Martin Casado - The Past, Present, and Future of Digital Infrastructure

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (1:44)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
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**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:09)
My guest today is Martin Casado. Martin is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he focuses on digital infrastructure. Before joining A16Z, Martin pioneered software-defined networking and co-founded Nicira, which was bought by VMware for $1.3 billion in 2012 Martin has studied, built and invested in digital infrastructure his whole career and is the perfect person to discuss the most interesting aspects of the industry. Please enjoy this great conversation with Martin Casado.
So, Martin, I think we might call this episode the past, present and future of digital infrastructure, which is the world that lives beneath all the stuff we all spend our days using and probably almost no one's ever really thought about, but represents enormous markets in terms of revenue, market cap, people have heard of things like AWS, etc.
And so I'd love to begin by you giving us a state of the union of digital infrastructure today. The major aspects of it that you think are more important, and I like starting in the present, then maybe we'll jump to the past, but if you had to describe this to a new initiate into this part of the business world, how would you describe it and its importance?

**Martin Casado** (3:15)
Well, the primary narrative for the last decade has been the cloud. You have basically an oligopoly of 3 providers, Microsoft, Google and AWS.
And they provide all of IT, which used to be provided by central IT teams. It used to be the case that you'd have these IT teams and they'd like rack servers that provide services. And now this stuff's just available online.
And not only is the compute, the storage and network, which are traditional infrastructure, but higher level services on top of those. And so today, if you're going to build an app, you don't have to know a lot about infrastructure. You don't have to rack servers. You don't have to know about how to build a database. You just use those and then you focus more on the business logic.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:57)
How would you put chapter headers on the stages of cloud adoption going back to, I think, Azure and AWS or sort of mid-2000s, 2005, 2006, thereabouts, relatively speaking, a short story? What do you think the major eras of the cloud story have been so far?

**Martin Casado** (4:14)
Right before the cloud, of course, everybody ran their own internal IT, right? And so they kind of write their own servers and their own wiring closets, the cloud showed up. And the early usage was what you would typically find in a technology early adopter ecosystem. It's more new projects and startups and hobbyists.
The average workloads were relatively small. There was an exception to that, of course, like Netflix is a very famous one, which went all in the cloud very early. But in general, that was what it was.