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Building Meter for decades, not an exit | Anil Varanasi (Co-founder and CEO)
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-bl
Published on 1 day, 8 hours ago