The more companies realize the importance of accelerating their digital transformation and software-centric initiatives, the faster the API economy expands. Development velocity is becoming a key concern for every organization, which is why the DevOps Market is expected to register a 20% CAGR, reaching $30 billion by 2028.

Martin Casado, General Partner at a16z, has been a long-time investor in the enterprise and DevOps space and an early investor in companies such as Kong and RapidAPI, in which we at Viola Growth invested in 2020.

Viola General Partner Natalie Refuah sat down with Martin to discuss the opportunities, transformations, and challenges on the horizon for DevOps and API companies.

The API Economy – From Monolithic Apps to Aggregation of Businesses.

As markets get larger, the unit at which you can monetize gets smaller… One trend that I strongly believe is the delamination of an application. The application is exploding, so independent pieces of applications now can be monetized and become a independent companies, whether they are doing the speech to text piece, or authorization piece or policy piece

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Understanding Who is the Ultimate Buyer

To understand the potential of a DevOps company you need to look from the market on in and not from the technology on out. It’s important to understand who the ultimate buyer is and then to work your way back on what to measure. …Based on who the buyers are, we figure out what we think the right go-to-market is, and then we base our analysis on that, so there is no one-size-fits-all.

 

 

Is Innovation Moving Beyond Cloud Providers?

All of IT is moving to the cloud or a large majority of it… I think they’re now the incumbents. I think the innovation is outside of them and we’ll watch that dynamic for a while and as always happens innovation will win.

 

 

Managing Thousands of APIs

You can almost view this transition from an independent developer writing everything to an organization where they’re all using everything to this cloud-ish world where they’re all using APIs everywhere and we need to re-implement control and visibility on top of those. For any developer using APIs this is the number one challenge

 

 

Investing in Israeli Founders

At a16z we invest in spaces and technologies, not in geo locations. That said, since i am in this position i travel to Israel at least three times a year, (I personally love Jaffa) and we’re very committed to the Israeli ecosystem

 

On our next blog – we’ll share Viola’s DevOps research – so stay tuned!