30% Of Network Engineers Are Retiring. What Happens Next? (Anil Varanasi, Co-Founder & CEO of Meter)

Anil Varanasi, co-founder and CEO of Meter, is building a new kind of networking company for the AI era. Alongside his brother Sunil, he has helped raise more than $250 million to challenge incumbents like Cisco with a vertically integrated approach spanning hardware, software, deployment, and ongoing operations, all delivered through a utility-style model. His view is that networking has remained largely unchanged for decades, even as it has become foundational to everything from AI workloads to real-world infrastructure. Meter’s ambition is not just to improve existing networks, but to make them autonomous over time. Before starting the company, Anil and Sunil were deeply involved in filmmaking, a background that still shapes their philosophy of building with cathedral-level craft across every layer of the stack. Together we explore: The “burden of knowledge” and why progress is getting harder across fieldsWhy most companies over-index on technology and ignore business model innovationThe three ways companies create advantage: technology, delivery, and business modelHow Meter’s trade-in model borrows from the automotive industryWhy networking should function like electricity or water—not hardwareLessons from Japanese vending machine logistics for infrastructure deploymentThe hidden coordination problem behind vertically integrated companiesWhy Anil believes “common knowledge” is often wrongHow COVID forced Meter to abandon geographic constraints and scale nationallyThe case for fully autonomous networks in a world of exploding demand— Thank you to the partners who make this possible .tech domains https://go.tech/thegeneralistnl: An identity for builders at their core. Granola https://granola.ai/mario: The app that might actually make you love meetings. Brex https://www.brex.com/mario: The intelligent finance platform. — Transcript: https://www.generalist.com/p/the-case-for-autonomous-networks — Timestamps (00:00) Introduction to Anil Varanasi and Meter (03:52) The burden of knowledge and slowing innovation (08:18) Losing creativity vs gaining expertise (10:25) What Meter actually does (13:26) Early life, immigration, and upbringing (15:47) Parental influence (20:03) Film, storytelling, and creative influence (22:55) Why Anil didn’t pursue filmmaking (25:44) Parallels between company building and filmmaking (27:00) Early programming and building (28:05) George Mason and understanding systems (29:59) The dynamic of working with his brother as a co-founder (34:03) His first business and lessons learned (or lack thereof) (35:15) Lessons from successful companies (38:16) Japanese vending machines and logistics insight (41:10) Scrapping 18 months of work (42:40) Conviction and long-term company building (46:02) COVID shock and near-death moment (49:59) Building hardware like a cathedral (52:25) Rethinking the networking business model (57:06) Build vs buy and transaction costs (59:39) Networking as infrastructure and utility (01:01:30) The case for autonomous networks (01:03:25) Hiring, talent, and what actually matters (01:06:15) Big unanswered questions (sleep, science) (01:07:28) Rethinking education (01:09:02) Infinite games and long-term thinking — Follow Anil Varanasi LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anilcv X: https://x.com/acv Website: https://anilv.com https://anilv.com/ — Resources and episode mentions: https://www.generalist.com/p/the-case-for-autonomous-networks⁠ https://www.generalist.com/p/the-case-for-autonomous-networks — Production and marketing by penname.co https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If you have a manufacturing facility, you need internet, networking, Wi-Fi, cellular to do whatever you want to do in that manufacturing facility. Traditionally, you have to go figure out what hardware you're going to use, who's going to install it, who's going to maintain it, where's the capital going to come from. With Meter, all customers have to do is give us a bunch of addresses and flow plans and somehow magically networks appear anywhere in the world.

• 0:20Mario Gabriele?

  If you had unlimited resources and no operational constraints, what is an experiment you would like to run?

• 0:26Speaker 00

  I think it would be interesting not to have school the first 15 years of your life. I'm not sure if education works. Today, so much time, energy and capital is going into augmenting software engineers. You and I could name hundreds of companies trying to do this.

• 0:41Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  After software engineers, the second highest number of jobs in technology is network engineers. But something like 30% of all network engineers are retiring by the end of the decade without replacement.

• 0:53Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 0:54Speaker 00

  Networking is really important. Nobody else is studying this at all and everything in the world is packaged. Autonomous networks is like the only way to solve this.

• 1:09Mario Gabriele?

  Before Anil Varanasi built startups, he made films. He and his brother Sunil had a crew, designed theater sets and built their own visual effects plugins. Today, the two of them run Meter, a full-stack networking company that's raised more than $350 million to go head-to-head with giants like Cisco. In time, Meter intends to build what Anil describes as fully autonomous networks, designed for the AI era. In our conversation, Anil and I discuss his unusual upbringing in Virginia, Japanese vending machines and what he means when he says that hardware should feel like a cathedral. I'm Mario and this is The Generalist. This episode is brought to you by .tech domains.

• 1:54Mario Gabriele?

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• 2:29Speaker 02

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• 3:12Speaker 02

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• 3:54Mario Gabriele?

  Anil, you have one of my favorite personal websites that I've seen. I think the signal to noise in that website is among the highest. You have only a few blog posts, but each of them is extremely interesting. And one of them in particular sort of centers on a topic that I'm quite obsessed with ever since I discovered it. And I wondered how you sort of became obsessed with it, which is the sort of concept of the burden of knowledge, this idea that as generations go by, people are taking longer and longer to make their most significant achievements. When did you sort of stumble upon that? And why is it something that captured your interest?

• 4:30Speaker 00

  I don't think I know the origin of when I discovered it. But there's all these people that have done really good work on it. I think Chad Jones and others. But there's this guy named Matt Clancy, who's probably one of the best meta-science researchers out there. So he used to write independently. I think Matt's done some really great work. He has one of the most unique blogs. It's called New Things Under the Sun. He works at Open Phil now. And I think when I first discovered probably The Burden of Knowledge, probably a decade, decade and a half ago at this point, I ended up going to George Mason to study econ there. So you sort of are always in this web of what's happening and how to think about why the world hasn't gotten better and stagnation and all these things.

• 5:15Speaker 00

  And I think it's possible, actually, Cowan had it in his book on stagnation as well.

• 5:22Mario Gabriele?

  Yes, very possible.

• 5:23Speaker 00

  I think it might be, at the very least, I think it was one of the indices or footnotes in there as well. But it's a very interesting problem. But I think also something like I've personally probably felt as well. And then I had friends who were researchers, doctors, et cetera, and those fields seem to, that being a problem. But then in the last few years, I also see it being untangled in some fields as well. So it's sort of an interesting challenge everywhere on burden of knowledge.

• 5:55Mario Gabriele?

  I'm interested, or I'm surprised that you feel like you felt it yourself because you started so early as an entrepreneur in many ways. Does it feel like you've been, I don't know, almost just in preparation mode for the real work to begin now?

• 6:07Speaker 00

  I think, you know, we were talking about Kevin Kelly's work before. You sort of always have this feeling that somehow you're late. And I think Kelly had this like great essay saying you're not late. But anytime you sort of discover a field and you try to understand it from the ground up, you always have this tinge of, oh, I arrived at the same solution. Wish I was there. So I think especially when you're younger, you're like, oh, man, I discovered this great thing. But it turns out, you know, somebody had already discovered it a decade or two decades ago. But I think particularly in computer science, probably the way I felt it is. Especially in the early 2000s to early 2010s,

• 6:45Speaker 00

  it was a deluge of frameworks to different ways of thinking and all these web frameworks and everything that was getting released and it's just constantly something or the other, where if you understood computer science, you could sort of go far. And then I think I also felt it a lot in other areas I'm interested in, like film and research and meta research itself and it's sort of like a Russian doll thing. I think you sort of always feel this thing of as time goes on, there is way more to learn. And then, you know, possibly something to do, even if you listen to like Buffett and Munger

• 7:27Speaker 00

  saying it was like, you know, back in the day, it was like shooting fish in a barrel type thing. And I think that's burden of knowledge, too.

• 7:33Mario Gabriele?

  Yes, yeah.

• 7:35Speaker 00

  Then Cowan had actually written this really great essay that I don't know if traditionally people would call closer to burden of knowledge called The End of Asymmetric Information.

• 7:48Mario Gabriele?

  Hmm, I don't think I've read that.

• 7:49Speaker 00

  It's really good, really, really good essay about how most of quote, alpha, no matter what field you were in, was coming from the fact that you had asymmetric information compared to other people.

• 8:03Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 8:04Speaker 00

  And sort of about a decade, decade and a half ago, the thesis is that there's this end of asymmetric information. I think that has to do something with burden of knowledge as well. So I think, you know, it's just a good topic that's interesting to think about.

• 8:17Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, definitely. You know, one of the things that I think about with the burden of knowledge and the nature of progress is sort of the idea that, you know, when we talk about it, you know, sort of needing to load yourself up with all of this information and frameworks and all of this stuff to just be able to contribute in the way you want to, in some sense, I feel that a lot of people go through that process and almost become denatured in some way, or they lose the childishness and the naivety that actually allows you to have a breakthrough. Like, you know, you're mentioning film. I'm sure you have watched the many Orson Welles interviews where he talks about how you can learn how to make a movie in a day and a half if you really focus on it.

• 9:00Mario Gabriele?

  And that sort of a child's mind is difficult to square entirely with like that need for such deep preparation. When you think about the work that you're doing and you seem to have an extremely long time horizon for what you want to do, how do you maintain like the sense of play or creativity or childishness when you're in the zone of innovation? Because that feels like such a necessary ingredient.

• 9:26Speaker 00

  I don't think our type of business has that problem at all. I think if you look at Silicon Valley in the last 25 years, almost everybody was told building a SaaS company was the panacea for a while. But most SaaS companies end up being about increasing retention and decreasing churn. And I think that's why you lose childlike wonder in life when your whole life is sort of dissolved into those things. But in a business like ours, there's hardware, supply chain, firmware, operating systems, routing algorithms, distributed systems, APIs, applications, models, deploying hardware in the real world, the complexities of that, to supporting, managing, scaling, all those

• 10:11Speaker 00

  things. By the time you think you've gotten good at something, something else is changing the world in another part of the stack where you have no choice but to go try to learn. And that's consistently been true the last decade of my life.

• 10:25Mario Gabriele?

  I'm sure a lot of people know what Meter does and maybe even use Meter at their office. But for those that don't, so that they can sort of frame those different pieces, how would you sort of succinctly summarize this business that you're building?

• 10:40Speaker 00

  Sure. Meter builds networking hardware and software. Anytime you have something in a warehouse, manufacturing facility, office, school, data center, that could be a robot, a tablet, a computer, an application, when you want to do something, those are packets that are moving back and forth. Those packets are moved by networks. And networks are powered by networking hardware and software. And we build hardware and software for networking and we're vertically integrated, which is also new in what we do, which is not only do we build the hardware and software, we'll go deploy it and maintain it. And then we have an entirely new business model along with it as well.

• 11:23Speaker 00

  So if you have a manufacturing facility, you need internet, networking, wifi, cellular to do whatever you want to do in that manufacturing facility. Traditionally, you have to go figure out what hardware you're going to use, who's going to install it, who's going to maintain it, where's the capital going to come from, to the tunes of hundreds of thousands to millions to tens of millions of dollars. With Meter, all customers have to do is give us a bunch of addresses and floor plans, and somehow magically networks appear anywhere in the world. And so we build the hardware, write the software, deploy it and maintain it, all entirely end to end.

• 12:04Mario Gabriele?

  When I think of what you do, often I do think of it in the office environment, but it's interesting to me that you really describe more of the manufacturing side of it. Has that become more of a focus or a bigger piece of how you think of it? Or is that always sort of, maybe my conception of where the business sort of centers is off?

• 12:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're off.

• 12:25Mario Gabriele?

  I'm off? Okay, there you go. Easy. So manufacturing's always been a really, really at the heart of it.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  Everything, from retail, healthcare, life sciences, warehouse, manufacturing, offices, schools are another big part of it, too. Roughly, you should think of us as like an index on the economy. Physical world grows in some way in the economy somewhere, at any given time. Whenever that happens, we're there. So for example, if you take times like COVID, offices went to zero, but e-commerce went from 12% of all receipts to 24%. So it doubled. And to be able to service that e-commerce, you had massive growth in warehousing. So then our business was a lot of warehousing at that time.

• 13:12Speaker 00

  Offices are about 15% of physical spaces.

• 13:17Mario Gabriele?

  Yep.

• 13:18Speaker 00

  So you should roughly have a mental model, that's what percentages of our business.

• 13:21Mario Gabriele?

  Mm hmm. Well, now I have my first mistake out of the way, so I can only, I can't disappoint too much from here. I'd love to start with a little bit of your beginnings, because from everything I read, you really had an unusual childhood in many respects. You sort of moved from India to the States, but it really goes deeper than that with just sort of the way that your parents raised you. Yeah, maybe you can tell me a little bit about the unusual parts of your Of your origins.

• 13:49Speaker 00

  That was such a revealing preference question because now I know what you read and who you talk to, to ask that question.

• 13:59Mario Gabriele?

  I love that your brain is running that algorithm. You're like, okay, now I know I figured this guy out.

• 14:04Speaker 00

  I know what you read and who you talk to, but I think so much of life is sort of luck.

• 14:12Speaker 00

  There's this great interview that Altman did with Cowan about eight or nine years ago. And Altman talks about how if he could actually work on helping everybody have loving, great parents, that would be the ultimate way to actually make things better in the world. So I think fundamentally for us is just, you know, I've had a really lucky childhood where I've had parents that never had a governor and what I should be doing. And I had a brother who's one of the smartest people in the world that is the same as me. And most people have one brain and I get to have two, so I can offload some compute tasks

• 14:52Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 14:52Speaker 00

  to his brain.

• 14:53Mario Gabriele?

  Doesn't he try and offload to you though?

• 14:55Speaker 00

  No, no, no.

• 14:56Mario Gabriele?

  Doesn't work like that?

• 14:56Speaker 00

  It doesn't work that way. My API is closed.

• 15:00Speaker 00

  But yeah, like we moved to the United States when I was 12, he was 14. And, you know, especially in the early 2000s when we moved here, it was such an amazing time in America. And I still think it is, you know, as an immigrant, I think always you end up loving the country. You move to way more than the people that live here. And we did have this childhood where I don't remember times where I thought I couldn't try something. And I think that part is unusual and sort of the phrase I think comes back to is like free range kids, where you can sort of run around, do your thing and try to build a world that you want. And I think we sort of had that sort of childhood. As I get older.

• 15:44Speaker 00

  I realize how unique that is, but I think when you're a kid, you're just like trying to live your life.

• 15:48Mario Gabriele?

  What my question really reveals is a preference is that I've had my first kid in the past year and a half.

• 15:54Speaker 00

  How old?

• 15:55Mario Gabriele?

  Sixteen months.

• 15:56Speaker 00

  Okay, I have a two-year-old.

• 15:57Mario Gabriele?

  And you can't help but once that becomes part of your story, think about, okay, well, you know, what made this person this way, right? What were the things that contributed? And that level of freedom feels like a big one that comes up a lot, actually. Do you think about that with your with your children?

• 16:14Speaker 00

  I have a tough time with this because when you're an academic, you end up also like trying to read longitudinal studies about this stuff.

• 16:21Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 16:22Speaker 00

  And apart from, you know, sort of the really bad cases of like abuse and maladnessment, other stuff, if you remove those things on the margins, net-net parenting doesn't matter.

• 16:33Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, I know. This is the only sort of thing that seems to matter a tiny bit is having dinner at the same

• 16:39Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 16:39Mario Gabriele?

  at the same time or something. It's something incredibly trivial, right?

• 16:42Speaker 00

  Other than that, parenting really doesn't matter that much.

• 16:44Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  So I think even as I think about the childhood I had, I don't think about it influencing directly what I do. I think about it influencing the happiness I had in life to then having the freedom to do it. So it's more a little bit more fundamental than having a direct

• 17:00Mario Gabriele?

  Yep.

• 17:01Speaker 00

  impact. I don't think of it as causal, but I think it's like an adjacent thing that's there that helped you be happier, be a certain way to then grow up a certain way.

• 17:11Mario Gabriele?

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:12Speaker 00

  So even with this stuff, even as a parent now, I'm still not convinced parenting matters.

• 17:18Mario Gabriele?

  It's also a it's both a terrifying and sort of somewhat convenient belief for parents, right? It frees you a bit, but also you think, oh, gosh, like, well, what am I doing here? Could I really left myself off the hook that much?

• 17:29Speaker 00

  I think the genetic choices have already been made a long time ago.

• 17:32Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 17:33Speaker 00

  That's the scary part.

• 17:34Mario Gabriele?

  Yes. Did you feel like a real sense of culture shock moving from India to North Virginia? Those are very different places.

• 17:40Speaker 00

  Possibly. You know, when I think of these types of questions, it's always hard not to ascribe how your mind is today to, in reality, how your mind was a long time ago. And especially it's so hard to understand a child's mind, even if the child was you a long time ago.

• 17:58Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 17:59Speaker 00

  So anything I answer with this, I probably should preface by saying is like, I'm probably making it up. I think maybe for like a month.

• 18:05Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, kids can adapt, right?

• 18:06Speaker 00

  I think kids are kids.

• 18:07Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 18:08Speaker 00

  I think kids, anywhere, want to do as little schoolwork as possible and want to hang out with their friends as much as possible.

• 18:16Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 18:17Speaker 00

  And I think that's invariably true, both in India and United States.

• 18:20Mario Gabriele?

  Yes, there you go. These are the universal constants. Your father was a very successful businessman, right? Was that what brought the family to the US?

• 18:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:28Mario Gabriele?

  Did you have a lot of conversations about business around the table and sort of see how, you know, what his work was like and the challenges he was grappling with?

• 18:36Speaker 00

  A hundred percent.

• 18:37Mario Gabriele?

  Ah.

• 18:38Speaker 00

  That part, I'm still curious about learning because I think if your parents were astronauts, you probably think that's a normal job.

• 18:46Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  And like, you know, sort of just.

• 18:48Mario Gabriele?

  Totally agree with that.

• 18:49Speaker 00

  Just sort of go. So I think that part has had a heavy influence for us. And I think understanding what a business is, understanding the fact that people start businesses. You know, if you didn't grow up in that way, I've heard a lot of my friends describe it in a way that it's other people that start businesses, not you, or other people sort of go do what you want. But I think whatever your parents end up doing seems so blasé to you because all parents are boring.

• 19:16Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  By definition. So if a parent does it, it must be easy.

• 19:21Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, that's right. Anyone can do this, yeah.

• 19:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like, you know, of course, Dad, if you can do it.

• 19:27Mario Gabriele?

  This guy, yeah.

• 19:29Speaker 00

  So I think that part actually plays a huge role. That's where like, I think if any parenting matters is just like, what do your kids actually watch you do? Sort of, you know, you know, do as I say, not do as I do, sort of thing, but the opposite of that. So I think that part's had a huge influence on us. A business or understanding a business, how our business gets started, how it scales and what happens to the different tumultuous points of it. That part's never felt alien to us.

• 19:57Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 19:58Speaker 00

  Nor has it ever felt like stress or scary. And I think that's a big gift in life.

• 20:04Mario Gabriele?

  Where did the the love of films come from? Clearly, that's a huge part of Indian culture and a sort of-

• 20:09Speaker 00

  I think that's a big part of it.

• 20:10Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, unique way.

• 20:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:12Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, something more too, I imagine.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  Again, from my parents. My father used to help make some film in a in small ways and things like that. Where I grew up, in especially in the 90s, it had the highest number of movie theaters per capita in the world.

• 20:29Mario Gabriele?

  In Hyderabad?

• 20:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, in South India.

• 20:31Mario Gabriele?

  Wow, no way.

• 20:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:33Mario Gabriele?

  No kidding.

• 20:34Speaker 00

  So it's like this, it's hard to explain.

• 20:37Mario Gabriele?

  I was thinking, not in North Virginia.

• 20:38Speaker 00

  No, no, no, no, it's this fabric of of culture.

• 20:42Mario Gabriele?

  Fascinating.

• 20:43Speaker 00

  And, you know, if you think about American politics, where Reagan and Schwarzenegger are sort of anomalies, throughout the 80s, 90s and 2000s, that was the norm.

• 20:55Mario Gabriele?

  Where you have this sort of pipeline of Bollywood to politics?

• 20:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, film to politics throughout India.

• 21:03Mario Gabriele?

  Wow.

• 21:03Speaker 00

  Especially South India.

• 21:04Mario Gabriele?

  No kidding.

• 21:05Speaker 00

  So the cultural influences is fairly high. And there were many filmmakers too, that I think were at that time, some of the best in the world. And how to think about color, how to think about blocking, how to think about staging things, how to think about sound, music and how you mix that in. And I think it had like a very, very heavy influence on us.

• 21:26Mario Gabriele?

  This is purely because I really wanted to ask about it. What is sort of the films that you you come back to most often? The ones that, you know, I wouldn't want to say you have to pick a favorite, but the ones that you, yeah, maybe have a special place in your heart.

• 21:42Speaker 00

  There's this cinematographer named P C Sree Ram. You know, I probably watched his his work numerous times, maybe dozens, some of them. I still don't understand how he does what he does.

• 21:54Mario Gabriele?

  Why? That's so interesting. Because you believe, I know that you believe that anything is, you know, can be solved, right? That's a sort of fundamental philosophy.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  His mind is- It's incredible. There's a video I'll send you. You can put it in the show notes or something.

• 22:08Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  On how he took characters and color and made it part of how film happens, to how the wind blows, to how the clothes blow away when a character is trying to get away from another character. Everything was so meticulous, down to how the colors pop on the screen, what type of film was used.

• 22:31Mario Gabriele?

  Wow.

• 22:32Speaker 00

  I think his stuff, really good. Obviously, like, Satyam Sethi, who made the Apu series and others, I think, remarkable. Mani Ratnam made a couple of movies, one about politics, and one sort of his own love letter to The Godfather, which in some areas is better than The Godfather, called Naika. And so a bunch of these movies had a heavy influence on us.

• 22:55Mario Gabriele?

  Wow, how interesting. You seem to spend a good amount of your, you know, childhood teen years making productions of your own. And when I think about that, I think of, you know, like, the home films I did. But you seem to have done it with like a level of seriousness and intensity that seems at a very different level. What were you, what were you trying to create or what were you creating?

• 23:15Speaker 00

  I think the problem with Sunil, my brother and I, is, and my parents would describe it this way, is somehow, anything we try, we just assume the only way to do it is, quote, whatever is the best version of that.

• 23:33Mario Gabriele?

  Hmm. That's a good disease, yeah.

• 23:36Speaker 00

  So I think like we were trying to really like compete with anyone.

• 23:40Mario Gabriele?

  You're like, well, let's make the best film in the world.

• 23:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:42Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 23:42Speaker 00

  I think we're pretty unreasonable about that.

• 23:45Mario Gabriele?

  I love that.

• 23:46Speaker 00

  I don't think we succeeded at all, to be clear. All the stuff we made, I hope nobody except me and him sees, ever.

• 23:54Mario Gabriele?

  Have you rewatched it anytime recently?

• 23:56Speaker 00

  Accidentally.

• 23:57Mario Gabriele?

  Accidentally?

• 23:59Speaker 00

  When going through some old hard drive or some, you know, sort of, glacier S3 thing you have and you're sifting through files to try to find something.

• 24:08Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  And then it's like one of those things where you try not to remember you ever made it or were a part of.

• 24:13Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, I don't need to see this.

• 24:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:15Mario Gabriele?

  Why did you not end up becoming a director, producer, a filmmaker in some capacity, given the clear love you have for it?

• 24:24Speaker 00

  It was something we'd consider seriously.

• 24:25Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 24:26Speaker 00

  Very, very seriously. We sort of came to this conclusion that the... The stories we wanted to tell, we could do it when we were eighty or ninety two because storytelling is storytelling. And maybe the, you know, the setting would change or the environment would change or the variables would change. But the story itself, sort of if you believe the trope of there's like five to nine stories you can tell in the world. We didn't think that would change at all, sort of forever. But what we wanted to do in technology felt like it had a half-life.

• 25:03Speaker 00

  That if we didn't do what we're doing with Meter then, we didn't think it was possible to do it twenty years from then, thirty years from then. So it was this real bargain of, you know, which path do you go on?

• 25:16Mario Gabriele?

  Don't you think that to do the story that you would want to do at the level you would want to do it? You would have to devote all of that time to it?

• 25:25Speaker 00

  Possibly, possibly.

• 25:29Speaker 00

  But then you also look at great films, even the greatest films can be made in a couple of years. But a great company takes a couple of decades.

• 25:37Mario Gabriele?

  Yes, that's true. So maybe it'll happen, uh.

• 25:40Speaker 00

  Maybe.

• 25:40Mario Gabriele?

  Maybe it'll happen in twenty years or something.

• 25:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:43Mario Gabriele?

  Hmm, I love that idea. Do you notice like parallels or symmetries between the two practices? Or am I looking for a pattern when one doesn't exist necessarily?

• 25:53Speaker 00

  There's some good books about this, about so much of building a company is a lot like assembling a great, uh, you know, sort of a great crew for a film where, you know, you want to figure out who's the editor. You want to figure out what's the story and, you know, who's the director and the producer? And how do you actually bring culture together to go accomplish something? I do think there's some parallels, but maybe another thing that I've changed my mind on a little bit as I've gotten older. I think everything is hard.

• 26:26Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  And sort of no matter what you do, it's like that.

• 26:30Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, that's my thought, would be my thinking too. Like if you want to do the best film of all time, maybe you can do it in three years, but also maybe it takes you your whole life, right?

• 26:37Speaker 00

  Sure, but I think building anything.

• 26:40Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:41Speaker 00

  Like, you know, this microphone company.

• 26:43Mario Gabriele?

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:44Speaker 00

  I'm sure there's people there obsessed for a long time.

• 26:46Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  On what's the filter, how do you actually capture the gain? What is wire, what's the firmware on it? It's probably the same obsession, otherwise it doesn't really happen. So I don't, I don't know if it's unique to company building and unique to filmmaking.

• 27:00Mario Gabriele?

  It seemed like filmmaking from, from what I read, sort of led you towards software in some way. Were you building software before you started to build things for?

• 27:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, my, my brother was. So, so my brother wanted to build plugins for 3D animation music. And that's how he started programming. And then that's how I learned programming from him.

• 27:21Mario Gabriele?

  Okay, interesting. And also I saw on your GitHub, maybe you were doing sort of different things with Pandora and Ardio and things like that. What were, what were those experiments about?

• 27:29Speaker 00

  I think it was just like an amazing time in the late 2000s, early 2000s where, you know, you, you just try to build different projects. And maybe some of that's coming back now with all the changes in models, et cetera, where everybody I knew was building stuff. So I don't know if it was like unique to anything to us. I think we were all just trying to figure out is like, cool, you have software. You now have infinite distribution. You can easily get code anywhere. APIs were becoming more proliferated everywhere. So I think we were just like part of that. I don't know if we were doing anything unique.

• 28:05Mario Gabriele?

  You went to, to college at sort of your, your local school, George Mason University, which was nearby, but also feels like in some sense, probably spiritually, the best possible school for, for you, given how interesting, yeah, collection of thinkers it has sort of aggregated. What did you learn from, from being there sort of at a more meta level, beyond, you know, just the pure information?

• 28:28Speaker 00

  I think you can, if you try, not, it's sort of, there's no limit to it, but you sort of maybe asymptotically get there. You can try to understand how the world works. And I think that's core to the George Mason ethos, and particularly what Cowan has been able to build and that team and the influence they've had, even in Silicon Valley. I mean, I think so much of Silicon Valley's ideas in the last 20, 25 years, I can trace back to

• 28:56Mario Gabriele?

  Hundred percent.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  George Mason.

• 28:58Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 28:59Speaker 00

  In so many ways. And I think that's actually, you know, I ended up going to college when I was young compared to other people. I was 16 when I got there. You tend to be a bit more impressionable when you're younger. I always felt after spending a couple of years at George Mason is that. You can try to understand how the world works. And it's not a fool's errand in any way.

• 29:21Mario Gabriele?

  What was it like going to to college that young? You know, when I've spoken to other people who, you know, maybe even go when they're even younger than that in some senses. It can be a very isolating experience.

• 29:32Speaker 00

  Going to college at like 16 or 17 is not that abnormal in India. I want to preface that too. I don't think I thought anything of it.

• 29:40Mario Gabriele?

  Really? Yeah, you you were able to fit in and it didn't feel like, hey, I'm, you know, not getting to invited to the parties or whatever.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  I think it's fine.

• 29:46Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it was fine. You know, I played a lot of sports and yeah, I don't think I thought of it much. Uh, if anything, I probably thought it was an advantage.

• 29:55Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 29:55Speaker 00

  Being young.

• 29:57Mario Gabriele?

  Uh, what was your sport?

• 29:58Speaker 00

  Basketball.

• 29:58Mario Gabriele?

  Okay.

• 29:59Speaker 00

  Always basketball.

• 30:00Mario Gabriele?

  When did you and Sunil start to converge on the idea for your first business? Which sort of is a a prologue to to Meter in some respects. Like, how did that sort of seed itself as an idea even? Because it's not a natural interest, I would imagine.

• 30:15Speaker 00

  I think with us, you know, I I've been trying to untangle this now, especially as our current business is growing. On how Sunil and I think about things and then how to actually dissipate that information. And I don't know if this is true with other siblings, but uh, there's no grand overture between us. Uh, we're sort of discussing things, discussing things, discussing things. And it just feels natural to go do something, but it's never like a proclamation that from this day forward, we shall do this. It wasn't like that for us at all. And that's true of Meter, that's true of before, that's true of making film, that's true of anything. I think it's just a very natural progression of our discussions where there's some quote, right answer.

• 30:56Mario Gabriele?

  Just sort of bit by bit progresses and you're it's sort of it's obvious.

• 31:00Speaker 00

  You know, until until he got he got married um, a few years ago. We also live together.

• 31:07Mario Gabriele?

  He wouldn't let you stay with him once he got married?

• 31:08Speaker 00

  That's tough. I mean, they would have preferred it, I think. For them, I think I'm like their first kid. I don't know of many other people, other than prisoners of shared cell, that have spent more time together than me and him.

• 31:21Mario Gabriele?

  You're in for a life sentence.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's just, it's hard to describe when you have that tight of a connection with someone.

• 31:28Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, everything is probably just at such high fidelity, the conversation, right? There's like, you know, even a gesture might carry a lot of understanding to it.

• 31:37Speaker 00

  It does. I could look at him a certain way and have an entire conversation.

• 31:41Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah. I mean, also, given the age gap between you, it's almost, I imagine, in many ways, more like a twin relationship.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, a lot of same friends. Then it turned out we had the same interests. Then it turned out we had the same values, though I think I just copied most of what he's done in life and called it my own. So then it's just like, you know, you don't really have a different path we're trying to go. Very similar.

• 32:05Mario Gabriele?

  You described him earlier as one of the smartest people in the world, which I think is like both really lovely, but also a big statement. What makes him so, so intelligent? What makes him so special?

• 32:16Speaker 00

  I have yet to understand how he learns things so fast. I'm fairly convinced I can put any new thing in front of him. Very few people can learn it faster than he can, and I can be in anything.

• 32:28Mario Gabriele?

  What do you disagree about most with him? Are there certain?

• 32:31Speaker 00

  Just priorities.

• 32:33Mario Gabriele?

  Priorities.

• 32:34Speaker 00

  Not the long term we're trying to do. I think we also agree on what's important. We probably sometimes disagree on what's urgent. So if you look at this Eisenhower matrix of what's important, what's urgent, we're probably, you know, 99% same on what's important, but maybe only 90% same on what's urgent. So if any disagreements we have is just which part of it is urgent? And especially in a business like ours, where if you're talking about a vertically integrated business. Where you have urgency has a lot of bearing because that's where focus goes, that's where capital goes, that's where resources go. Yep. That's where attention goes.

• 33:13Speaker 00

  So if any disagreements is always just on which part of it requires the urgency at this moment. But we've never had disagreement in what's important and what we're trying to do long term.

• 33:25Speaker 02

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• 34:04Mario Gabriele?

  Your first business, it's interesting in many respects. It sounds like it was, had some sort of shared DNA with Meter, but it hasn't been something that is widely covered. What was that business? What were the sort of parallels?

• 34:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, not many parallels, I think.

• 34:19Mario Gabriele?

  Oh, interesting. Okay.

• 34:20Speaker 00

  I think there's also this overfitting of businesses. I actually don't think you can learn from every business for your business.

• 34:27Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 34:27Speaker 00

  I think people would like to.

• 34:28Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  Because it's a good story to tell and a good way to feel good.

• 34:31Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 34:32Speaker 00

  But I think there's only a few businesses you can learn from for your business. But Northern Virginia, especially Fairfax County and Loudoun County where we grew up, something like a 40 or 45% of every household has at least one income from the government. So it's sort of like a company town for the US government.

• 34:51Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 34:52Speaker 00

  So what we were doing wasn't anything gargantuanly impressive in any way at all. We were just answering RFPs for the government. And it was just for first the local, then county, then state, then federal. It was just a very normal, I wouldn't even call it in traditional parlance, a startup. As foolish as it sounds, it was just a business making money.

• 35:13Mario Gabriele?

  It was just a, yeah, so, so boring. Okay, interesting. You, I, I actually, I mean, I fully agree with that idea that you can overfit these things. And, uh, you know, every business is, is truly unique in some respect, right? Um, what are the ones that, you know, if there are only a few businesses you can learn from?

• 35:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:31Mario Gabriele?

  What are the few that you try and learn from for meter?

• 35:34Speaker 00

  I think that there's some characteristics of things. And that depends on which part of the business you're trying to learn from. For example, um, if you look at something like sales, maybe you actually want to learn from a business where the product wasn't that good and they still were phenomenal at selling. So there's some kernel of sales that they've understood it to be. Uh, maybe when you're looking at something like hardware, you, you want to learn from businesses that were capital constrained, yet produced incredible hardware.

• 36:07Speaker 00

  To understand how they did the supply chain, how the management, how they did actually production and mass production.

• 36:14Speaker 00

  And then in complex coordination, uh, which is what we have to do. Um, I, I think the old, uh, industrial America, Ford and all of those, uh, are actually great precursors. And I think there are also types of businesses nobody starts today. Nobody wants to take complex disparate systems and make them into one company. Those sort of companies really don't get built anymore. So I think it also depends on like the problem you're trying to learn about and what solution you're trying to come across. And I think every one of them, maybe if I try to articulate every part of our business, there are some, you know, characteristics I look for when I look for businesses to go

• 36:56Speaker 00

  learn from, but, uh, usually ends up being a, a non axiom answer. Uh, I, I think, um, Almost everything that's assumed as like a common knowledge, or that's the way things are done, it's likely wrong.

• 37:16Mario Gabriele?

  Yep, I think that's a good heuristic to have with all, in general. Have you spent a bunch of time like studying Ford or I don't know Toyota I know is a big inspiration for Elon from those I've spoken to. Maybe I'm, yeah, taking, I'm taking a bit of a shot here in that respect, but curious what you maybe have tried to take from them.

• 37:36Speaker 00

  I think complex coordination. Whereas if you look at Ford, you wouldn't really say the body of the car was that different than other car companies at that time, the tires, the steering wheel, et cetera. Being able to take that entire supply chain and then figure out how to do the assembly line and actually produce and coordinate, you know, these 20, 30, 40, 50, 100 different things into one thing that a customer cares about.

• 38:05Mario Gabriele?

  Yep.

• 38:06Speaker 00

  I think it's remarkable to be able to do that. They probably didn't call it vertical integration back then because it wasn't cool enough to call it that.

• 38:13Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 38:14Speaker 00

  But I think it's like a true form for some of these businesses.

• 38:18Mario Gabriele?

  I think it must be in, maybe it's in Paki's piece, speaking of virtual integration, or perhaps it's in the Ashley Vance profile of Meter. But the sort of founding story is that, you know, you, you sell your, your company, your first company, and then you spend a bunch of time in Shenzhen studying all, all different pockets, including Japanese vending machine logistics and all these things. I'm so interested in the Japanese vending machine logistics piece of this. Why was that a fascination?

• 38:47Speaker 00

  So part of what we do with our business today is historically how networking happens is you go to one of these legacy vendors and you say, I'd like to buy hardware. And they sell you hardware. And they're trying to make hardware every year with ever so imperceptible changes. So they can sell you hardware every year.

• 39:06Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  Because that's their business. Our business model is entirely different. We don't sell hardware. We take on all the risk for the hardware instead of our customers. And we install our hardware for customers and it's our responsibility to maintain it. But also, one of the, you know, sort of responsibilities and agreements we have with our customers is that as we build new hardware, we will upgrade all of them to the latest and greatest hardware. And we sort of looked at the logical extrapolation of that, which is as Meter becomes more successful, every time we build new hardware, the task is a bigger task.

• 39:45Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 39:46Speaker 00

  To upgrade all of our customers.

• 39:47Mario Gabriele?

  Yes. So that's like something I was fascinated by your model. Okay. So I'm glad we're getting into it. Yeah.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  So then we started looking at are there other parallels in the world that are very similar? And vending machines are like that. Because you have to figure out this complex coordination where you have product or inventory with you. But the only way you can continue to get paid is if you go to every physical site and refresh the inventory to be able to continue your business. And so we started looking at vending machines a lot and how that's happened. And have you been to Japan?

• 40:23Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, just once.

• 40:25Speaker 00

  Okay. So if you've been to Japan, you know, somehow vending machines are just perfect.

• 40:28Mario Gabriele?

  Yes, they really are.

• 40:29Speaker 00

  So that's why we started looking into how companies in Japan maintain this incredible supply chain and keep the inventory up of all the vending machines everywhere. You know, you sort of are walking somewhere in a random street and there's a small vending machine. Even that's perfect.

• 40:52Mario Gabriele?

  So how is that possible? Wow, that was such a deeper answer than I anticipated. I thought this would be, oh, I don't know, we found it so interesting. So you had even at a very early stage, that model in your mind.

• 41:03Speaker 00

  Almost nothing about what we want to do meter has changed since we started it.

• 41:06Mario Gabriele?

  Wow, that's so interesting to me. I would have assumed that was much, much later down the line. Huh. What one thing that seems like it did change was in, you know, as the story goes, you, you spent sort of a year working on, you know, the V zero story of meter. And then had this encounter at first round review. You, you have to remind me of where you have, you met this networking person who basically told you, hey, everything you've been working on, we're about to, you know, release. Maybe you can remind me of that anecdote because I think it's such an interesting.

• 41:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, nothing to do with the startup world. I actually don't think Silicon Valley knows anything about networking anymore. So it's a whole separate topic.

• 41:41Mario Gabriele?

  Oh, interesting.

• 41:42Speaker 00

  So this was some meetup down in Santa Clara.

• 41:44Mario Gabriele?

  Ah.

• 41:44Speaker 00

  Uh, that I think Intel and a bunch of people were having.

• 41:47Mario Gabriele?

  Okay.

• 41:48Speaker 00

  We had spent a year sort of writing a type of operating system. And for the operating system nerds out there, we were trying to use unicolumns to write every part of the network on top of a hypervisor. Anyway, it was as bad as it sounds. We were writing this operating system. It was going okay. It wasn't going poorly. It would crash a lot. It didn't work as well as we wanted it to work. And that was about a year, year and a half of our work. We randomly went to this meetup down in, in South Bay in Santa Clara in the Bay area. And um, some guy was writing this open source project that was part of Intel. And they had hundreds of people working on this, on how to do this one part that was the unlock.

• 42:30Mario Gabriele?

  Ha.

• 42:31Speaker 00

  Better than how Sunny and I were thinking about it. Uh, and it was one of the most painful times of our lives because we, uh, literally scraped everything we did for about 18 months.

• 42:39Mario Gabriele?

  Oh my gosh. Uh, I think there must be many founders who experienced some version of that.

• 42:47Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 42:47Mario Gabriele?

  Maybe it wasn't 18 months, maybe it was three months. Looking back at that moment, like, ha, did you feel the urge to quit? Were you, did it feel?

• 42:56Speaker 00

  That I've never had. I just, I don't know that feeling at all. I don't know what that means.

• 43:02Mario Gabriele?

  Come on.

• 43:03Speaker 00

  I honestly never ever felt that.

• 43:05Mario Gabriele?

  You've never felt like this isn't worth it or this I should do something else?

• 43:09Speaker 00

  No, I studied this for so long before deciding to start it.

• 43:13Mario Gabriele?

  It was like, whatever happens, this is the thing.

• 43:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is what we wanted to do. Like, why would I not have the courage of my own convictions? I didn't understand. I don't understand that ever.

• 43:22Mario Gabriele?

  Isn't there such a thing as you might find information that you didn't discover?

• 43:26Speaker 00

  Not, not, not when you start a company that you at the outset want to do it for decades. We had spent years prior to starting Meter, to deciding to start Meter. And it was years worth of these conversations between Sunil and I. And in our minds, it was always crystal clear. That's why the pricing's never changed. What we build's never changed. How we want to do the vertical integrator's never changed. How we want to deliveries never changed. The business model's never changed. That arc has been very, very true. But nonetheless, it was very painful at that time. Incredibly painful at that time.

• 44:06Mario Gabriele?

  But it's really interesting because I think that says something about the way that you and Sunil clearly build, right? Like, you almost de-risked it in your, in your minds through conversation and research over a huge time before deciding, okay, this is actually worth our time.

• 44:21Speaker 00

  And the whole de-risking was just between the two of us. I don't think we ever even really like looked for permission from others.

• 44:29Mario Gabriele?

  That's also very interesting because clearly some part of your brain maybe realized, I don't know, if we open this to other people, it's going to be more noise than signal.

• 44:38Speaker 00

  I don't know, possibly. We did try to ask people at some of these legacy companies, like, why aren't you doing this? Because I think in, at the outset, when you have an idea about something, even before you realize you want to do it, maybe one of the first things you end up feeling is you just want it to exist. So I remember having conversations with folks at these legacy companies saying like, why aren't you guys doing this, et cetera, et cetera? But I think once we probably heard that they had no interest and then our convictions started growing, I think after that, we, yeah, I, I take it as input for sure. When somebody says something, especially people I respect and people that understand our industry and understand how to build businesses and all that, it's definitely an input.

• 45:22Speaker 00

  But even if somebody were an order man to more intelligent than I am. Let's assume that's true. I have spent two to three orders of magnitude more time

• 45:32Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 45:33Speaker 00

  thinking about it.

• 45:34Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 45:34Speaker 00

  So I don't know if I trust somebody else's opinion.

• 45:37Mario Gabriele?

  I fully ascribe to that. I think we give too much credence to advice from authority figures and many other, you know, such, such characters in our lives.

• 45:50Speaker 00

  I think the irony of that is as you get older and you get to meet your heroes and they become your friends.

• 45:55Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 45:56Speaker 00

  There's nothing behind the veil.

• 45:58Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, you're like, oh, this is just a normal person too, right? What was the, I don't want to say miscalculation because that's not maybe fair, or the view of the world that was slightly off that meant you thought, hey, for the the first 18 months, this is really important for us to do.

• 46:13Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 46:13Mario Gabriele?

  But you, there was some difference in the calibration of the vision versus the world.

• 46:19Speaker 00

  The vision was the right vision, I think, but man, computer science is fickle. I just didn't think we arrived at the right solution for the problem. The problem was right, what we wanted to do, where we should build it, but we just didn't arrive at the right answer. And I am immensely grateful that somebody else did because then it helped us just start.

• 46:39Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, it saved you some time.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:41Mario Gabriele?

  I think you've said maybe in another interview that, you know, you think that companies roughly have a thousand hard days in their life and you just happen to have a thousand at the start because you started, and then COVID really hits. What was, you know, clearly it sounds like you didn't think about quitting because that was out of the question, but what was that experience like?

• 47:03Speaker 00

  It was really brutal.

• 47:04Mario Gabriele?

  Really brutal.

• 47:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think you, you know, you start a company because you want to make progress on something. You want to sort of surround yourself with people that you respect and you enjoy working with and learn from, and you want to make progress as a business. None of that was happening during COVID. It was really hard. And as a matter of focus to your original question, we were only selling to offices when we were a dozen people. That was the place to start because you can go boil the ocean.

• 47:34Mario Gabriele?

  Yep.

• 47:35Speaker 00

  And ironically, we started selling to customers fall of 2019. And by March 1st of 2020, our entire TAM went to zero.

• 47:45Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, tough.

• 47:48Mario Gabriele?

  And that's when you start thinking, how do we serve e-commerce stores and the, I mean, the associated infrastructure.

• 47:54Speaker 00

  We always knew we would do those later on.

• 47:56Mario Gabriele?

  Yep.

• 47:57Speaker 00

  But you know, you, you don't get data from CPI and other things much exposed. So we actually didn't know how much growth was happening. The way we got sucked in is meeting customers that wanted our product and service that were in these other segments. It was always a plan. We would go do all segments. As a matter of focus, we started with offices, but then during COVID, customers came and asked for it. Then we ended up doing it. We were like, okay, but I don't think we knew the data at that point. The e-commerce was going from sort of 12% of the economy to 24%. I don't think we knew that. Maybe implicitly we felt it as consumers ourselves because we're like ordering things online or whatever, like instead of going anywhere. But it was more like customer driven.

• 48:43Mario Gabriele?

  You know, I think these near death moments or existential moments for a company always end up producing some kind of new muscle that gets built.

• 48:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:51Mario Gabriele?

  Clearly that was, you know, also serving different types of customers, but even at a, you know, maybe more fundamental level, what do you think it changed about some part of the nature of meter or the way that the team operates or some, some of that skeleton almost?

• 49:05Speaker 00

  The other thing I was very resistant on in the beginning is I was adamant that we should only sell to customers in the Bay Area in the beginning for a long time because I had it in my mind that we should go visit every customer. We should sort of shake every customer's hand and then grow with them. The other muscle that happened because of this is we started deploying in all sorts of places in the country because e-commerce warehouses, other things were everywhere. In some places COVID was strict and some places wasn't. Some people were going in offices or not, but flying from Bay Area to these other places was still very restrictive. We ended up building this muscle where we could deploy networks anywhere.

• 49:47Speaker 00

  Whereas my original was I was stopping the company from doing anything outside the barrier, just as a matter of focus and other things. And it turns out, you know, my brother and a bunch of colleagues were right, and I was entirely wrong about that.

• 49:59Mario Gabriele?

  You talk a lot about building a company and building hardware with sort of almost the splendor of a cathedral. I think you like that analogy, which I really speaks to me. I love when we try and think of these parts of our world with equivalent reverence and care. What are the parts of the meter product that you think to the right eye, this shows true craft, true beauty, you know, the right amount of splendor?

• 50:28Speaker 00

  To the right eye, I think there's about a dozen things like that at Meter. And that's what keeps the job really fun across hardware, software, operating systems, APIs, how we do deployments, how we handle ISPs, how we take all this data and train models to how we scale the business, what we do in the channel, bunch of these things. Genuinely, it's such a fun job.

• 50:59Mario Gabriele?

  Is there one or two that you think that when you come across them in the product, every time you sort of think, we did this well, or this feels especially good to me?

• 51:08Speaker 00

  I hope none of my colleagues listen.

• 51:11Mario Gabriele?

  Why? Because you would be singling out someone for praise?

• 51:14Speaker 00

  No, no, no. Because I don't think I've ever said some part of Meter is good.

• 51:18Mario Gabriele?

  Ah, okay, just because you got to, we're never finished. The cathedral's never done.

• 51:22Speaker 00

  I just never felt it.

• 51:26Speaker 00

  Because the moment we're done building it, almost all of us know it can be better on every part.

• 51:35Mario Gabriele?

  I see.

• 51:36Speaker 00

  But I think everything from how we do design to how we do our software, to even hardware. We announced a bunch of new hardware in the fall, and there are parts of it that I think are good.

• 51:49Mario Gabriele?

  And that's as much praise as we can.

• 51:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's just not true. Like, it's just, we still have, I think there's a lot we should do. And I know instantly, you know, a couple of hours after even getting off the stage when we announced this hardware.

• 52:05Speaker 00

  Almost all of our hardware team too is like, we'll do it even better.

• 52:08Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 52:09Speaker 00

  But I think that's the whole fun.

• 52:11Mario Gabriele?

  I understand that impulse. I don't think I can, you know, the, the nice thing of when I publish an article is I don't have to reengage with it because if I do, I go back and I think, oh, wow, what was I thinking? This is a nightmare.

• 52:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:22Mario Gabriele?

  And editing a text document's a lot easier than changing hardware. So.

• 52:26Speaker 00

  That is true.

• 52:27Mario Gabriele?

  We, we talked a little bit about this part of meters model, but I think it bears sort of digging into a little bit more, which is, well, you, you talked about the idea that you constantly are refreshing the hardware as you scale it up. But also when you bring in a new customer, you buy out their existing equipment from other manufacturers. How does that make sense? Why is that? How did you come up with that philosophy? Because it's, it seems to go against what one would think is a, a good business practice.

• 52:52Speaker 00

  For sure. I think there's, uh, three types of new things that a business can do to make a footing in the market. And 95% of companies, I think, end up doing the first two, uh, which is you want to come up with something genuinely new, something new technology or new widget, something.

• 53:14Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 53:15Speaker 00

  But if we're talking in tech company parlance, it's building a new technology. That's the predominant way companies we know go to market, right? They're building a new technology and they want to bring that technology to the world. The, the second way to do something new is, uh, changing how you deliver the product. So the best example of this is something like Adobe, right? Adobe started off with literally giving you an entire hard drive.

• 53:43Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 53:43Speaker 00

  Then, um, you know, going to, uh, multiple CDs for you to be able to download the hardware, uh, from your, from the disk to your hard drive. Then they went to where you can just download this. Then instead of just downloading it, it's hosted online.

• 54:02Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 54:03Speaker 00

  And many iterations in the middle too. I skipped a few, but each time delivery changes, you can also have new companies. Whereas if you use again, software as a parlor lance, from, uh, buying something where somebody comes and installs it, to you going to the store and buying it, to you downloading it, to you then using the hosted version.

• 54:27Speaker 00

  Every time there's a new delivery, there's a new company generally as well. When delivery changes. Yes. So those are the two predominant ways companies, especially tech companies, go to market is either they are changing with technology or they're changing with the delivery to differentiate themselves from other offerings. And some companies end up doing both. But there's a third way that Sunil and I thought a lot about along with these two, which is we believe with Meter, we should do new technology. We believe we should do new delivery networking, which is vertically integrating things, which nobody had done before. But it was very important to us. We also go about doing

• 55:11Speaker 00

  a new business model as well. And business model innovation is, I think, heavily underappreciated and underrated because it doesn't feel as tangible, but I think it's possibly just as important as delivery and technology as well. So for us, the business model aspect was very important on every part of that continuum and what we're going to do with the business model. How are we going to charge? How are we going to continuously provide value? Then to your question as well, which is, how are we going to displace existing things to start providing value? So you want to actually

• 55:51Speaker 00

  have answers for all of that continuum too. So then we went and looked at is what is the high-priced item that consumers change very frequently? Do you know the answer to this? Phones? Cars. Cars, yeah. Terrible guess. But cars have a trading mechanism. Hmm. You can literally go take a car. Wow, so interesting. Any car you have. Yeah. To any dealership and say, I'd like to give you this car. Yes. That came from some other vendor that I've been using. Will you please take it and give me a new car? That's fascinating to think about that that's actually a sales motion that's been

• 56:33Speaker 00

  part of things for a long time. So we went and looked at a lot of how where it came from for car dealerships, for cars and why that was happening. And it's sort of this advent of as cars became more reliable. There was less changing of cars because people were like, my car works. Why would I go do this? And that's where trade ins came in in the car industry. And so that that part of the business model was also very important for us to go try and figure out.

• 57:02Mario Gabriele?

  That is so interesting. I would never have made that parallel. Why is the business model innovation so underappreciated in your view? And why is it so important? Like, what does it unlock for you?

• 57:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:16Mario Gabriele?

  That if you had just tried to keep a more traditional model, wouldn't, wouldn't be possible.

• 57:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, man, I think I could go on for like an hour, hour and a half just about this. It's something has to do with like the closest theory of the firm. Which is, do you build or do you buy? And the reasons you should end up building or you should end up buying is where the transaction costs the lowest? Which is is it cheaper to transact internally to build it?

• 57:50Mario Gabriele?

  Yep.

• 57:50Speaker 00

  Or is it cheaper externally to go build it?

• 57:52Mario Gabriele?

  Yep.

• 57:53Speaker 00

  And that's sort of the rough bargain with infrastructure as well, constantly. Which is, should we build it? Or should we buy a product and service that does it for us?

• 58:03Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 58:04Speaker 00

  And this is true of every infrastructure product. From databases to even electricity and power. As companies get larger, they decide if they want to do it or they should have other people do it. Anything, any infrastructure. It's the same question over and over again. Should we build or should we buy? So in general, attacking how products are sold? And what those transaction costs are are very important. So if you look at networking, it's one of the largest industries in all of technology. Along with computing, it's the reason Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley.

• 58:39Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 58:41Speaker 00

  Cisco was sort of the Nvidia of its time. It was the largest company in the world.

• 58:47Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, easy to forget that.

• 58:48Speaker 00

  But most of networking is sold through what's called a channel. So there's resellers and integrators, all of these. And how the legacy companies have done it is when a new company has come in, they incentivize the channel.

• 59:06Speaker 00

  So that it's hard for a new company to take off. So you recognize that from a business model perspective. Then you should also look at sort of this Bezos thing of your margin is my opportunity. Legacy hardware companies want to make hardware for as cheaply as possible. To sell it for as much as possible because the gap is their margin. Yes. So you also want to do something exactly opposite of that. Then, once you have a bunch of these ingredients of how do you think about trade in? How do you think about margin? And how do you think about the opportunity? For us, it was also important is what is it that we're trying to do actually in the world? For example, if you looked at the sky in Manhattan a hundred years ago.

• 59:49Speaker 00

  And let's say you were standing in front of Times Square. And you looked up, you couldn't even see the sky because there were wires everywhere. What was happening mostly is if somebody wanted a telephone line, they would call up Ma Bell or something like that. And they would literally pull a telephone line to you. And then if you wanted electricity, you asked the power company and they would literally pull a line to you. That's why it was just wires everywhere. And roughly two to three decades into those technologies where there were a bunch of parallels between those two, people realized, why would I go into a building without a telephone and electricity in there by default? That's how utilities got started.

• 1:00:31Speaker 00

  And then if you look at a building today, it has electricity, it has water, it has telephone lines, et cetera, et cetera. And there's power meters, water meters. That's why we're even called meter. Because we're trying to build this thing into a utility. And we're roughly two to three decades into people using the internet. So there's a lot of, you know, sort of narrative parallels too. So for us, it was also important to work backwards from what is it that we're trying to do? We want to build a utility. We believe the internet is one of the greatest forces of good ever made. And we want that to be part of every single building. From a small location, that's like a retail location of a thousand square feet, all the way to a large data center. It should be like a utility.

• 1:01:16Speaker 00

  So then we felt the business model should reflect that too. Which is how weird would it be if the power company said every time you moved in, you owe me a million dollars to putting in a transformer?

• 1:01:25Mario Gabriele?

  I feel like that was a really fascinating history lesson and a really, really interesting insight into how you think about this. Looking at the future and this world where networking is more of a utility. You've talked about the, the goal of having fully autonomous networks in a couple of years. What does, what does that mean? What does that look like to you?

• 1:01:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I think one of the great things about Silicon Valley is that we can be myopic. And all the resources and capital can go into one thing. I think that's also downside of Silicon Valley sometimes, as we tend to be a bit myopic. Today, so much time, energy and capital is going into augmenting software engineers. And I think you and I could name hundreds of companies trying to do this. After software engineers, the second highest number of jobs in technology is network engineers. But something like 30% of all network engineers are retiring by the end of this decade with our replacement. And I'm not talking about net new ones we need because the number of data devices, applications is growing.

• 1:02:29Speaker 00

  I'm just talking about replacement rate. So if we imagine everything we're doing in technology to continue on this sort of S curve, or wherever we are on that S curve, at some point is just an exponential. The core things that are needed are compute and networking. There's no scenario in which the number of data devices and applications in the world goes down.

• 1:02:55Mario Gabriele?

  Agreed.

• 1:02:56Speaker 00

  Nor is there any scenario in which the rate of growth slows down either. One of the core bets we've had with Meter is that we all will use it on it more than we currently do. So if you put a bunch of these things together, which is computing is really important. Networking is really important. The growth will continue.

• 1:03:16Speaker 00

  Nobody else is studying this at all. And everything in the world is packets. Autonomous Networks is like the only way to solve this.

• 1:03:26Mario Gabriele?

  As we sort of reach the last few minutes here, I want to spend a little bit of time briefly talking about, you know, a little bit of how you run the company, into your mind as a founder. One, one piece of that that I think about is you seem to be an incredible talent spotter in like a very diverse range of fields, to the extent that you also helped, you know, Duarkesh Patel sort of get off the ground a bit as a, as a podcaster. But there are many examples of people who you seem to find early in their career and bet on them in some capacity or bring them into your network in some sense. When you think about doing that at the company level, what is it that you're, you're looking for?

• 1:04:08Mario Gabriele?

  Are there signals that you've learned to sort of hone in on that other people maybe ignore or certain profiles that you end up gravitating towards because of this mission?

• 1:04:18Speaker 00

  Some things that I've learned that seem true in my head, especially in the last couple of years is I don't think we as a business are able to change people. If we are, we should be in that business because that's way more valuable in the world than almost anything if you can change people. So fundamentally, I think people that care about their work have made a choice that their work is one of the most important things in their lives. And it's okay for other people to not believe that to be true.

• 1:04:50Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:51Speaker 00

  And somehow have figured out what they want to do in a way that's true to them. That's usually what I'm trying to look for is I'm actually trying to understand is like, why is this person doing what they're doing? And do they care about what they're doing?

• 1:05:07Mario Gabriele?

  I mean, that feels like a sneakily deep piece of that. I suspect there's a lot that goes into figuring that out with.

• 1:05:15Speaker 00

  It's hard.

• 1:05:16Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah. Fidelity.

• 1:05:18Speaker 00

  Interviewing rarely works.

• 1:05:19Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:20Speaker 00

  I think the question is if you could spend 20 hours asking about someone versus 20 hours talking to someone, which should you choose? And the fact that we don't have a clear answer to that. Interviewing is okay. You know, I could be tired. I could be hungry. My daughter could have been up late last night.

• 1:05:42Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:44Speaker 00

  It's just impossible.

• 1:05:46Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:46Speaker 00

  So I, you know, interviewing is one of the hardest things.

• 1:05:50Mario Gabriele?

  There was some study that suggested that actually the most effective interviewing technique is like actually the most boring ones. Like, don't try and come up with these sort of convoluted.

• 1:06:00Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:06:01Mario Gabriele?

  Experiments because you need something that's just as replicable as possible and consistent as possible.

• 1:06:06Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:06:06Mario Gabriele?

  Which is really disappointing disappointing in a way because you want to think there's a magic question that can unlock someone.

• 1:06:11Speaker 00

  I wish. I haven't found it.

• 1:06:13Mario Gabriele?

  Yes. Yeah. Well, we started with one of your blog posts and maybe as we wrap up. I really loved this post of things we don't understand that you keep a list of. And, you know, you have things like how planes fly and what is happening inside of fire.

• 1:06:34Mario Gabriele?

  Which of the five or so on that list annoys you the most that you don't have an answer to?

• 1:06:40Speaker 00

  I think sleep.

• 1:06:41Mario Gabriele?

  Sleep. Remind me which one is.

• 1:06:44Speaker 00

  Why humans need sleep.

• 1:06:45Mario Gabriele?

  Why we need sleep.

• 1:06:46Speaker 00

  It's a third of our day.

• 1:06:49Mario Gabriele?

  I can, I can imagine why that one frustrates you.

• 1:06:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think it'd be so cool to think about as all these great things happen in, in science and in technology and other things. At least we first, you know, sort of unravel of why is it that we need sleep? But it's clearly natural that we need sleep. But what is it? What's happening? Where is that coming from?

• 1:07:14Mario Gabriele?

  And clearly we're doing important processing during it.

• 1:07:17Speaker 00

  Hundred percent. It's clearly important.

• 1:07:19Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 1:07:21Speaker 00

  But I'd like to, maybe, I know a lot of people are working on this. I've talked to a bunch of people that are trying to figure this out.

• 1:07:28Mario Gabriele?

  Well, final sort of wrap up questions that I like to end podcasts with. If you had unlimited resources and no operational constraints, what is an experiment you would like to run?

• 1:07:39Speaker 00

  How draconian can I be?

• 1:07:40Mario Gabriele?

  Oh, as draconian, you're like, no one will be harmed in the thought experiment. So, you know, be brutal if you'd wish.

• 1:07:46Speaker 00

  I think it would be interesting not to have school.

• 1:07:51Speaker 00

  The first 15 years of your life.

• 1:07:54Mario Gabriele?

  Oh, that's, this is a really good answer. I like this answer. Okay, why?

• 1:07:58Speaker 00

  I'm not sure if education works.

• 1:08:01Mario Gabriele?

  You think it's deleterious in some sense?

• 1:08:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:04Mario Gabriele?

  You wouldn't want to teach literally nothing?

• 1:08:07Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 1:08:07Mario Gabriele?

  Hmm.

• 1:08:08Speaker 00

  But I'd like to at least start with that question.

• 1:08:10Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:10Speaker 00

  Which is, should there be organized school the first 15 years? I don't know the mechanics of it yet, and I've thought about, written about it a little bit on how I would sort of go about it. But I generally can't seem to understand how every place in the world has roughly come to the same answer about early childhood education.

• 1:08:34Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 1:08:35Speaker 00

  That seems crazy to me.

• 1:08:37Mario Gabriele?

  That does seem a bit crazy. I mean, in a way, this is maybe stretching a bit, but sort of the Waldorf system of schooling is maybe the closest we have to that of. And I have to say, there are a lot of great people who seem to come out of the Waldorf system, so there's something to it.

• 1:08:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, but it'd be, it'd be interesting to see if, you know, first 15 years of your life, you don't go to organized school.

• 1:08:59Mario Gabriele?

  I like that. This is, this is a good one. Final question, if you could give a book to everyone on earth to read and know that they'd understand it, is there a book you'd want to give to people?

• 1:09:09Speaker 00

  It would almost certainly have to be a meta book. So the impacts of it are far downstream on second order and third order. And I also want it to be a book that's easily repeatable between people, so it becomes sort of memetic in some ways. So I guess it can't be, quote, like, complicated in any way.

• 1:09:30Mario Gabriele?

  But you, in this scenario, you know people will understand it, so.

• 1:09:33Speaker 00

  Find that hard to believe.

• 1:09:35Mario Gabriele?

  That is fair.

• 1:09:37Speaker 00

  Maybe I'm like prisoner of the current, last couple of years. But I think James Carr's Find Out Infinite Games comes to mind.

• 1:09:46Mario Gabriele?

  A great choice. I love that book.

• 1:09:48Speaker 00

  I think if we all end up playing infinite games, that'd be interesting to see. And if everybody deeply understood what infinite games were.

• 1:09:53Mario Gabriele?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:09:54Speaker 00

  And that's the way the world operated, it'd be interesting to see across like science, politics, technology, education, other things. What are the results of playing infinite games?

• 1:10:07Mario Gabriele?

  I think that's the perfect place to end.

• 1:10:08Speaker 00

  Cool. Thank you.

• 1:10:09Mario Gabriele?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:10:10Speaker 00

  Thanks for doing this.

• 1:10:11Mario Gabriele?

  That's it. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Generalist Podcast. Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast app.

• 1:10:21Mario Gabriele?

  Ratings and reviews help others discover these discussions, so if you enjoyed the conversation, I'd be grateful if you could take a moment to leave one. For all past episodes and more, visit us at thegeneralist.substack.com. See you next time as we continue to explore the future.