Anil Varanasi

@quintendf @meter thank you for being a customer!

.@meter and @acv get a lot of love but are still underrated ~two years into being a @meter customer I had to think about our office network for the first time today (we're adding a floor and hit an edge case in their system) Emailed Anil + he responded in precisely 40 seconds Problem solved. Excited to not think about our office network for another two years.

@brettberson @meter you ask some of the most exacting questions! They are rarely cathartic and illuminating.

This was one of my favorite interviews of 2025... Founders often underestimate how much freedom they actually have. @acv and @meter is a reminder of what happens when you use all of it. They ignored the usual advice and built the company their way. It’s no surprise their story doesn’t resemble anyone else’s. Here are just a few examples: 1. They spent four and a half years pre–revenue, just two people. It was essentially Anil and Sunil, alone, for four and a half years before they had a sales ready product and their first customers. They even scrapped an entire year of operating system work once they realized a different technical approach (inspired by an open source project) was better. 2. They literally moved to Shenzhen to learn how the physical world is made. They were blocked by slow hardware iteration in San Francisco, so they just relocated to Shenzhen for over a year. 3. Full vertical integration as a day one decision, not an afterthought. Meter decided from the start to own the entire stack: hardware, software, installation, and ongoing service. This is in a market where most entrants pick one slice (just switches, just access points, etc.) and get trapped as point solutions that end up acquired. 4. Business model treated as part of the product, not a pricing afterthought. They moved networking from “buy hardware” to: Meter provides the hardware, the software, the installation and ongoing support. The customer pays recurring, per square foot, and effectively “don’t pay us if the network doesn’t work.” Anil thinks about business model innovation on the same level as product and technology innovation. 5. Choosing a massive, incumbent dominated market on purpose. Networking is controlled by a few giants like Cisco. They were pulled toward that exact dynamic: a huge, durable market where the initial ramp is brutal, but if you get through it, there are very few new players alongside you. 6. Deliberately avoided the channel in a channel dominated industry. Roughly 90 percent of networking is sold through the channel.Meter refused to use the channel until they were convinced the product was dramatically better in every way, because incumbents could weaponize the channel with discounts to block them. Only after they had hundreds of happy customers and strong tools did they fully embrace channel sales. 7. The team has an extreme time horizon, paired with extreme urgency. Anil thinks in decades: “I care about where Meter ends up in 25 years, not five.” At the same time, he is obsessively focused on what happens in the next few hours and where every report spends time. That “barbell” between multi decade vision and hour by hour intensity is very explicit for him. 8. An allergy to “meta work” and most conventional management. No OKRs or goals at all. They have a strong skepticism of spending time on docs, processes, and coordination that feel like work but do not move the product forward.

@akothari @DouthatNYT's book also makes this argument: amazon.com/Believe-Why-Ev… and @charlesmurray's latest book has interesting arguments that religion can be an intellectual exercise: amazon.com/Taking-Religio…

It’s been a big year for faith in the Kothari household. We began the year with a visit to the new Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. In the summer, I took the kids to Palitana, the Jain temple town I grew up visiting every year. And over Thanksgiving, we stood inside St. Peter’s Basilica and were blessed to see the new Pope. Our home is a tapestry of traditions: our family follows Jainism, I’m shaped by Buddhist ideas, my wife believes deeply in Hindu Gods, my daughter goes to a Catholic school, and my son attends a Jewish preschool. Somehow, all of it works. In fact, it’s made me realize how powerful faith can be in a child’s life. I didn’t appreciate this growing up, but I see now how much grounding, meaning, and strength it can offer. In the U.S., religion has been declining and non-belief is rising. I hope we can find a way to rekindle a sense of faith, whatever form it takes.

Really looking forward to interviewing @satyanadella at MeterUp in November. We’ll discuss infrastructure, AI, and networking. Lots to chat about: scaling fast while building an enduring organization.

@kevinakwok @packyM @typesfast @meter Kevin is a shareholder and we can use all his tweets (I have some of his deleted ones too)

@packyM @typesfast @meter I will send invoice to your accounting department. Net 60

Meter turned my Deep Dive into an actual, printed, 104-page book.

@GuptaRK22 @meter thank you Ravi!

Autonomous networking is both early and inevitable. @meter is building that future. Congrats to @acv and Sunil and the team!

@mvernal @meter beautiful

@acv @meter

Congrats to @acv, Sunil and the entire team @meter! As Anil knows, nothing gets me more excited than deploying supremely (over)powered networking gear!

@nilamg @meter thank you Nilam!

@acv Congrats @acv and @meter team! We are very happy customers at Beacon

We raised a new round of financing to help support our expansion of bits and atoms (better hardware, high throughput, data centers) and physical operations (rest of Europe, Asia). I'm particularly excited about what we are about to release and what we can do by doing the basics right in networking, scaling it up, and making networking autonomous.

@borisjabes @meter @census very kind! And thanks for being a long time customer

congrats to @acv and the team @meter on the latest round! we've been happy customers for years and anil is one of nicest and most thoughtful humans i've ever encountered – he quietly helped @census and he oozed wisdom in every conversation :-)

@chenliw You probably understand Meter as well as anyone. Can’t wait to get you a @meter.com email one day.

Networking is hard Hardware is hard Analog signal processing is hard Partnering with ISPs is hard And you can't go down. But I really don't think @acv and Sunil know how to build any other way :) Congrats and excited to continue our partnership. wndrco.com/news/our-inves…

@VDP83 @meter Ha!

@acv @meter I'm fairly confident a decent % of my tweets are meter related :)

congrats @acv, sunil and the rest of the @meter team!

@grinich thanks!

@acv congrats anil!

@cjc thank you Cristina!

@acv Congrats, Anil! 🥳

@rauchg @vercel @meter will do it

We’ll soon be moving into a larger office in SF 🌁. Would love to feature hardware products and art from @vercel customers for visitors to try / see. Let me know what I should buy

@jasoncrawford Syverson worked on this: pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10… He concluded mismeasurement is far too small to account for GDP/TFP slowdown.

There is an argument that the apparent GDP/TFP slowdown (“stagnation”) is an illusion created by mismeasurement. Has anyone developed this argument systematically / attempted to marshal evidence for this hypothesis? (Excerpt below from my essay on stagnation)

@bnj @svlleyy @xiakv @awfy are the artists behind everything we do

@svlleyy @acv would know

who are the designers working at meter.com? everything is just so good here