In the last three months, Martin Casado has been on the cap table of three of the biggest AI acquisitions ever:
Cursor, bought by SpaceX for $60B in stock
World Labs, Fei-Fei Li's company, bought by AMD for $8.2B
OpenRouter, bought by Stripe for a reported $7.5B
Who is he?
A general partner at a16z, where he runs the infrastructure practice. Before that he founded Nicira and sold it to VMware for $1.26B, at the time one of the highest multiples ever paid for an enterprise software company.
This week he sat down with Patrick O'Shaughnessy on Invest Like the Best.
He said a frontier model has a lifespan of three to six months, that nobody knows what happens to Anthropic and OpenAI when the market slows down, and that for the first time in tech history you can give 20 people $1B and they can put it to work.
📚 In this newsletter, I break down what Martin Casado said about the AI boom, the deals behind Cursor, World Labs and OpenRouter and where the bottlenecks are, with clips from the interview.
High-signal analysis on markets, capital and the companies shaping the next decade
Inside you will find:
What Happens to Anthropic and OpenAI When the AI Boom Slows Down
See why the frontier takes 80% of the money and why a model lives three to six months.Why AI Is an Industrial Revolution: Money Can Finally Buy Engineering
Learn why 20 people with $1B is the biggest shift Casado has seen in 30 years.The Bottlenecks Behind the AI Boom: Debt, Power and Chips
Find out why debt is running out and why data centers are heading to space.Inside the Cursor, World Labs and OpenRouter Deals
See how the biggest AI acquisitions got done, and why one of them kept leaking.Why AI Is the Biggest Rebuild of Computer Science Since the Internet
Learn which sleepy layers of infrastructure are waking up, from databases to networking.Why Most Network Effects Aren’t Real (and Moats Barely Matter)
Find out how few real network effects exist and why growth matters more than defensibility.The Four Types of VC Investors
See the four mindsets behind every deal and why mixing them up justifies anything.The Take That Got Him “VC Canceled”: Private Markets Are Efficient
Learn why he pays market price and disagrees with Sequoia’s Roelof Botha.Why Software Has Sucked for 30 Years and What AI Changes
See the house that greets him, the movie you can walk into and the new constraint.
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