He opens a closet and there's like all the bananas felling off because there was one guy's only eating huge bananas. He open another closet is another mattress with other guys sleeping a second closet and say okay this is real. We had no money. We we we we just take 600 bucks last left to go to a United flight and we had 90 days to just uh make it or break it. We knew that if we couldn't race we would 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 retro.

So AI is the founder and CEO of Kong which was previously mass shape and we are covering his background from a garage in Milan uh to now being the CEO of a atscale company with I dare say IPO ambitions at some point.

Long way long way to go but that's one of the steps along the way.

Ambitions. All right. So, so you're doing this kind of API thing. You come to the US on a tourist visa.

Tourist visa. Yeah.

And the idea was to raise

90 days.

Was the idea to raise funding?

Yeah. We had no money. We we we we just take 600 bucks last left to go to a United flight through Cincinnati. We went through secondary room. Uh we landed up and we landed up through sorry Atlanta first time. Cincinnati was secondary room. And then we went right arrived to San Francisco and um and we had 90 days to just uh make it or break it. We knew that if we couldn't race, we would go back to Italy broke and that was it.

So did you raise those?

Yeah, we raised two weeks before departure.

You you raised in those

angel rounds. Uh it was you know that we're talking about decade ago, right? Small checks. It was 50K round was defining YouTube teams.

All right.

There we go. And here's a funny story like

how did you get introduced to that? Uh okay that's that's um 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 they were cool. You made all entrepreneurs all the VC were coming there and um there was this entrepreneurship mixer big party. We arrived we left late. There was a there was a big 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 that night till 5:00 a.m. I write all the 400 emails.

Wow.

About, hey, you need to know about Masha. 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.

Uh 30 reply and 10 were kind of interested. At the end five or six went to meet us

and then this one person

told like Kevin Donahu who was the the VP one of VP funding team of YouTube came to our

Kevin Donahu

Kevin

and then he started a company for baby books he sold it but he he said look I think this is something so he wrote a $17,000 check on our air m

thousands yeah and for us 17,000 was life

versus debt

we came from 600 bucks and few hundred bucks and so then he brought two other phoning actually was 16,000 16,000 16,000 we got 15,000. The problem with 15,000 divided 3 was 6666. There was too many sixes like we don't we don't want too many six in the captive. So we we round it up 17 17 and we got 51,000 check. Now the funny the second funny part is we negotiated and closed the deal at Travis Kalani house.

Travis Kalanic'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 were negotiating and they didn't want. So Trevy's had at that time was this house up in Castro called it a jampad where everybody would go. Aaron leave would go and uh Drew from Da was the all going there on the weekends and I didn't have a place to stay. So actually Travis give me his place to stay a few a few weeks as long as I would cook carbonara for his better half once a week. And I did that and then and then we needed help. He said come to my kitchen. We negotiate. So we sit on the table. It was myself and Travis Kalanic and they were the three YouTube investors negotiated this convertible notes are like 50% discount something crazy. were desperate and so I say okay well I don't want to take this deal like you know screw that I say okay okay we're going to leave I say and I was very naive 20 years old okay okay 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 the cont offer and I go to the bathroom we close his s and we come back in 10 minutes so brought me to the bathroom lock the door of the house so these guys don't went to the bathroom and we said there 10 minutes go back another round of negotiation back to the bathroom so three four time at the end we handshake on the deal just finally better like 42% convertible kind instead of 50

and no and it was a higher cap

and that's it and then we shake the hand and and that was it

that's crazy so I I remember you had the um you had the Quora like the top Kora post for living on like 13,000 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 the next

Yeah.

stretch.

What happened is obviously we got we got to go back. We are illegal in two weeks. So we went back to Italy um and we we we we came back with a B1 which you could be there. We can be here 6 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 you you have to enter into a new system and we had zero anything. So we couldn't pay our salary cuz we didn't have SSN. We didn't have a legal visa to pay oursel all that. So the company

Did you have employees at this point?

No, it was just you two.

It was three of us. It was Mikuela was the Turk co-founder back then. But um we did a,000 and about 1,900 monthly promisory note that the company would give us and we would have to live in three with $1,000 a month.

That would be

So you you were living off of $1,000 a month.

In three people were living off $1,000.

Yeah. For in San Francisco. How do you do that?

It was cheaper.

Now what year was this?

Uh 2009 2010.

Even then. 2010. Even then it's impossible. $1,000 a month for three people. I tell you how we did it. So, we live it in uh on Airbnb somewhere else at like 100 bucks

and all in the same mattress.

Um Wow.

And uh we were going to Valencia. I don't know if you 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 at the cheapest way possible. And that was the combination of I guess amount of carbs and product at the cheapest way possible. And that's how we made it. Like we we never eat out. We never buy. We did everything in the house. We cooked in the in the kitchen Airbnb. Rice, beans or tuna pasta. In fact, we eat so much tuna pasta with tomato that Mark and I when we seen tuna pasta, we almost threw up because we just running on tuna pasta every single day. So how wait so how how long did this last?

That last uh so March April 2010 a year a year and a few months.

Wow. And what were you doing this time? I can I know what Marco was doing this time. He was writing code. What were you doing?

I was writing blog, building the website, calling uh pro the sign up, talking with all every sign up on the website that was talking to us and trying to figure out I was mix of b devs, HTML, CSS, slicer, um talking with investor too as you start to build the seed rounds.

Yeah.

Um trying to do some recruiting that never worked because nobody wanted to work for illegal Italians that will disappears. So a lot of lot of mistakes and this Yeah. few things.

Yeah.

All right. So take us to the seed round. So somebody decided to give you a proper round at some point.

So then a year later we we we rearchitect. So we went we went to Honolulu on the beach and Moana beach and we we thought about okay all these APIs were aggregating. I think the word is actually actually we see now finally now but 10 10 15 years ago it wasn't ready. they were to like build apps on the fly through APIs with drag and drop. We wen't we were too far ahead. We're missing pieces but say hey we're we are wrapping a lot of APIs actually that assembly line visual still hold. 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 pivot that we relaunch it uh with you know tank crunch all the stuff.

Okay. So so originally we're doing this kind of drag and drop composable

app builder

apps builder thing. So funny how many companies go through this like 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. Cuz 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 little disentractions on longtail and that was already the summer of 2011.

Yeah.

After pivot in Hawaiian. So we launched very fast. Boom boom boom. And um and then we raised after

was the was the Hawaiian on the last of the money from

No because San Francisco Tonolulu I think at that time it was like 300 bucks. So we say with our 51k we would we we we were living like on tuna pasta rice and beans in Valencia in mission in this in this historic building middle of nowhere and working mattress and things. It's like

unbelievable.

At some point I remember I remember woke up in the morning I got to go I need I need to go to Honolulu. We could do our walk on the beach and thinking about our future or no future because we knew this was going no 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 we did the crazy I I remember was building the website market was going crazy the third co-ounder was building all the Java back ends and the launch fast and then got a little bit of tech crunch press at that time was read write web this other was mashable and so all that somehow we got covered by all of that which now like crazy and then um and boom and then we raised um and then it started seed round uh uh phase

from who? So at that time

uh we went through a lot of lot of iterations but where we ended up was NEA leading the seed round and then Index co-leading 20A and then we and then we got a bunch and then

in the se so Vulpi did the

yeah so what happened is actually the first checks were George Zakari from CRV back then he didn't like lead the round but he wrote he was the first 100k commit so with that he say we have CRV 100k at that point had a seed program very unusual back And then we went 28 and he said we're going to lead this round. At that point also they start a seat program 500k and then we went through and then and then I met Mike Vulpi that just moved to San Francisco to launch index US. It was like him and Denny Rhymer through there somewhere. I said and they also started out angel a seed program and they they wrote another big checks and then we got a long tail which was likely Jeff Bezos and Eddie Schmidt into the funds and so we got this this combination

basos and Eric Schmidt. So again that is said in DPD 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

is it 2011?

Yeah. So Amazon was maybe a $50 billion company then $80 billion company. Um so what happened is uh I I I I hire the lawyer of his family office for call for me shape and after we hired for doing the seed round as the seed round was going along I say by the way since you are also the the lawyer of the family office and basos expeditions can you introduce me can introduce me to Jeff Basos that's what we do so it's a PG cool call and then he was on the road with his brother going around with his brother on the road in Texas and uh you he actually want to put more and invest. Boom. So that was Jeff Bezos. What do you get from Jeff Bz? You get the brand. So we got a dinners a year strategy of things but obviously was the big brand. And then second, uh, 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 that just raised from NEA and Eric Schmidt. And at the end, they saw us working till 3:00 a.m., 4:00 a.m. They would leave a chew when they knew we're fundraising. And this and the investor asked, "Who's the hardest worker than you?" And say, "This guy's next to us." And so they introduced us to the Eric Schmidt fund. And that's how Edish Mid invest.

Wow.

Totally unrelated.

All right. So now this brings us to 201.

So what was your total? What was the total seed funding you raised at that time?

It was very big. Uh it was 1.5.

It's like wow huge seed round.

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.

Illegally. wrong to jail.

All right. So now you have your seat fund match shapes going.

So then we raise the seat. Uh all right. Now it's real. We got to get these visas. We got a middle. So we went back to Italy, go to the American embassy, blah blah blah. Do the letter of recommendations. Actually Sam Alman was one of the guys that wrote me a letter recommendation when he was um CEO of Looped.

No kidding. which I met on. We were going to the NEA retreat and I see next to him in the bus and we went to Pebble Beach to the NA retreat and we spent three hours together and I said, "By the way, I'm in illegal here. Can you write me a letter of recommendation for my 01 visa?" No kidding. And he wrote me. So I have this big thing of how great I am. That's great. I got a recommendation. You got to get this guy in the country no matter what.

So we got this five letters and and I get this 01 visa and finally I got the visa. So finally I can come here. can get a wei work space and we start to hire and we had seven people and Mark also get the visa. Mark is also because of the love book he never got uh to college or nothing. So it was the hardest visa to do. So we 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 but you know at that time like you needed like a million let's say a million revenue to to take a a good ser for a marketplace you need a million in gross volume. we were like at 50k so lot of traction but not a lot of revenue. Um but we went through a 3 four month series A race and um and CRV uh led and then index was it devot that

yeah that

yeah yeah because George Zachary was more a consumer so he passed the the thing to death just more on the enterprise side I remember deva told me like Sunday at 6:00 a.m. to go for a walk uh to decided to invest or not and he knows I'm a night hole and and he just Sunday 6 a.m. to go to go down to Palo Alto which I had I had to rent a zip car where the zip cars there was no Uber and uh and go down there and and uh and then go for a few walks and I decided to to invest because he was he was always actually a big believer on APIs as assembly line he could see that maybe 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 sleep in the same mattress 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 aer house cuz we moved to a house in South Park 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 felling off because it was one guy's only eating huge bananas. You open another closet is another mattress with other guys sleeping a second closet. Okay, this this is real.

Wow. How big was your a

6 uh 6.5 million?

Oh, so for you that must be must have been a lot of money.

6.5 million. Yeah. I went out with this power. Let's raise a 10 million serious at that point. That was like the big thing. We ended up at 6.5 and uh I say that's it was like when we saw it was like yeah like maybe we got a shot.

So at some at some point you decided that the market wasn't working.

The market wasn't working. And um I think so we raised this and we ra we hire more. We moved 20 off 25 people like you the usual post race uh honeymoon. Um and I remember this thing like 6 months after uh we the business wasn't really doing anything. So it was one board meeting that we just cook pasta for the board members at that time because that was like two years before you joined us and it was there was nothing to talk about from business.

The issue was is you couldn't monetize or there was a graduation problem like these marketplaces are very tough. So the the idea of the market when I was staying with Airbnb founders I learned that the marketplace are could be the biggest more powerful business in the world like you don't even have to innovate once you get liquidity it's just you can disrupt it look at eBay you eBay you can't kill

so I thought like there's all this API you can build a marketplace liquidity it'll be like the w the ws of and so we we noticed though that in our case it was a developer API marketplace so to have a marketplace to work you need to have a long tale 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 true you need to have exclusivity somewhat like the door to access that that marketplace supply has to be through the marketplace. APIs you could Google and go to the website you wouldn't go through go through the marketplace. APIs at that time power of low for public APIs was on the tweet or the stride. There were 30 that matters and 3,000 that didn't matter much. So it was also this longtail power and third thing is was quality like you couldn't you were running a cloud marketplace you couldn't actually maintain the quality of the supply you were always get blamed for it and there was no trust and and so I think because of that it got to a million and a half in gross revenue but it never became this Airbnb or Uber API

that is like 10% yeah it was it was also losing margin on AWS so they 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 we're here year we're burning. We're running out of money. And so we built this massive API engine behind the marketplace API gateway that was powering 20,000 APIs of this longtail doing billing, rate 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 this engine and we give it to the whole world? And that was the beginning of open source, And so boom, we we open source uh Kong.

Then we go there. It's like, okay, this is we're here year we're burning. We're running out of money. And so we built this massive API engine behind the marketplace API gateway that was powering 20,000 APIs of this longtail doing billing, rate 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 this engine and we give it to the whole world? And that was the beginning of open source, And so boom, we we open source uh Kong.

What was your what was your runway at the time that you open sourced Kong?

Uh so we open source in April 15. We had to take a bridge of uh 2 million to go another year because

was it an insider bridge?

Yeah, we we had to take an an extensions because we were out of gas

from from Dev and Mike.

Yeah, they give us an extension on the 2 millions because we were out of gas. like we were would have died otherwise.

Wow. So you you released I remember when Kong released it was actually a really big deal. When was that? 2015

15.

Yes.

Big deal. I remember took off. Boom.

Yeah. So this is when you and I started talking about your raise. You're raising the

you came at the right times before like these guys make no sense. Okay. Now it start to make sense.

Well, that was even a tough race for you just cuz 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 um 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 like and then you forwarded that to me and so there just kind of like all of this, you know, zeitgeist around Kong. And as a result of that, I'm like, "Oh, this is clearly a phenomenon."

Yeah. I remember I was spamming you with emails of every prospect or customer user they were saying just you saying Kong Kong usage Kong usage just nonstop like it was blowing up the inbox.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So how close how close were we to running out of money for it to be?

Uh so after bridge there were [Music] weeks.

Jeez.

Yeah. But I was very

Nothing Nothing is ever gonna stress you again 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. It felt like basically

No, no, we were dead and we just didn't know about it.

You were like two weeks from being dead. I mean it felt

we were like bang you know that it flies but it's not supposed to fly and we keep going.

No, I remember that very very well.

Yeah. You you were like you're like this guy's been there a while. I think they're going to, you know, whatever they raise money and then they're going to give up. You work I said I say and it was tough. Uh and I think I think if if we go back I say I don't know we were able to replicate all the sequence that happens all all the things that happens and I remember we went uh yeah and then uh then we had that that great sushi with with Mark Andre and you and I and we sealed the deal and Marco.

Yeah. The end of 2016 we closed and since then the company's just been remarkable. I mean there was kind of an 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. So we we

Yeah. It was in in a year and a half is 10 years where we were like when you invested we were AR less than a million.

Yeah. Yeah.

Less than a million of do not even a million 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 if you hit 10 million or whatever it was I'll buy you a car. remember that

I did. Oh, actually I we have in the new office now. I need to send you a picture.

Well, there's a funny story about this and so like you know you um you do it. So like I think you grow like 10x that year.

So that year we went from 2 million of RR Yeah. to 10.

That was right.

The planning was six or seven.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then I went I went I checked with compliance and I'm like can I buy Auggie a cheap car and they said the maximum for a gift is whatever it is. doesn't sound like crap. So, so I ended up buying you the best model car I could find

from Japan, I think.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I spent a long time actually looking for this model car.

Is the 280 GT?

Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

So, great. So, so I would love to shift I think this is the most remarkable Silicon Valley startup story that I know of that I'm close to and I kind of having They will make a movie one day. They will have to make a movie one day. Yeah. Um 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've saw the shift to APIs. So maybe just talk a little bit about how you view this current shift with AI. Is it is it fundamentally different? Is the same? Does it change how you think about yourself as a leader? Like how h how is your view at a high level?

So the the the big thing is I I'll start with API first. So obviously we we we built we become this API infrastructure company.

Yeah. May maybe we should just describe what Kong is right now before we actually do that.

So so we left with this pivot and we open source uh Kong API gateway took off and we become an enterprise company. We became we rebrand Kong Inc. Uh 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, 100 thousand of APIs. We're kind of this highways uh that makes them run and you have rate limiting. Like if if APIs were a cars, you got guardrails, speed bump, speed cameras, gas stations, stalls, bumps, guardrails, everything, ambulance, and we provide all the infrastructure to make sure that the API connectivity runs for small company, big company, all of that.

Now in in this transition you mentioned what really drove I think this explosion of cloud APIs was the workload moving from onrem to the cloud. The second transition is breaking down the monolith to microser creates more and more APIs the big data and all that creates event streaming all that. So this just data in motion is much higher than is becoming much higher than like data rest or data data news than before. But but but in a way when you were starting the company you were drafting on a big transition right which was the breaking down of the monolith and the shift to cloud

right and

that was the key.

Yeah

I think I think before there were all these archive legacy solutions in APIs but they were not built for the transition to the cloud and breaking down the monolith into microservices and highcale decentralized architecture. I mean, you know, from your time on like we we we kind of invented a control plane data plane separation at the API management, API control plane level. Nobody was doing it before. I I got to say I 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 2555 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.

Every year the company has to go they get 255. It's just it's just symbolic of course

to remember seven years of struggle. Every year is a retrol.

And there's this crazy diving catch which you know Marco does the greatest Kong. He throws it out on the market and it catches off. But once it did, the company grew incredibly quickly. Um,

and we had 45 competitors when we started.

Oh, 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, you know, in in recent years, 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, right?

Yeah. 17 MU got acquired RPG got acquired in 16.

That's right. Yeah. So like in in a way kind of like the there was consolidation and you broke out as this leader. So you kind of navigated this transition from you know cloud to breaking up the microservices. You know you built the control plane for APIs. You're considered now like the you know the the leader independent for sure in the API space. Kong is the leader independent. Um 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, accretive? Like how are you as CEO viewing this?

Yeah, I think again is it's not like was like any me those 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 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. Agents are going to programmatically exchange labor get task done through programming interface whether is classic APRS MCP protocols which is like Dualingo 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 you is is through programming interface. That's the huge shift that we we are now capturing and powering and making sure the enterprise

um think about AI connectivity and at the end of the day behind the scene it's all APIs. We you know we had that board meeting what was it yesterday. Yes. And what you know what I found actually pretty remarkable is how many more benal use cases there are around AI right 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 like key management for you know like a lot of 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 you're actually seeing like a non-agentic draft now.

Yeah. I think so what I think the word is a bit of stack. Okay. You have these AI companies like poor that are just building models yada yada and then then you have this rapper company that are trying to solve you know HR issue whatever through AI then you have these LLMs that have APIs to talks companies like entropy a lot of revenue through APIs all that what what is missing is the infrastructure to make those those AI talks and run and that's that's what we do now with I gate 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 he has to authenticate and to authenticate you 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 provision and auto and automate key provisioning key rotation authentication so once you're there you can unleash your LLM your agents to just roam free without getting stuck every time for authentication authorization because you're already provisioning all these keys I think that's That's what we want to our customers.

So, so maybe just just assume for this this this part of our discussion that whoever's listening is is pretty familiar with AI API infrastructure, right? Do you think that the way API infrastructure looks in 6 months or a year or 2 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 the mouth and the ears to a model. Um and so that's how AI talks. So the way we know about API API infrastructure, it will evolve, it won't change, but API traffic and AI traffic, they're converging. So the classic API calls yes but also when you move tokens is an API call and intelligent let's say intelligent will be sold through tokens every earning release is about tokens but behind and each tokens there are calls the payloads move tokens so they're kind of converging and what we are calling or 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 will will converge into a unified like program and 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 you know for fun I develop using cursor

um you know I used to be a professional developer you know in a in a previous life even knowing what API guys 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 can expose it to I mean it feels like a lot of like even the development paradigm is shifting now because we can start surface these these things to developers. Yeah, I think I think you can you can think you can we can be an enabler to helps large companies, small companies to to get into the hands of more developers or more courser because it's all start with API we can provide you that infrastructures and and and all of that. Uh we as you see from yesterday we have a a very exciting road map that is going in all in that direction. Uh so those are all of them. I think here here's the big bet. The big bet is what happened in micro 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 it is that even it doesn't exactly repeat but it reads it's just there's always an out. So you you do so what we see with microservices what happened we we first build ra limiting and authentication 10 times 100 times 50 times into the python framework the javascript framework the typescript framework the java frame whatever php blah blah blah at some point didn't make any sense let let's abstract 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 LMS Now they're going to use five 10 100 small LM medium large whatever once you get to you don't do tokens relingiting token authentication in each LLM using the frame or the lchain whatever eventually same thing happen in microser you will abstract that to a gateway partner once again and that's where I think I gateway will have the the same analogy and dispatcher to write connectivity logic to the right versus rewriting initial 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.

um you know I used to be a professional developer you know in a in a previous life even knowing what API guys 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 can expose it to I mean it feels like a lot of like even the development paradigm is shifting now because we can start surface these these things to developers. Yeah, I think I think you can you can think you can we can be an enabler to helps large companies, small companies to to get into the hands of more developers or more courser because it's all start with API we can provide you that infrastructures and and and all of that. Uh we as you see from yesterday we have a a very exciting road map that is going in all in that direction. Uh so those are all of them. I think here here's the big bet. The big bet is what happened in micro 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 it is that even it doesn't exactly repeat but it reads it's just there's always an out. So you you do so what we see with microservices what happened we we first build ra limiting and authentication 10 times 100 times 50 times into the python framework the javascript framework the typescript framework the java frame whatever php blah blah blah at some point didn't make any sense let let's abstract 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 LMS Now they're going to use five 10 100 small LM medium large whatever once you get to you don't do tokens relingiting token authentication in each LLM using the frame or the lchain whatever eventually same thing happen in microser you will abstract that to a gateway partner once again and that's where I think I gateway will have the the same analogy and dispatcher to write connectivity logic to the right versus rewriting initial 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'd 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.

maybe adi advice on kind of like you know um uh you know how to start thinking about getting ready for that. I think I say 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 run I think a lot of the traffic will be very strategic and you have to build the the startups of the enterprise to manage that AI connectivity into your next apps your next internal tools your next customers

and for the uh listen the budding founders that are listening to like the most hardcore Silicon Valley story ever. What advice do you give to them?

I think what what I learned over a decade of like

do do you ever think I I just have to do you ever think that like maybe you should have cut your losses and tried to start it over again? Like do you ever think that that would have been the right thing?

Never.

No.

Never. Never. The the reason is I could never visualize myself going back to the airport in Italy and my dad picking him 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 that never crossed through 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

and so and then But the thing to advise is it always take longer than what uh we thinks. Um it it's good to take a a trend that lasts 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 last and just put 110% on it every day and then it will compound. Uh keep the barn rate low in the early days.

Don't die.

Don't die. Like don't quit. Uh those those are um those those are I think the things I learned along the way.

AI 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.