Martin Casado is a technologist and investor who has backed some of Silicon Valley’s best known start-ups. He leads an AI investment team at Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z, one of the world’s most prominent and outspoken venture capital firms.
Earlier in his career, Casado worked on simulations of nuclear weapons at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and, after the attacks on September 11 2001, moved into conducting research for the intelligence community on networking and cyber security. During a subsequent PhD at Stanford University, he helped pioneer software-defined networking, enabling the movement of data between computers via software rather than hardware. He then launched his own start-up, Nicira Networks, which sold for more than $1bn.
In this conversation with FT’s venture capital correspondent George Hammond, he argues that recent progress in AI is an industrial-revolution scale event but warns that the ability of the bigger players in the sector to raise “cheap money” is time-limited and the value will quickly move downstream.