How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure

Unknown Source October 21, 2025 38 min

artificial-intelligence startup investment google

63 Companies

80 Key Quotes

3 Topics

🎯 Summary

Podcast Episode Summary: The Improbable Journey of Kong and the API Economy

This episode of the podcast, featuring Agu Marietti, CEO and co-founder of Kong, and Martin Casado (General Partner at a16z), chronicles the near-impossible founding story of Kong—a leading API platform—from near destitution in Milan to scaling a major enterprise technology company. The narrative arc centers on extreme perseverance, forced pivots, and the eventual recognition of APIs as the fundamental “assembly line of software.”

Key Takeaways for Technology Professionals

1. The Crucible of Early-Stage Entrepreneurship (Extreme Grit)

Near-Death Experiences: The founders started with virtually no money, famously using their last $600 for a flight to the U.S. with only 90 days to secure funding or face returning to Italy broke.
Survival Mode: For over a year, three founders survived in San Francisco on approximately $1,000 per month (or $14/day total), subsisting primarily on cheap rice, beans, tuna, and pasta cooked in borrowed Airbnb kitchens. This highlights the extreme financial sacrifice required in the earliest, unglamorous stages of building a company.
Symbolic Struggle: The company maintains a “Founders Award” granting 2,555 shares to an employee, symbolizing the seven years of struggle before breakout success.

2. Navigating the U.S. System as Immigrant Founders

Visa Challenges: The founders initially entered on tourist visas, forcing them to return to Italy and rely on securing O-1 visas (extraordinary ability) based on strong letters of recommendation from influential figures they met (including a future NEA contact).
Operational Hurdles: Lacking SSNs or credit scores, they couldn’t legally pay themselves initially, relying on internal promissory notes while operating out of co-working spaces and Starbucks.

3. The Power of Networking and Serendipity (The “Stolen Emails” Story)

Aggressive Networking: Lacking formal access to a major Stanford Entrepreneurship Week mixer, the founders “stole” the registration list and manually emailed 400 attendees, leading to initial interest.
Key Early Backers: Their first check ($17k, later rounded to $51k total in the initial angel round) came from Kevin Donahue (a founding YouTube team member).
Negotiation Drama: The convertible note negotiation for that initial $51k took place at Travis Kalanick’s house, involving multiple trips to the bathroom for private counter-offers, illustrating the high-stakes, informal nature of early Silicon Valley deal-making.

4. The Pivotal Shift: From App Builder to API Marketplace

Initial Concept Failure: Kong (originally Mashape) first attempted to build a drag-and-drop application builder using wrapped APIs, realizing they were too far ahead of the market (circa 2010-2011).
The Marketplace Pivot: They pivoted to an API Marketplace—a platform for API producers and consumers to connect—believing the API economy would be the next major wave.
Marketplace Economics Failure: Despite early traction and raising a $1.5M seed round (with investors like NEA and Index), the marketplace model failed to scale economically. Marietti identified three key marketplace challenges:
1. Lack of a sufficient long tail of low-power users.
2. Lack of exclusivity (users could bypass the marketplace).
3. Inability to maintain quality and trust in the cloud supply.

5. The Birth of Kong Open Source (The Final Pivot)

The Engine as the Product: Recognizing the failure of the marketplace, the founders realized the true value lay in the massive API engine they built behind the marketplace gateway (handling routing, caching, authentication, logging, etc.).
Open Sourcing: In April 2015, they open-sourced Kong, betting that every company would eventually need to become an API company. This move was made when they were critically low on cash, requiring a $2M bridge extension from existing investors (led by Dev Equity) just to survive long enough for the open-source launch to gain traction.
Breakout Success: The open-source release was an immediate phenomenon, evidenced by exploding GitHub stars and customer inbound interest, which ultimately secured their Series A funding.

6. Strategic Insights and Future Outlook

API Centrality: Marietti asserts that APIs are the assembly line of software.
Future of Autonomous Systems: He predicts that the next wave of AI agents and autonomous systems will make APIs more essential than ever, as these agents will rely on standardized interfaces for interaction.
Investor Validation: The success of the open-source pivot validated the underlying theme for investors like Dev Equity (who was an early believer in the API theme) and brought in high-profile strategic investors like Jeff Bezos (who invested via his family office after being introduced through a lawyer).

The episode concludes by noting Kong’s remarkable growth post-Series A, achieving $100M in ARR in a relatively short period after years of struggle, cementing this as one of the most dramatic turnaround stories in recent tech history.

🏢 Companies Mentioned

poor ✅ tech

Duolingo ✅ Tech/Education

Mongo ✅ Tech/Database

Expedia ✅ travel

Uber ✅ tech

AI API ✅ unknown

Kong Inc ✅ unknown

Kong API ✅ unknown

Silicon Valley ✅ unknown

Can I ✅ unknown

And Marco ✅ unknown

South Park ✅ unknown

Palo Alto ✅ unknown

George Zachary ✅ unknown

Pebble Beach ✅ unknown

💬 Key Insights

"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."

Impact Score: 10

"Human consume internet would be through UI. Machine consume internet is you is through programming interface. That's the huge shift that we we are now capturing and powering..."

Impact Score: 10

"The market came to us in AI by creating more APIs. What that means is agents are going to consume the internet in a very different way than how to Monday it is."

Impact Score: 10

"...if APIs were cars, you got guardrails, speed bumps, speed cameras, gas stations, stalls, bumps, guardrails, everything, and ambulance, and that we provide all the infrastructure..."

Impact Score: 10

"I would love to like kind of shift towards how you think about product, how do you think about markets, and then kind of move towards AI. So you actually have seen a number of shifts now, right? You saw the cloud come. You saw the shift to APIs. So maybe just talk a little bit about how you view this current shift for the eyes. Is it is it fundamentally different? The same?"

Impact Score: 10

"Every company will become an API company. Why don't we take this this engine and we give it to the whole world? That was the beginning of open source Mongo."

Impact Score: 10

📊 Topics

#artificialintelligence 72 #startup 15 #investment 5