actually we see now, finally now. But 10, 15 years ago, it wasn't ready.

They were to build apps on the flight through APIs with drag and drop. We were too far ahead. We're missing pieces. But I say, hey, we aren't wrapping a lot of APIs. Actually, that assembly line visual 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 peopled that.

We relaunch it, then crunch, all the stuff. So originally we're doing this kind of drag-and-drop composable. Apps builder thing. It's so funny how many companies go through this exact journey. And then you're like, okay. With HTML 5. Wow. And then you're like, okay, no.

we need to build a marketplace. Exactly. Because, okay, the economy, this API economy will come. It's not just apps. It will be APIs. And we build a marketplace. We launch it. We got disinteractions on Long Tail.

And that was already the summer of 2011. After a pivot in Hawaii. So we launched very fast, boom, boom. And then we raise after Hawaii on the last of the money from... No, no, because San Francisco to Honolulu, I think at that time, it was like 300 bucks. So it's like 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 and things.

And you guys, same mattress and things. It's like, unbelievable. At some point I remember, I remember a couple of morning, I need to go to Onolulu. We could do our walk on the beach and thinking about our future or no future because we knew this was going to 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 building the Webster, Mark was crazy. The third co-founder was building all the Java backhands. the launch it fast and then got a little bit of tech crunch press at that time was read

right web this other one was mashable yeah yeah so all that somehow we got covered by all of them which now like and then and boom and then start the seed round phase from who so at that time we went through a lot of lot of iterations but where we ended up was n e a leading the seed round and then index co leading to n a and then we got a bunch in the see so volpi did the yeah so What happened is, actually, the first checks were George Zachari from CRV back then. He didn't lead the round, but it was the first 100K commit. 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 28, 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 Lange Index, U.S. It was like him and Danny Reimer showed there somewhere. And they also started an 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. How did you get Bezos and Eric Schmidt?

So again, this is a sitting in deepity that I don't know we can't 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. So 2011? Yeah. So Alonzo was maybe a $50 billion company then, 80 billion dollar company.

So what happened is I hire the lawyer of his family office for call, for mesh, and after we hire for doing the Cid round as the Cidron was going along and say, by the way, since you're also the lawyer of the family office and Basos expeditions, can you introduce me? Can you introduce me to Jeff Bezos? That's what we do.

So it's a P.G. Cole, call. And then he was on the road with his brother, going around with his brother on the road in Texas. us and you actually we want to put more and invest. Boom. So that was Jeff Bezos. What do you get from just baseball? You get the brands.

We got a diner's a year strategy giant of things. But obviously it was the big brand. And then second, Eric Schmidt, we were working this co-working space. And what happened is we were the only startup that stay the latest in the night after this other startup that was doing Expedia for cruise ships. They just raised from NEA and Eric Schmidt. And at the end, they saw us work until 3am, 4 a.m. They would leave a chew.

They knew we're fundraising. And the investors asked, who is the artist worker? They knew and say, these guys next to us. And so they introduced us to the Eric Schmidt Fund, and that's how Eric Schmidt invest. Wow. Totally unrelated. All right.

So now this brings us a lot of luck. So what was your total? What was the total seat funding raised? At that time, it was very big. It was 1.5. It's like, wow, a huge cedron. I got to say, in 2010, 11. I got to 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. No longer jail. All right. So now you have your seat phone mass shapes going. So then we raise the seed.

All right. Now it's real. We got to get these visas. We got a middle of that. 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 recommendation when he was a CEO of Looped. Oh, kidding. Which I met on that. We were going to the N.E.A. retreat, and I see next to him in the bus, and we went to Pebble Beach to the NIA 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 01 visa? Oh, kidding. And he wrote me. So I have this big thing of how great I am. From some other than that's great. But some other condition.

You've got to get this guy in the country and no matter what. So we got these five letters 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 got seven people and Mark also get the visa. Mark also because of the love book and never got to college or nothing. So it was the hardest visa to do. So we figured it out more letter recommendations for him. We brought him there.

We stay here, blah, blah, blah. We build a year. We grow down. But at that time, you need like a million, let's a million revenue to take a good CIRUSA. 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 months CIRCRAC, race. And CRV lead and then indexed was it. Was it Devda? Yeah. Yeah, because George Zachary was more a consumer. So we passed the thing to death that just generally more on the enterprise side.

I remember Deftar Colby, like a Sunday at 6th. a.m. to go for a walk to decide to invest or not. And he knows I'm a night hall. And he just signed at 6 a.m. to go down to Palo Alto, which I had to rent a zip car. There was no Uber. And go down there and then go for a few walks and decided to invest. Because it was always actually a big believer on APIs as assembly line. He could see that. Maybe it wasn't sure marketplace was the right execution, but the theme, he was a big believer. And I think he like us, like he came to see us leap in the same match.

He wanted to really see that we're not like bullshitting the big drama story. It was really drama. Actually, he opens. He came to the Hacker House because we moved to Hacker House in South Park back at that time where we're sleeping and working there with the 70p. And he opens a closet and there's like all the bananas falling off because it was one guy is only eating huge bananas. He opened another closet.

There's another mattress with other guy sleeping in a second closet. It's okay. This is real. Wow. How big was your, hey? 6.5 million. Oh, so for you, that must have been a lot of money. 6.5 million.

Yeah, I went out with this power plant. Let's raise a 10 million seriously. At that point, I was like the big thing. We ended up at 6.5. And I said, that science, it was like, when we saw it, it was like, yeah. And like, maybe we got a shot. So at some point you decided that the market wasn't working. The market wasn't working.

And I think, so we raised this and we hire more. We moved to a new office, 25 people. Like, you know, the usual post-race honeymoon. And I remember this thing, like six months after, the business wasn't really doing anything. So it was one board mini that we just cooked pasta for the board members at that time because it 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 term. There's a graduation problem. Like, I mean, these marketplaces are very tough. So the idea of the market was that when I was staying with Airbnb, funders, I learned that the marketplace could be the biggest, more powerful business in the world. Now, you don't even have to innovate once you get liquidity. It's just you can't disrupt.

Look at eBay. You can't get eBay. You can't get eBay. You can't get eBay. You can't build a marketplace 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 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 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 low for public APIs was on the Tweed or the stride or

30 that matters and 3,000 that didn't matter much. So it was also this long tail power. And 13 is was quality. like you couldn't, you were running a cloud market, because 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, he got to a million

and a half in gross revenue, but he never became this Airbnb of Uber 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

a year, we're burning 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, rail limiting, routing, caching, authentication, authorization, logging, all of that. We built it three times, and the third time was the great one. And we say, wait a second. Every company will become an API company. Why we don't take this engine and we give it to the whole world? And that was the beginning of open source, Mongo. And so, boom, we open source Kong.

What was your runway at the time that you open sourced Kong? So we opened 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 extensions because we were out of gas. From Deptod and Mike? Yeah.

They give us an extension on day, $2 million because we were out of gas. Like we would have died otherwise. Wow. So you release, I remember when Kong released. It was actually a really big deal. When was that? 2015. That was a really big deal.

I remember. 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, this guys make no sense. Okay, now it starts to make sense. Well, that was even a tough raise for you,

just because the company had been around for seven years. Like a marketplace. Like Kong had just come out. And it was taking off, but like, it only been a couple of weeks. maybe a couple of months. And so honestly, I'll tell you what, what did it for me is, you know, we were doing all the work.

And like the GitHub stars checked out. Your story is phenomenal. Your command of the business is great. But it just wasn't enough. But then while we were doing the diligence, like I kept getting these kind of serendipitous, like, somebody had used Kong and loved it. I remember, didn't like somebody stay in like your Airbnb and like loved Kong? And then you forwarded that to me.

And so they're just kind of like all of them. 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 of customer user that we're saying. You're just saying, Kong, Kong usage, Kong usage, just non-stop. Like, it was blowing up the inbox. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So how close we'd running out of money for the B? So after a 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 dead. I felt like basically.

No, no, we were dead. We just didn't know about it. You were like two weeks from being dead. We were like Bangalby, 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, guys, guys been there. Wow.

I think they're going to, you know, whatever, they raise them all. and then they're going to give up. You were, I said, and it was tough. And I think, I think if, if we go back and say, I don't know we were able to replicate all the sequence that happens, all the things that happens. And I remember we went, yeah, and then we had that great sushi with Mark 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 announcement recently that across 100 million, which is now actually quite a while back. A year and a half ago, yeah. A year and a half ago. Yeah.

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 of ARR. Do you remember? Do you remember? Not even a million at RR. 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, if you hit 10 million or whatever it was, I'll buy you a car. Remember that? I did. Oh, actually, we have in the new office now. I need to send a little 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 ERR to 10. That was right. And the planet thing was 6 or 7. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I went out.

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 he. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I spent a long time actually looking for this model car. Is there a 280 GT? Yeah, yeah, that's right. So great. So I would love to shifts. I think this is the most remarkable Silicon Valley startup story that I know of that I'm close to. And I kind of have to make a movie one day. They will have to make a movie one day.

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've 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? It's the same.

Does it change how you think about yourself as a leader? Like, how is your view at a high level? So the big thing is, I start with API first. So obviously, we 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 source Kong API Gateway took off and we become an enterprise company. We became weird brand Kong Ink. 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 10,000,000 of APIs. We are kind of these highways that makes them run and you have rate limiting. Like, if APIs were cars, you got guardrails, speed bomb, speed cameras, gas stations, stalls, bombs, garrails, everything, ambulance, and that 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 through the cloud.

The second transition is breaking down the monolith to Microsoft. as 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, it's becoming much higher than like data rests or data news 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 to the monolith and the shift to cloud. Right. And so that was the key. Yeah. I think before the world is our 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 this year, like we kind of invented the 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, and you don't you know this, but like every year we do the Founders Award. Yeah.

The Founders Award is 2,555 stock to the best employee of the company. Yeah. 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, you get 2055. 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 con. 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. 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, in recent years, it's just 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 and that, like, MuleSoft got acquired and Apogee got acquired too. Yeah. Right. It was right. Yeah, 17. Mulesov got acquire. Appig got acquired in 16.

That's right. Yeah. So, like, in a way, kind of like there was consolidation and you broke out the business later. So you kind of navigated this transition from, you know, cloud to break up the microservices. You know, you built the control plane for APIs. You're considered now like the, you know, the leader independent for sure. In the API space, Kong is the leader independent. No, 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 to creative? Like, how are you as CEO viewing this? Yeah. I think, again, it's not like what's like any meat of 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 to 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. Agent is going to programmatically exchange labor, get us done through programming interface, whether it's classic IPRS, 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 a huge shift that we are now capturing.

and paring 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 like a lot of just basic stuff, 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? Yeah. So when I think the world is a bit of stack, okay, you have this AI companies like poor 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 talk.

companies like Anthropi, a lot of revenue through APIs, all that. What is missing is the infrastructure to make those AI talks and run. And that's what we do now, with I gave to a lot of products. But at the core, the boring problem, like you mentioned, authentication, authorization. You can be AGI as much as you want, but at the end, an agent gets stuck if it has to authenticate. And to authenticate, you've 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 provide infrastructure, you can

provision and automate key provisioning, key rotation, authentication. So once you're there, you can unleash your LM, your agents, to just roam free without getting stuck every time for authentication authorization, because you're really 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 them out in the years to a model. model. And so that's how AI talks. So the way we know about API infrastructure, it will evolve and won't change. But API traffic and AI traffic, they are converging. So the classic API calls, yes, but also when you move tokens is an API call. And intelligent, let's say intelligence will be sold through tokens. Every earning release is about tokens. But behind and each tokens, 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

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 program. That's how I think intelligence will move. And it's an evolutionary steps in like two, three years. But we really 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, for fun, I develop using Cursor. You know, I used to be a professional developer, you know, in a previous life. Even knowing what APIs existed in a company required a ton of reading through docs or some weird search. And it feels like now, especially like if you have 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 surface these things to developers. Yeah, I think you can, you can, we can be an enabler to help large companies, small companies to get into the hands of more developers or more cursor. Because it's also an API. We can provide you that infrastructure and all of that. As you see from Yasei Burma, you have a very exciting roadmap that is going in all in that direction. So those are all in the name 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 is that even it doesn't exactly repeat, but it reads. It's just there's always on and out. So what we see with microservices, what happened? We first build rail limiting and authentication 10 times, 100 times, 50 times into the Python frame or the JavaScript frame or the JavaScript frame or the Java frame, whatever, PHP, blah, blah, blah. At some point, it didn't make any sense. Let's subtract everything to a gateway pattern. And we move all this connectivity logic to the gateway and that dispatch to the right service, no matter what language. The same thing I think is going to happen in LLMs.

At first, you have one enterprise use one big LLMs. Now they're going to use 5, 10, 100, small, LEM, medium, large, whatever. whatever. Once you get to, you don't do tokens relimiting, token authentication in each LLM using the frame or the LNG, whatever. Eventually, same thing happened in Microsoft, you will abstract that to a gateway partner once again. And that's where I think I get to we'll have the same analogy and dispatcher to write connectivity logic to the Rite LLM versus rewriting initial LAM. 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 would 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. Yeah. Maybe advice on kind of like, you know, 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 yet to build the startups of the enterprise to manage that AI connectivity into your next apps, your next internal tool. your next customers. And for the, listen, the budding founders that are listening to, like, the most hardcore Silicon Valley struggle story ever,

what advice do you give to them? I think, well, I learned over a decade of life. 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 heads. Shivers. That was so good. But never. Like, that's, that's the visual that every time I even start to, I had that visual and immediately say, I'm not going back like that. Wow.

And so, and then, but the thing to advise is it always takes long. longer than what we think. It's good to take a trend the last 10 years, 20 years, because you have time to grow into and do a lot of mistakes and building. And just, you have to generally believe it in this trend versus falling glitters because it's going to take longer than what you think as a leader, as a human, as a market, as a product, as a revenue is always going to take longer. So take something that lasts and just put 110% on it every day and then it will

compounds, keep the barn rate low in the early days. Don't die. They don't die, like don't quit. Those are, I think, the things I learn 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.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X, A16Z, and subscribe to our substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only. Should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its

affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com forward slash disclosures.