The Ledger
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Cisco's highest multiple acquisitions like AppDynamics and Meraki were its most successful
“In fact, if I look at some of our most Strategic or financially successful acquisitions, moves like AppDynamics, moves like Meraki, they, in fact, were some of our highest multiple deals.”
Cisco's Meraki, AppDynamics, and OpenDNS deals originated through corporate development
“So when I look at just the partnerships or investments or acquisitions that I've been involved with, Meraki, OpenDNS, AppDynamics, Investments like Cohesity, Turbonomic, all of those relationships, they actually began with corporate development. And when those…”
Biswas: Meraki and Samsara used "allergy testing" to find product-market fit
“That has worked for us across both companies and many, many products that we've built.”
Biswas: Meraki bootstrapped its first year without venture capital
“We bootstrapped the company the first year, which I can talk about. We didn't actually have venture money. We managed to sell enough product to get off the ground.”
Meraki failed to launch exotic networking products driven by tech-first thinking
“So that was a mistake that we made at Meraki as well. We built some exotic networking products that didn't quite get off the ground.”
Biswas: Meraki reached nearly $1M in bootstrapped revenue before raising VC
“So we got to close to a million dollars in, in revenue.”
Biswas: Samsara launched market-first, reversing Meraki's initial technology-first approach
“We all, we started market first with this company. We said, who's the customer? What are the problems we can solve in a kind of scalable way? And let's work backwards from that, which is to find the commonality.”