Anil Varanasi
Co-founder and CEO, Meter · 1 appearance on the record.
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Anil Varanasi co-founded Meter with his brother Sunil in 2015 to provide full-stack enterprise networking infrastructure as a service. Under his leadership as CEO, the company has raised venture backing from investors including Sequoia Capital and Sam Altman.
41statements → 11claims → 5claims resolved → 60%fully supported → 3.71/5average certainty → 2.46/5average debate potential →
3 supported 0 partly supported 2 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 5 not checkable as stated how the 11 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
1 prediction · 10 assertions · 5 opinions · 19 insights · 6 disclosures · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 11 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 5 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 5 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Anil argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Varanasi: Cisco built its hardware stack via acquisitions, unlike Meter
“So if you look at our industry, Cisco has a rack like ours where they have, you know, 10 different pieces of hardware. But majority of that was done through acquisition. So they bought their switching business called Crescendo in the nineties, et cetera, Merak…”
Their most notable contradicted claim
Varanasi: Apple Silicon switched to two shared software-defined radios
“When they did that, usually hardware had three separate radios for like, 2.4 gigahertz, five gigahertz and Bluetooth. When they moved, they were using what this thing called software defined radio, which is using two radios for all three of those things.”
Everything Anil Varanasi said on In Depth that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Varanasi: No single large company today is not vertically integrated
“What's ironic to really think about is there is not a single large company in the world today that is not vertically integrated. There's just none.”
Varanasi: Small teams should ask peers, not just managers, who to fire
“A lot of times when you go to a team that's six or seven or 10 people, more than the manager, I think it's actually better to ask everybody else that works with in that team who should be fired.”
Varanasi: If you think about the person, the person is the problem
“If you're spending your time thinking about the person instead of the problem, the person is the problem.”
Varanasi: OKRs only work for money-printing monopolies like Google
“If you have a money printing machine, you should have that kind of stuff, but for everybody else, it's different.”
Varanasi: Networking industry will move to square-footage pricing within 5-10 years
“I think now the rest of the industry will move there in the next five, 10 years is some scribbles and notebooks of me and Sunil where we came up with this.”
Varanasi: Networking startups fail to build full stacks and become acquired point solutions
“What we understood what happened with all the companies in the last 2030 years that tried to compete with Cisco was that they then ended up selling that. Then the best companies actually start having success. Then they never go out and build the rest of the th…”
Varanasi: Building a Very Large Business Requires Vertical Integration
“But if you do start a great, you know, point solution or something where you own horizontally one part of the stack, I think the chances of making it to a certain level are higher, but the chances of building a very large business, I think are very slim chance…”
Varanasi: Incumbent-heavy markets become much easier once the initial barrier is crossed
“In a market where incumbents like that don't exist, the initial ramp is easy to get in, but so many people get in, then it becomes really difficult. But with markets like this, with large incumbents, the initial ramp is really hard, but once you pass that chas…”
Varanasi: Meter focuses on a 25-year horizon rather than five-year goals
“I don't care about
Where meter ends up in five.
I care about where it ends up in 25.
But at the same time, the next few hours also really matter to me.”
Varanasi: Meter plans to develop proprietary ASICs and custom chips
“Over time, we can go even further down the stack where we should go make our own ASICs, our own chips.”
Varanasi: Most tech workers do not use the products they build
“I think another thing that I found very surprising, but then I'm pretty sure of is most people in technology don't use the products they help build.”
Varanasi: Leaders should be CC'd on every single customer issue
“I think if you help people understand that anytime a customer is having an actual issue, you should be at least CC'd on it for every single customer. You can actually drive a lot down.”
Varanasi: Meraki was the last great networking company
“The last great networking company was a company called Meraki.”
Varanasi: Managing hardware allows Meter to use 20% to 40% pricier components
“So what that enables us to do is because the hardware is for us to manage and us to make sure it's great, we maybe might choose components that are 20%, 30%, 40% more expensive than a traditional vendor might, but that is only marginal for us compared to the e…”
Varanasi: Core infrastructure software does not need customer design partnerships
“The job there is just get it working first, then make it fast, then make it secure. You don't need design partnership there. Can you actually process packets? Is it actually working? Is it fast and is it secure? Because no customer actually understands that pa…”
Varanasi: Meter's in-house chip plans will take eight years to yield
“Yeah, we have plans underway. We think we can do some great work there, but by the time we realize that it will take another eight years, I think from now before this will even be fruitful at all.”
Varanasi: Business Model Innovation Is Severely Underrated Compared to Product and Delivery
“If you look at businesses in the modern sense in the last 50 years, The three times businesses are usually rewarded is when they innovate on product and technology, or they innovate on how they deliver that. You know, somebody figured out SaaS, before that som…”
Varanasi: Expanding initial startup scope by 20% unlocks vastly more value
“If they had decided at the beginning that the scope was a little bit larger, generally my rough intuition is it's only 20% more. But it actually ends up enabling you to capture a lot more.”
Varanasi: Silicon Valley culture pushes founders to optimize for local maxima
“Particularly in Silicon Valley, that this sort of thinking has accelerated, which is make a point solution as fast as possible to get to some revenue as fast as possible. And everybody that ends up optimizing for the local maxima, because if you end up giving …”
Varanasi: Founders mistakenly believe their specific problem is the world's hardest
“Almost invariably, every company tells you what they're working on is the hardest problem in the world. And I just don't think that's categorically true at all. But because, you know, you end up becoming either a slave of your own success or end up having some…”
Varanasi: Creating processes and tracking tools is not real work
“You put a process in place, you write a doc down, you talk about how to do the work. You talk about how to set up your tracking system on like, you know, Atlassian or linear or whatever. Doing all that feels like real work. I just don't think it's real work at…”
Meter aims to decouple management from decision-making authority
“And one of the things we're trying to do, and I don't know how successful we will be over the next five to seven years is, the other thing we disagree with in this vein, somehow people have bundled management and authority together in one. We're trying to deco…”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Building Meter for decades, not an exit | Anil Varanasi (Co-founder and CEO) | Dec 10, 2025 | 54m |