OPAI.PVT<\/a>) executive Mira Murati\u2019s Thinking Machines Lab at a $10 billion valuation before it had released any products. \u201cShe created ChatGPT,\u201d Casado said, waving off concerns about the latter. \u201cAnd she\u2019s Mira.\u201d (Murati\u2019s startup has since lost several staffers to OpenAI.)<\/p>\nThe infrastructure fund\u2019s largest investments are around $60 million and most are smaller. The goal is to be early. \u201cWe invest much before these crazy numbers typically,\u201d Casado said. \u201cEven when you see these big headline numbers or whatever, often we\u2019re in earlier.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP\/\/\/ywAAAAAAQABAAACAUwAOw==\")
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To spot AI companies first, a16z\u2019s fund relies on a team with less traditional resumes for VCs \u2013 starting with Casado himself. Unlike some on Sand Hill Road, Casado doesn\u2019t hail from a tony background. His mother, a travel writer, met his father on a ship where he was a purser. She followed him to Southern Spain, where Casado was born, and eventually to Billings, Montana, followed by stints in Denver and Arizona.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe grew up very, very poor,\u201d Casado says. \u201cWe were always that weird European family in that western town.\u201d At times, his family was on food stamps, an experience that engendered a \u201clevel of resourcefulness\u201d he\u2019s found useful later in life.<\/p>\n
Casado paid his tuition to Northern Arizona University with a mix of jobs, including video game programmer and teppanyaki chef. After college, Casado put his computational physics skills to work testing weapons systems for the Defense Department. Following the Sept. 11 attacks, Casado spent two years at an agency he isn\u2019t sure he\u2019s allowed to name. Later, he proved to be a talented coder at Stanford, winning competitions so often they took to naming two winners to give others a shot, according to Guido Appenzeller, a former Stanford teaching assistant and current a16z investor.<\/p>\n
At a16z, Casado surrounds himself with technical pros who have an eye for infrastructure, including Appenzeller and Jennifer Li, the only person who has risen from analyst to general partner at the firm. A former product leader at AppDynamics, Li joined a16z in 2018, despite thinking she\u2019d never be an investor. She\u2019s distinguished herself by pushing her point of view with a16z\u2019s senior leadership \u2014 \u201cshe\u2019ll talk me down,\u201d Horowitz said \u2014 as well as by helping portfolio companies like AI voice startup ElevenLabs navigate difficult deals and departures. \u201cThis is what I love about startups \u2014 all these little fire drills and battles,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
With the addition of the new $1.7 billion for the fund, Matt Bornstein is being promoted to general partner. Bornstein, like Casado, was an early proponent of infrastructure investment at another firm. According to Bornstein, Casado recruited him by saying, \u201cCome here and win deals instead of losing deals.\u201d<\/p>\n
Photographer: Manuel Orbegozo\/Bloomberg <\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of venture capitalists were hired from investment banking,\u201d said Jamin Ball, a partner at Altimeter Capital and longtime infrastructure investor alongside Casado. \u201cMartin, when he was building his team, he just didn\u2019t care what the conventional wisdom or background was.\u201d<\/p>\n
That proved instrumental to spotting Cursor, which has been hailed as the fastest-growing startup in history. When a16z invested, many startups were competing to dethrone AI code-generation pioneer GitHub Copilot, but a16z\u2019s infrastructure team were all using Cursor for hobbyist coding projects.<\/p>\n
Casado\u2019s background in 3-D gaming models and computational physics also created a bond with AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, leading him to back and assist her in founding World Labs, which develops so-called world models for simulating physical spaces, a contrarian idea at the time. \u201cI was still very impressed that he actually understood it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Photographer: Gabby Jones\/Bloomberg <\/p>\n
The fund\u2019s strategy, which is a hallmark of a16z, is to offer plenty of hands-on help to startups. Casado, who is on Cursor\u2019s board, has spoken with candidates to convince them to join the startup. When computing capacity ran short, he helped them secure more, and when some of it went down on a weekend, he helped the company get support, said Cursor President Oskar Schulz.<\/p>\n
Casado also goes into World Labs\u2019 offices every Wednesday to code. \u201cPeople do joke that I work Martin really hard,\u201d Fei-Fei Li said.<\/p>\n
When necessary, Casado steps in to protect the firm\u2019s investments. In November, Cloudflare Inc (NET<\/a>). acquired Replicate, an Andreessen-backed company that eases deploying AI models to the cloud. Behind the scenes, Casado was engaged in a delicate matchmaking game to find a partner for a startup facing increasing competition that had not yet developed a strong enough business strategy for its promising technology, according to a person familiar with the process. He was aided by Bornstein, who sits on Replicate\u2019s board.<\/p>\nCasado tapped a contact who had experience at Cloudflare to help sway Replicate\u2019s founder to sell and spent time convincing both parties that the price was fair. The timing was key because Replicate ran the risk of missing out on a good exit and falling behind competitors, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private matters. Casado may be a nice person but he\u2019s a ruthless businessman, the person said.<\/p>\n
Casado also played a behind-the-scenes role in another notable acquisition, working over months to help a16z investment Tabular sell to Andreessen-backed Databricks Inc., for a larger sum than the startup had been discussing with Databricks rival Snowflake Inc., said people familiar with that deal.<\/p>\n
A keen eye for companies and a steely drive may be necessary to weather the uncertainty ahead in the AI boom. \u201cThere\u2019s going to be a bunch of companies that don\u2019t work,\u201d Casado said. \u201cThere\u2019s always fewer winners than people assume, but they are much larger than people assume.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek<\/p>\n
\u00a92026 Bloomberg L.P.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Bloomberg) \u2014 An artificial intelligence startup that helps developers write and debug code is now worth nearly as…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":527804,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[691,234234,512,738,171583,3638,5173,150770,158,8975,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-527803","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-ai-computer-company","10":"tag-andreessen-horowitz","11":"tag-artificial-intelligence","12":"tag-ben-horowitz","13":"tag-bloomberg","14":"tag-infrastructure","15":"tag-martin-casado","16":"tag-technology","17":"tag-united-airlines","18":"tag-united-states","19":"tag-unitedstates","20":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115922707882016017","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=527803"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527803\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/527804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=527803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=527803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=527803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}