Martín Casado is a Spanish-born American software engineer, entrepreneur, and investor. He is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and was a pioneer of software-defined networking, and a co-founder of Nicira Networks.
Martín Casado was born around 1976 in Cartagena, Spain.[1] He received his bachelor's degree from Northern Arizona University in 2000.[2] In 2017, he received an honorary doctorate from the same university.[3] Casado was a researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 1998 until 2003.[4] While at LLNL, he ran large-scale computer simulations for the United States Department of Defense.[5]
Casado attended Stanford University from 2002 to 2008,[citation needed] earning both his Masters and PhD in computer science.[6] While at Stanford, he began the development of OpenFlow,[7] an open-source protocol that enabled software-defined networking. His Ph.D. thesis, "Architectural Support for Security Management in Enterprise Networks,” under advisors Nick McKeown, Scott Shenker and Dan Boneh, was published in 2008.[6]
In 2007, Casado co-founded Nicira Networks along with McKeown and Shenker, a Palo Alto, California based company working on network virtualization. Along with McKeown and Shenker, Casado promoted software-defined networking.[7] His Ph.D. work at Stanford University led to the development of the OpenFlow protocol, which was promoting using the term software-defined networking (SDN). McKeown and Shenker co-founded the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) in 2011 to transfer control of OpenFlow to a not-for-profit organization.[8]
In July 2012, VMware acquired Nicira for $1.26 billion.[9][10] At VMware he was made a fellow and held the positions chief technology officer (CTO) for networking and security and general manager of the Networking and Security Business Unit.[11]
Casado left VMware and joined venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz in February 2016 as its ninth general partner.[12][13][14] Andreessen Horowitz had been one of the investors Nicira, contributing $17.7 million to the start-up venture.[10]