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

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 floor plans and somehow magically networks appear anywhere in the world. If you had unlimited resources and no operational constraints, what is an experiment you would like to 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.

Yes.

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 without replacement.

Yes.

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

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 Meteor, a full-stack networking company that's raised more than $350 million to go head-to-head with giants like Cisco.

In time, Meteor 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.

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Anil, you have one of my favorite personal websites that I've seen. Uh, 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?

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 Mac 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 decade, decade and a half ago at this point. I ended up going to George Mason and studying 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. And I think it's possible actually, Cowen had it in his book on stagnation as well.

Yes, very possible.

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, in 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.

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?

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 ago 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, 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 sort of is 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 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.

Yes.

Yeah. Then Cowen had actually written this really great essay that I don't know if traditionally people would call Closer to the Burden of Knowledge called The End of Asymmetric Information. Hmm.

I don't think I've read that.

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. Yes. 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, um, I think, you know, it's just like a topic that's interesting to think about.

Yeah, definitely. Uh, you know, one of the things that I think about with the burden of knowledge and the nature of, 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, in a day and a half if you really focus on it. And that sort of a child's mind is, is difficult to, to square entirely with like that, that need for such deep preparation. When you, when you think about, you know, 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, when you're in the zone of innovation? Because that feels like such a necessary ingredient.

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 things. By the time you think you've gotten good at something, something else has changed in 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.

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

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. So 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? To the tune 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.

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, you know, more of a focus or a bigger piece of how you think of it? Or is that always sort of, you know, maybe my conception of where the business sort of centers is off?

Yeah, you're off.

I'm off. Okay.

There you go. Easy.

So manufacturing's always been really, really at the heart of it.

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. Offices are about 15% of physical spaces. Yep. So you should roughly have a mental model. That's what percentage is of our business. Mm-hmm.

Well, now I have my first mistake out of the way, so, you know, I can only, you know, 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 origins.

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

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

I know what you read and who you talked to, but I think so much of life is sort of luck. There's this great interview that Altman did with Cowen about 8 or 9 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 in 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 to his brain.

Doesn't he try and offload to you though? How does that—

No, no, no.

Doesn't work like that?

It doesn't work that way. My API is closed. Okay. But yeah, like we We moved to the United States when I was 12, he was 14. And especially in the early 2000s when we moved here, it was such an amazing time in America. And I still think it is. As an immigrant, I think always you end up loving the country you moved 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. 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, I realize how unique that is. But I think when you're a kid, you're just like trying to live your life.

What my question really reveals as a preference is that I've had my first kid in the past year and a half. How old? 16 months.

Okay, I have a 2-year-old.

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 children?

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

Yes.

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

Yeah, I know. This is the only sort of thing that seems to matter a tiny bit is having dinner at the same— that's right, at the same time or something. It's something incredibly trivial, right?

Other than that, parenting really doesn't matter that much. Yeah. 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 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. So even with this stuff, even as a parent now, I'm still not convinced parenting matters.

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, what am I doing here? Could I really let myself off the hook that much?

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

Yes.

That's the scary part.

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

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, to 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.

Yes.

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. Yeah.

Kids can adapt, right?

I think kids are kids.

Yeah.

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

Yes.

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

Yeah, 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?

Yeah.

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?

100%. That part I'm still curious about learning. Because I think if your parents were astronauts, you probably think that's a normal job.

Yes.

And like, you know, sort of just totally agree. 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.

Yeah.

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.

Yes.

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

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

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

This guy. Yeah.

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 or 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.

Yes.

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

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

That's a big part of it.

Yeah, unique way. Yeah. Uh, yeah. Something more too, I imagine.

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

In Hyderabad?

Yeah, in South India.

Wow. No way.

Yeah.

No kidding.

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

I was thinking not in North Virginia.

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

Fascinating.

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.

—where you have this sort of pipeline of Bollywood to politics?

Yeah, film to politics throughout India. Wow. Especially South India. No kidding. 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 on 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.

This is purely because I really want to ask about it. What is sort of the films that 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.

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

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.

His mind is just incredible. There's video I'll send you. You can put it in the show notes or something. Yeah. 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. Wow. I think his stuff, really good. Obviously, like, Sachin Guitray, 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 Nayakan. So a bunch of these movies had a heavy influence on us.

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 trying to create or what were you creating?

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. That's a good disease. Yeah. So I think like we were trying to really like compete with anyone. You're like, oh, let's make the best film in the world. Yeah. Yeah. I think we're pretty unreasonable about that. Um, I love that. I don't think we succeeded at all, to be clear. Uh, all the stuff we made, I hope nobody except me and him sees ever.

Have you rewatched it anytime recently? Accidentally.

Accidentally? Yeah. When going through some old hard drive or some, uh, you know, sort of Glacier S3 thing you have and you're sifting through files to try to find something. Yes. And then it's like one of those things where you try not to remember that you ever made it or were part of.

Yeah, I don't need to see this. Yeah. Why did you not end up becoming a director, producer, uh, you know, a filmmaker in some capacity, given the clear love you have for it?

It was something we'd consider seriously. Yeah. Very, very seriously. We sort of came to this conclusion that the, uh, the stories we wanted to tell, we could do it when we were 80 or 90 too, 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 5 to 9 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, that if we didn't do what we're doing with Meteor, then we didn't think it was possible to do it 20 years from then, 30 years from then. So it was this real bargain of, you know, which path do you go on?

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?

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

Yes, that's true. So maybe it'll happen, uh, maybe, maybe it'll happen in, in 20 years or something. Yeah. 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?

There's been some good books about this, um, about so much of building a company is a lot like assembling a great, um, 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 changed my mind on a little bit as I've gotten older is I think everything is hard. Yeah. And sort of No matter what you do, it's like that.

Yeah, that's my philosophy. Would be my thinking too. Like, if you want to do the best film of all time, maybe you can do it in 3 years, but also maybe it takes you your whole life, right?

Sure. But I think building anything. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you know, this microphone company, I'm sure there's people there obsessed for a long time. Yes. 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 know if it's unique to company building and unique to filmmaking.

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

Yeah, my brother was. 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. Okay, interesting.

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

I think it was just like an amazing time in the late 2000s, early 2000s where, you know, you just try to build different projects and maybe some of that's coming back now with all the changes in models, etc., where everybody I knew was building stuff. So I don't know if it was like unique to anything to us. I think we're 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.

You went to college at sort of your local school, George Mason University, which was nearby, but also feels like in some sense, probably spiritually the best possible school 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? 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 Cowen 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 100% George Mason. Yes. In so many ways. 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.

What was it like going 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.

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.

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

I think it's fine. Yeah. 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. If anything, I probably thought it was an advantage. Yeah. Being young. What was your sport? Basketball.

Okay. Always basketball. When did you and Sunil start to converge on the idea for your first business, which sort of is a prologue 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.

I think with us, you know, I've been trying to untangle this now, especially as our current business is growing on how Sinan 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 there's no grand overture between us. 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 Meteor, that's true 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. Just sort of bit by bit progresses and you're, it's sort of, it's obvious. You know, until he got married a few years ago, we also lived together.

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

That was 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 that have shared a cell that have spent more time together than me and him.

You're in for a life sentence, if that sounds right. Yeah.

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

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. Yeah.

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

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

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 you're trying to go. Mm-hmm. Very similar.

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? 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 that can be in anything.

What do you disagree about most with him? Are there certain, you know, he's just—

priorities. Priorities. Not the long-term, what 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 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. Yeah, that's where attention goes. So if any disagreements is always just on which part of it requires the urgency at this moment. But we've never had disagreement on what's important and what we're trying to do long term.

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

Oh, interesting. Okay. I think there's also this overfitting of businesses. I actually don't think you can learn from every business for your business. Yeah, I think people would like to. Yes, because it's a good story to tell and good way to like feel good. Yeah. 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 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. 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.

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

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, 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 this is some kernel of sales that they've understood it to be. Maybe when you're looking at something like hardware, you want to learn from businesses that were capital constrained yet produced incredible hardware to understand how they did the supply chain, how did management, how they actually production and mass production. and then in complex coordination, which is what we have to do. I think the old industrial America, Ford and all of those, are actually great precursors. And I think they're 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 learn from, but usually ends up being a non-axiom answer. I think almost everything that's assumed as like common knowledge or that's the way things are done, it's likely wrong. Yep.

I think that's a good heuristic to have with, 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, 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.

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. Yeah. 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. Yes. But I think it's like a true form for some of these businesses. 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, of, of Meteor. 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?

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. Yes. 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 Meteor becomes more successful, every time we build new hardware, The task is a bigger task. Yes. To upgrade all of our customers. Yes.

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

Yeah. So, so, 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? Yeah, just once. Okay. So if you've been to Japan, you know, somehow vending machines are just perfect. Yes, they really are. 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 and a random street and there's a small vending machine, even that's perfect. 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.

Almost nothing about what we want to do with Meteor has changed since we started it. Wow. That's so interesting to me.

I would have assumed that was much, much later down the line. Huh. 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 v0 story of Meteor 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, yeah, you know, release. Maybe you can remind me of that anecdote because I think it's such an interesting—

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. Oh, interesting. So this was some meetup down in Santa Clara. Ah, I think Intel and a bunch of people were having. Okay. We had spent a year sort of writing a type of operating system. And for the operating system nerds out there, we we're trying to use unikernels 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 South Bay in Santa Clara in the Bay Area. And 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 better than how Sunil and I were thinking about it. And it was one of the most painful times of our lives because we literally scraped everything we did for about 18 months. Oh my gosh.

I think there must be many founders who experienced some version of that. Sure. Maybe it wasn't 18 months, maybe it was 3 months. Looking back at that moment like, ha, Did you feel the urge to quit? Were you— did it feel that?

I've never had. I just— I don't know that feeling at all. I don't know what that means. Come on. I honestly never, ever felt that.

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

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

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

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

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 never changed. How we want to do the vertical integrators never changed. How we want to do deliveries never changed. The business model never changed. That arc has been very, very true. But nonetheless, it was very painful at that time.

Incredibly painful at that time. 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 is really worth our time.

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.

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.

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 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 conviction started growing, I think after that we, yeah, 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. But even if somebody were an order of magnitude more intelligent than I am, let's assume that's true. I have spent 2 to 3 orders of magnitude more time. Yes. Thinking about it. Yeah. So I don't know if I trust somebody else's opinion.

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.

I think the irony of that is as you get older and you get to meet your heroes and they become your friends. Yeah. There's nothing behind the veil.

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. Sure. You— there was some difference in the calibration of the vision versus the world.

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.

Yeah, it saved you some time. Yeah. I think you've said maybe in another interview that, you know, you think that companies roughly have 1,000 hard days in their life and you just happen to have 1,000 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?

It was really brutal. Really brutal. Yeah. I think, 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. Yep. And Ironically, we started selling to customers fall of 2019, and by March 1st, 2020, our entire TAM went to zero. Yeah, tough.

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

We always knew we would do those later on. Yep. But you know, you don't get data from CPI and other things much ex post. 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 was like, okay, but I don't think we knew the data at that point. Yes. That 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, consumers ourselves, because we're like ordering things online. Yeah, of course. Or whatever, like instead of going anywhere. Uh, but it was more like customer driven.

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. Yeah. Uh, 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 Meteor or the way that the team operates or some, some of that skeleton almost.

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

You talk a lot about building a company and building hardware with sort of almost the splendor of a cathedral. I think you, you like that analogy, which I really speaks to me. I love, uh, when we try and think of these parts of our world with, uh, 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, you know, the right amount of splendor.

To the right eye, I think there's about a dozen things like that at Meteor. 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 such a fun job.

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

I hope none of my colleagues listen. Why?

Because you would be singling out someone for praise?

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

Ah, okay. Just because you got to— we're never finished.

The cathedral's never done. No, no, I just never felt it. Hmm. Hmm. Because the moment we're done building it, almost all of us know it can be better on every part. I see. 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.

And that's as much praise as we can do.

No, 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 hours after even getting off the stage when we announced this hardware, almost all of our hardware team too is like, we'll do it even better. Yeah. Uh, but I, I think that's the whole fun.

I, 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, why, what was I thinking? This is a nightmare. Yeah. Um, and editing a text document's a lot easier than changing hardware. So that is true. 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 good business practice.

For sure. I think there's 3 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 2. Which is you want to come up with something genuinely new, something new technology or new widget, something. Yeah. 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. They want to bring that technology to the world. The second way to do something new is 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. Yes. Then, you know, going to multiple CDs for you to be able to download the hardware 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. Yeah. 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 parlance from 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, 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 Meteor 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 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 on 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 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. Gas. 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 part of things for a long time. So we went and looked a lot of how, where it came from for car dealerships, for cars, and why that was happening. And it was 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 part of the business model was also very important for us to go try and figure out.

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

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 Coase 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 are the transaction costs the lowest? Which is, is it cheaper to transact internally to build it?

Yeah.

Or is it cheaper externally to go build it? Yep. 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? Yes. 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 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. Yes. Cisco was sort of the NVIDIA of its time. It was the largest company in the world.

Hmm. Yeah. Easy to forget that.

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 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 100 years ago, 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 2 to 3 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, electricity in there by default? So that's how utilities got started. 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 2 to 3 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 1,[redacted address] to a large data center. It should be like a utility. So then we felt the business model should reflect that too. Just how weird would it be if the power company said every time you moved in, you owe me $1 million to putting in a transformer?

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 years. What does, what does that mean? What does that look like to you?

Yeah, 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 a downside of Silicon Valley sometimes, is 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 without replacement. Now, I'm not talking about net new ones we need because the number of data devices, applications is growing. 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. Agreed. Nor is there any scenario in which the rate of growth slows down either. One of the core bets we've had with Meteor is that we all will use the internet 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. Nobody else is studying this at all. And everything in the world is packets. Autonomous networks is like the only way to solve this.

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, uh, you're into your mind as a, 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, Dwarkesh 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? 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?

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. Yeah. 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?

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

Interviewing rarely works. Yeah. 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. Yeah, it's just impossible. Yeah. So I, you know, interviewing is one of the hardest things.

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 experiments because you need something that's just as replicable as possible and consistent as possible, which is really disappointing in a way because you want to think there's a magic question that can unlock someone. I wish. I haven't found it. Yes. Yeah. Well, we started with one of your blog posts and maybe as we wrap up, uh, 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. Which of the 5 or so on that list annoys you the most that you don't have an answer to? I think sleep. Sleep. Remind me which one the sleep one is. Yeah, I think why humans need sleep. Why we need sleep.

It's a third of our day.

I can imagine why that one frustrates you.

Yeah. I think it'd be so cool to think about as all these great things happen in science and 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?

Um, and clearly we're doing important processing during it. 100%.

It's clearly important. Yes. Um, 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.

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

How draconian can I be? Oh, as draconian as you like.

No one will be harmed in the thought experiment, so, you know, be brutal if you'd wish.

I think it would be interesting not to have school the first 15 years of your life. Ooh, that's—

this is a really good answer. I like this answer. Okay, why? I'm not sure if education works. You think it's deleterious in some sense? Yeah. You wouldn't want to teach Literally nothing? I don't know.

But I'd like to at least start with that question. Yeah. 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 it a little, I've 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. Yes. That seems crazy to me. 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. Yeah.

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

I like that. 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?

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.

But you, in this scenario, you know, people will understand it. So find that hard to believe. That is fair.

Maybe I'm like prisoner of the current, uh, last couple of years. But I think, uh, James Carse's Finite and Infinite Games comes to mind.

A great choice. I love that book.

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

I think that's the perfect place to end.

Cool. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for doing this. That's it.

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