Building Meter for decades, not an exit | Anil Varanasi (Co-founder and CEO)
In Depth
Measuring Velocity and Customer Friction
Anil details using product usage and unhappy-customer metrics to track quality and engineering velocity.
Anil Varanasi is the co-founder and CEO of Meter, which provides full-stack networking infrastructure as a service for businesses. Since founding Meter with his brother Sunil in 2015, Anil has been playing a distinctly long game in one of the most entrenched markets in technology, betting on vertical integration, business model innovation, and a multi-decade time horizon. In this conversation, he unpacks Meter’s origin story, from four-plus years of heads-down R&D, and shares how his unconventional approach to planning, management, and pace keeps him excited to run the company for decades.
In today’s episode, we discuss:
- Why Anil thinks in 25-year horizons
- How operating in a monopolistic market shaped Meter’s approach
- Why Meter scrapped a year of OS work during the R&D phase
- How Meter is rethinking networking’s business model
- Surviving COVID, Apple’s M1 transition, and “a thousand bad days”
- Anil’s contrarian views on planning, OKRs, and management
- How founders can build companies they’ll want to run for decades
Where to find Anil:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anilcv/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/acv
Where to find Brett:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson
Where to find First Round Capital:
- Website: https://firstround.com/
- First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital
- This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast
References:
- ADT: https://www.adt.com
- Alex Honnold: https://www.alexhonnold.com
- Alex Tabarrok: https://x.com/ATabarrok
- alarm.com: https://www.alarm.com
- Andreessen Horowitz (a16z): https://a16z.com
- Apple: https://www.apple.com
- Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com
- Bryan Caplan: http://www.bcaplan.com/
- Cisco: https://www.cisco.com
- Coca-Cola: https://www.coca-colacompany.com
- George Mason University (GMU): https://www.gmu.edu
- Intel: https://www.intel.com
- Julia Galef: https://x.com/juliagalef
- Martin Casado: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martincasado/
- Meraki: https://meraki.cisco.com
- Meter: https://www.meter.com
- Michela Giorcelli: https://x.com/M_Giorcelli
- Nicholas Bloom: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-bloom-stanford/
- Raffaella Sadun: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raffaella-sadun-3a182225/
- Sanjit Biswas: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjitbiswas/
- Sunil Varanasi: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sunil-varanasi-662a01253/
- Tyler Cowen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyler-cowen-166718/
- Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv
Timestamps:
(01:27) Meter’s unusual timeframes
(04:06) “We don’t do OKRs”
(06:32) How to plan without planning
(08:31) Track your unhappy customers
(11:43) How Meter’s journey began
(15:02) Dissecting the 2010s SaaS boom
(17:06) The networking industry trap
(21:44) Meter’s first roadblock
(22:07) Why Shenzhen accelerated Meter’s progress
(26:29) The process to get a sales-ready product
(31:02) Why you should own the full stack
(32:45) The surprising thing you should innovate
(35:03) Avoiding the one-trick pony trap
(37:39) The secret to finding an excellent market
(43:48) How COVID’s constraints propelled growth
(48:25) Why founders need to know their customers
(49:34) Why Meter didn’t sell via traditional channels
(51:44) You need “seller-market fit”
(54:51) The danger of meta-work
(56:25) Decoupling management from authority
(1:02:17) When the person is the problem
(1:05:05) The inherent value of going slowly
(1:09:41) Running a company for as long as possible
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