About this episode
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:
