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]
Career
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]
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]