Enterprise Network Infrastructure: What Every IT Leader Should Know

Scott Kinka (00:00):

Hey, everyone out there. Welcome to the Bridgecast. Super excited about this episode. I have Anil Varanasi with me. He’s the CEO of Meter where he’s been for close to a decade. We’re going to get into all that background before we do. Anil, welcome to the show.

Anil Varanasi (00:17):

Scott, thank you so much for having me on. This should be fun.

Scott Kinka (00:20):

It definitely will be fun. You were just telling me a little story about your last name.

Anil Varanasi (00:24):

Yeah, it’s one of the oldest cities in the world. Probably still one of the most eclectic places to ever visit. It’s sort of like Mecca or Jerusalem, but for Hindus. Yeah, it’s a fascinating place.

Scott Kinka (00:39):

Got and we’re going to talk about Meter as we get into this. You’re the CEO there now. What did you do before that?

Anil Varanasi (00:47):

I ran another business with my brother, who I started meter with for about a decade. We’ve always been interested in technology and software and hardware and networking and systems, and a group in Virginia. Went to high school there, went to college there and ended up working with our food business, working a lot with the government first with the local, then state, then federal as most people do in the area.

Scott Kinka (01:13):

Yeah, got it. And you guys left, you and your brother left India. I mean, you were teenagers, right? I think I read in your bio.

Anil Varanasi (01:21):

That’s right. I was 12 and he was 14 when we moved to Virginia from in India.

Scott Kinka (01:28):

And this is your second gig together. How’s that work

Anil Varanasi (01:32):

19 years together? I think the easiest way to probably describe it, if there were two of me, one of them would’ve killed the other. But luckily my brother is probably the kindest, most intelligent person I’ve met in all these decades working professionally. And we’re fortunate enough to work with probably some of the smartest and most accomplished people in the world. And he’s up there as far as intelligence and kindness and that rare combination together.

Scott Kinka (02:05):

We’ve talked about him. I want to ask about you. We have a lot of founders, business executives in tech on this. We’d like to learn a little bit about them. I think every executive has a superpower at the end of the day. What’s yours?

Anil Varanasi (02:24):

I am probably better than almost anybody I’ve met in the world at context switching. It is okay for me to do 50 things in a single day. I tend to respond to almost anything in a matter of minutes, sometimes in a matter of seconds. Mostly I have no problems, context switching, and I have never had that problem. I can decide I’m going to work deeply on something and then just work on it deeply. I don’t need a preamble or windup anything. And then suddenly I can decide I’m going to be in a mode where I’m just going to context switch all the time, and it’s responding to hundreds of emails, text messages, slacks, phone calls a day for me to keep going back and forth on different topics.

Scott Kinka (03:09):

Got you. Have a who’s who of investors in your business? Obviously seia Capital, but Sam Altman from OpenAI, Reid Hoffman from LinkedIn. He had the strip co-founders in there. And this was a startup. I mean you guys started this together. Take us on that journey from idea to being engaged with some of the greatest minds in technology in the US in particular.

Anil Varanasi (03:38):

Yeah, I think the old adage of if you ask people for capital, they will give you advice. And if you ask people for advice, they will give you capital probably is the closest truth to what happened with Meter. We had run another business, like I mentioned, for about a decade. We had done decently well. We actually didn’t want any outside capital for a really long time.

(04:04):

There was all this change happening in networking, especially across hardware, across operating systems, across routing algorithms, and what was really happening at scale. But it felt like nobody else cared about this as much as we did, so we just said, Hey, we’re going to go start doing this from the ground up. We’re going to build a hardware, write the software, all these things. So we just started just doing it, just the two of us. And as we started writing a bunch of operating systems and trying to build hardware, hardware lifecycle, and the iteration cycles were too slow for us.

(04:41):

So from Virginia, we had decided to move to San Francisco mainly because we were trying to figure out how this city of 800,000 people figured out how to build software for 8 billion people we’re like, is it in the air? Is it in the water? What’s going on? And so we came here, we started writing software, trying to build hardware with it, but we designed a PCV or something like that, and it would take weeks and sometimes month to two months for that PCV to come back. We, especially 10, 12 years ago, did not have any infrastructure in the United States for any manufacturing. Most of it had been shipped outside of the US with all the equipment in the eighties and nineties. And a lot of times this was coming back from China. So we started looking into it, how can we make hardware iteration as fast as software iteration? And it turned out most of this happens in the city called Sheen. Sheen is one of the most fascinating places in the world. It was one of the first economic zones, especially economic zones that China had set up where free trade and other things were just open and can really just grow. And what’s interesting about Shenzhen is 30 years ago it was sort of a fishing village with about 30,000 people.

(05:59):

And in 30 years it went from 30,000 to 30 million people roughly. It’s amazing. So we decided that to have the hardware iteration cycle just as fast as software, we naively said, and if you ask my brother, he’ll tell you that it’s me who said it. Let’s just go to China, figure out how to build hardware to scale. How hard can it be? Let’s go for a month. We’ll figure it out.

(06:24):

Turns out we were a little bit off. We ended up living there for about a year, 18 months, building out the hardware. Then we came back and wrote software and we ended up spending our own capital even getting into production hardware and started bringing on customers. But the thing that’s really great about Silicon Valley with the capital s and v is that the networks are actually really small. If you are doing good work and interesting work and differentiated work, somehow everybody finds out really fast. So a lot of these folks, and I’m happy to go into specifically each how it happened.

Scott Kinka (07:05):

Yeah, that’s okay. You don’t need to do that, but I

Anil Varanasi (07:07):

Totally

Scott Kinka (07:07):

Understand. Yeah,

Anil Varanasi (07:09):

Yeah.

Scott Kinka (07:09):

We’re out in Silicon Valley as well. I mean it’s the smallest big community in the world at the end of the day, right? This is a good idea.

Anil Varanasi (07:18):

Yes,

Scott Kinka (07:20):

We could explore manufacturing in China probably for the remainder of this time. Are you still doing that? You still manufacturing the hardware itself in China thing

Anil Varanasi (07:30):

We manufacture in Taiwan

Scott Kinka (07:33):

Now

Anil Varanasi (07:34):

Mainly because of scale and where our equipment and chip manufacturers are. We work with Qualcomm and Marvell and Intel and for supply chain and other purposes, it’s way faster and better and higher quality. Do in Taiwan what they all manufacture their own chips too.

Scott Kinka (07:53):

Yeah, makes sense. Makes sense. Innovated in China, manufacturing in Taiwan, you’re writing in Silicon Valley. I get all that makes sense. We’re saying all this that we didn’t get to the meter conversation.

Speaker 3 (08:06):

I mean,

Scott Kinka (08:06):

You guys, every good company starts with an idea. So before you tell us about Meter, why don’t you tell us about the problem that you were trying to solve when you founded the company?

Anil Varanasi (08:18):

Yeah. Networking is incredibly important in the world. Everything in the world as packets, we’re doing this recording right now. The listeners who are listening on their phone to when they go get coffee to all the cool things that are happening in AI and workloads, and literally everything is just packets. But the problem that we saw was it was hard time consuming, expensive and without great products in networking. Somehow what happened is as computer science started having abstractions on top of each other, almost nobody studied networking anymore, which meant there were no real great networking companies being built at all for decades. The

Scott Kinka (09:07):

Players, everybody would know. And it’s still in their networking closet, right?

Anil Varanasi (09:10):

That’s right. And those got started decades ago. But if you go to any CS program today, for example, there’s maybe two distributed systems classes and two weeks of networking and that’s it. That’s all people know. And so the problem we saw was networking is important. It’s hard, it’s expensive, it’s time consuming. Products aren’t that great, and nobody was caring about this and building it, and it turned out nobody really knows how to anymore. So we set out to really solve that end to end.

Scott Kinka (09:39):

Got it. And what that means at a high level, from my understanding, and please correct me if I’m wrong because there’s a lot to networking. We’re talking public side, private side, land wan, everything in between as it manifests itself in the marketplace. What you guys, and you’ll have to correct, this is my commercial on you guys, right? Being a partner,

Speaker 3 (09:58):

But

Scott Kinka (09:59):

Really is sort of a next generation managed wifi service at the core, there are many things that you do, but the thing that makes you very unique in my mind at least that I see is wifi at scale with significantly less complexity. I think, and I may have limited it, so if I’ve limited what you are, tell me please. I want to get the story, but how far off am I?

Anil Varanasi (10:26):

You are not far off, but it’s like a fog of war thing. I think you stepped in and you mentioned a little bit, but the fog of war is pretty large. Okay,

Scott Kinka (10:37):

Expand it for me.

Anil Varanasi (10:38):

Yeah, so it’s relatively simple. What we do is handle networking end to end entirely vertically integrated without any capital costs for customers. So all customers have to do is give us addresses and floor plans that might be across warehouses, life sciences, labs, offices, retail, healthcare, hospitality, whatever it is. They give us addresses, floor plans and answer some questions about how they’re trying to solve their problems in their business. And then our racks show up, which have everything from power units that we build, routing, switching, indoor wifi, outdoor wifi, cellular and security, all built entirely end-to-end by meter from designing the hardware to writing the firmware, operating systems, distributor systems, APIs, applications, models, all integrated. And this is all done entirely to end where we help design the networks, deploy them, and then help maintain them. And we do this all without any capital costs at all for customers or partners.

(11:54):

We take on that risk entirely, and I’m happy to get into why we do that. And so what we do for our customers is provide really great networking that’s fast, secure, reliable across routing, switching, wireless and security. And who we’re building for is essentially the CIOs, CTOs, and networking teams. One of the other things we’ve really been baffled by is how bad networking software is and how much nobody has done anything great in decades When they hear something like a managed service from somebody like meter end-to-end, customers might think it’s a black box and they don’t have any control, but it’s actually entirely on the contrary. Even though we do this all entirely, we give incredible amounts of control where we want the networking and IT teams to be able to make any changes and be really productive. So Meter is a vertically integrated solution for networking entirely end to end without any capital costs.

Scott Kinka (12:58):

Got it. So what’s unique, and I think I got the unique part because you can’t shake a stick without hitting a managed network services company if we’re being honest. But it’s usually routing and sometimes it comes from the carrier themselves and we’ll monitor it, let you know when it’s down. It’s sometimes switching very often, not distribution, I mean very often, not core, but sometimes distribution. And then it’s almost never wifi if we’re being honest. You have a very few competitors in that space, but those services don’t get into core switching. They don’t get into reality, they don’t get into it. So I think the thing that’s one super differentiator, which is kind why I focused on wifi is because that’s the one component nobody wants to touch, who is a managed

Anil Varanasi (13:47):

Network

Scott Kinka (13:47):

Services provider. That’s number one. I think too, your pricing model is super interesting. I would love to know a little bit more about how you came to that conclusion. I think everybody gets it. The description is really simple, gang, you send them the network a diagram and they will charge you by the square foot effectively to make sure that you can connect to the outside world regardless of what the model is. And I’m oversimplifying, but man, that’s got to be like I’m thinking about the people that you have who you treat as your mentors and are involved in your business and they probably look at you very sideways. When you said that was going to be your pricing model, tell me about that meeting when you guys made that decision.

Anil Varanasi (14:29):

Yeah, I think there’s three ways businesses can differentiate themselves. One is technology just pure, how much better is your technology and your IP compared to other people? Second is how are you integrating things and simplifying a otherwise fragmented or complicated stack. And third is from a TCO and pricing perspective, is it not just marginally better for customers, but is it significantly better for customers? And usually when people start businesses, they end up selecting one of these or maybe two of these. We were naive enough to do all three. So on the technology side, how we build our hardware to how we write our operating systems and firmware and dispute systems and APIs, it’s incredibly different. Happy to go deeper into that, how we do the integration across the fact that not just we’ll design it and magically, somehow racks and aps appear everywhere. That’s different. And then to answer your question on pricing, we actually worked backwards from two things and then decided on pricing on how it came about. First is the customer experience and then second is what are we trying to do long term? So we spent a bunch of time going talking to CIOs, VPs of it, VPs of networking, CTOs and others, and they all said a couple of things. One, that networking is one of the largest spends. They do in their cycles. You have to buy all this equipment, especially as you have massive amounts of locations, massive infrastructure, you’re spending a lot of money. Second, it felt like once a vendor sells hardware to them, it’s much harder to get ahold of the vendor after that much harder. I get you.

(16:29):

And then third, they have to keep doing this every five to seven years depending on their business. And they have to keep going back to procurement and financing. Like, Hey, remember that 20 million we spent, I’m back. Give me another 20. I have to refresh the

Scott Kinka (16:45):

Little bit. It’s lumpy, it’s lumpy, it makes it hard for accounting to deal with. It’s a hey, it makes well, they’re going to advertise, it doesn’t matter, you still need the cash. All that stuff becomes very, very difficult. In particular for the CFO engaging with the CIO who doesn’t talk ccf. It is just that consistent thing that is a flex inside the business makes it very difficult. So I totally get that. Okay.

Anil Varanasi (17:08):

Yeah. So couple that with what is the, we were trying to do long-term. So I like things when the incentives are very aligned with our customers and what would make meter successful. That’s really important for us to do constantly. So we started looking at line items for CIOs and CTOs and everything turned out to be that the incentives were aligned with their vendors, that they would only pay their vendors if the service was working. That might be things from AWS to GCP to zoom to whatever, pick your software or hardware. But networking was the last thing that wasn’t there.

(17:51):

So then what we decided to do is flip that is can we set up our balance sheet and our finance operations that we take on the capital risk entirely? And the reason to do that is in our model, no capital cost, that 20 million has now gone to zero. We are not taking CapEx and amortizing it over opex. We take on the entire risk of the CapEx. We only charge the opex of making sure that the networks are better. What customers also get along with that maintenance is that when we release new hardware, we will upgrade our customers as well.

(18:33):

But the reason it aligns with our business model, it actually ties back to what is it that we’re trying to do at meter. So let’s say there’s a customer in a large warehouse that’s a half a million square feet, we install meter, they’re doing really well, their business is growing. They are trying to move from that half a million square feet to a million square feet warehouse. When they move, we’ll go outfit that million square feet warehouse with meter as well. But because we never charge for the hardware, we’ll actually just leave our hardware in that original 500,000 square feet warehouse for the next tenant as well.

Scott Kinka (19:15):

Got it.

Anil Varanasi (19:17):

And that’s where actually most of the business and even the name for meter comes from, which is buildings have electricity and water and telephone lines and there’s power meters and water meters. That’s why we even called meter. We believe internet infrastructure should be more like a utility rather than something you’re fending for yourself all the time. So we’re going to make the capital investment for decades

Speaker 3 (19:41):

And

Anil Varanasi (19:41):

Let our customers benefit from it, but we’re also making the bet that meter will be way more valuable year 20 and 30 because of that investment.

Scott Kinka (19:50):

Yeah, I mean I love what you said earlier too about this being almost like the last bastion of having to capitalize and then depreciate investments. We did it with communications and we did it with contact center solutions and we did it with software. And we’ve obviously done it on the computing side of the house. One of the things that is complicated at the early phases of that for our listeners to not spend a lot of my time in voiceover IP and unified communications, at the beginning it was like, wait a minute, how much per person I spent and getting that analysis done? Do you find yourself when you’re meeting with a customer,

(20:36):

Having to almost prove to them what they’re spending? Right. And what I mean by that is obviously it’s very clear what they spend on their networking gear and what their maintenance costs continue to be with insert whatever name you want here, we won’t pick on anybody. But then there’s also care and feeding time, productivity time, the soft cost side of this, it feels like in many of these other areas we’re well over that we’ve accepted SaaS, we’ve accepted anything as a service, but this is sort of the last frontier in a lot of ways. Do you find yourself having to jump in and really help CIOs actually understand what they’re spending in both hard and soft costs before they’ll be able to get their head around the number?

Anil Varanasi (21:21):

I think the more complex businesses and the larger business we work with some of the largest companies in the world, actuating for the soft cost is really hard. But luckily for us, our TCO is so good, even just on the hard cost. We do a TCO analysis just on the hard cost.

Scott Kinka (21:41):

Got it.

Anil Varanasi (21:42):

And then have a next slide saying, now you’ve seen that plus add the soft costs in that you can estimate yourself because it’s really hard if you’re talking about a company that has 10,000 people for the CIO to actually think about, I’ve got 300 people in networking and in it I’ve got a thousand people. What are all the soft costs? That’s really hard to actually,

(22:04):

But when we do a TCO analysis, Scott, over the course of five or seven years, our customers end up saving so much capital without any of the risk and it’s not a depreciating asset and it’s next year something new comes out and it’s just waste what’s been sitting in there. Pricing just becomes incredibly obvious to customers. But what you’re saying on the soft cost is a super insightful thing to think about our best customers who are become our long-term partners, the soft costs when they’re able to actually figure out how much time is being spent by people in their organizations, if they’re a CIO or CTO, but people in other organizations that rely on them that are wasting time because the infrastructure isn’t great, the value is immense because of how good our hardware and software is and how integrated it’s, it’s a single rack that drops in, again from power routing, switching wireless, DNS, security, security, wifi, cellular in a single dashboard, the value is immense for customers.

Scott Kinka (23:14):

Sure. I mean, it’s great that you can get to the savings or at least the consistent cost basis without requiring the soft cost justification. So I mean that’s pretty remarkable at the end of the day. A couple of quick hits here before we have a little fun at the end of this one, you just announced Microsoft with a Microsoft, you just announced a partnership with Microsoft for AI efficient networking. Somebody cooked that up in marketing, but what does that mean? What is it that you guys are doing together?

Anil Varanasi (23:47):

Yeah, I think a couple of things. One is Microsoft for people to understand is probably one of the largest customers in the world of networking just because of their scale and things like that. So that should set the stage on how much they care about infrastructure. So first what we’re doing is investment and support from them. So it’s rooted in the fact that we believe networking is important As we develop products, they’re going to offer expertise and design and performance for just because of the scale of what they see. Second, we released a product called command in the fall last year. We’ve got some other really large model products coming as well. Microsoft is going to help us with compute, it’s going to require massive amounts of compute. They have some of the best infrastructure anywhere, so they’re going to do that. And

Scott Kinka (24:47):

Command is really where this is sort of the, Hey command, what’s wrong with my network?

Anil Varanasi (24:53):

Yeah, that’s right. Approach command is three things, very simply one, exactly like you’re saying, natural language to get information. I have a hundred locations, 10,000 feet of hardware. Let me just ask what I want. You get information back. Second natural language to take action. Hey, for all of my retail locations, make sure port 72 is blocked for whatever reason, just as a trite example, instead of having to go through that manually across hundreds of locate just instantly happens just by saying that exactly is the way I said it. Third, what command can do is take natural language and convert it into software entirely on the fly. One of the beliefs we have is that software should be soft. We believe that as time goes on, most software will just be generated on the fly based on what the user wants. So we know that Scott’s been a CTO before, now he’s in a strategy role. He wants to have a bigger picture what’s happening. And if you just say, Hey, command, give me a dashboard I can share with my CTO at the speed of a Google search, they’ll just write the dashboard and just give it to you fully custom the way you want it to be. So that’s our command product.

(26:07):

And yeah, so command scaling that compute is one. And the last thing is market expansion with them. Azure Marketplace is one of the great channels there is. So it’s to promote and sell and distribute meter products to more customers globally and ideally work on selling with customers together. And so the partnership has been a while in the making, but working with Satya, Jay and Jason and so many other folks there, we’re super excited by it and I think we’ll be hopefully one of the great partnerships a smaller company has done with a large company.

Scott Kinka (26:45):

Yeah, I mean I find that to be amazing, particularly when you’re talking about the traditional companies that you’re competing against, right? In the networking space, you said three things there on the Microsoft partnership we explored two and three, but I think number one that you mentioned is the one that’s the most interesting to me. Microsoft is consuming most of the packets that may be ill performing on your network on a traditional fashion. So for you guys to be co-developing at least, hey, we have this new version, you’ve got this new version, let’s make sure that we’re managing these packets. I mean, just thinking about the amount of teams traffic as an example or Zoom traffic, being aware of how that performs against the other things that are happening on those platforms in the network, it’s essential to the way that we’re communicating today. I mean, I started my career in voiceover IP and every year we’re like, this is the year of video. And it wasn’t that the video opportunity, the technology wasn’t supportive of it. It was that the networks were largely not supportive of it, number one. And then two behaviorally, I’m not sure we were ready,

(27:53):

But something drove that. So then enter Covid and then all of a sudden back to the Future is here and we’re looking at each other on video every day. And so before, just quickly before we jump into some fun at the end here, a couple of fun questions. I’ll use this question as a transition. I was doing some reading on you guys in particular, you and your brother, and you shared some funny stories about Covid and growing

Speaker 3 (28:17):

The

Scott Kinka (28:17):

Company during Covid. I mean in an era where people were trying to figure out what they were going to do with their offices and then everybody’s trying to cut things back. And I read some fun anecdotes about you guys. You were basically, you started staging gear out of your garage. You have to tell me more about this. Just give me a quick,

Anil Varanasi (28:36):

Yeah. It was probably one of the hardest times in my professional career was through Covid. Looking back, obviously it’s funny and things like that, but at that moment it was really hard because not only we were delivering networks for physical world, but also supply chain was impossible to get working just impossible. We were on calls with folks in Taiwan. I played almost every night trying to get some hardware out. Somehow

(29:06):

It was nearly impossible. And then when we did with all these no contact and no touch rules, it was just crazy on where are we even going to store all this hardware? Where is it going? There’s no folks working in warehouses. Nobody’s allowed to go. We were not considered mandatory and critical in any way. And so yeah, it ended up, actually, we ended up storing it in one of our early colleagues who’s been with us for a long time, his garage and other places. And literally pallets would show up with trucks outside garage and we would wheel them in. And him and his family and his spouse, they were all really kind of be like, yeah, sure. Take over and just wheel in professional pallets into a home. And yeah, it was just like a wild time to think back on.

Scott Kinka (29:59):

I mean, that’s the beauty of entrepreneurship at the end of the day. Right. What’s your job? I’m chief cook and bottle washer every day. I love that story. Let’s jump. Is it okay to jump into a little bit of fun before I let you go?

Anil Varanasi (30:12):

Whatever you want.

Scott Kinka (30:13):

Yeah. Awesome. Fantastic. Okay, couple quick ones. And we sort of have fun with these questions because we use them and we vary them across different guests and we sort of compare them and have some fun with ’em. So I’m going to ask you the first one, transitionally coming out of the business conversation. Just give me some kind of shameless prediction. I don’t care what it is. It could be technology, it could be sports, it could be entertainment. Something over the next 12 to 18 months that we can look back and see how right you were.

Anil Varanasi (30:43):

I think in 12 to 18 months, simultaneously it will turn out to be models are incredibly good and the fact that almost nothing has changed. Even if you look at models today and if somebody would’ve told you five years ago that this is the capability that you’re going to have and somebody might’ve told you this 10 years ago, you would’ve said there would be chaos in the world. Everything would’ve changed. Economies would be up and down and things, but almost nothing has changed. And I think that will be true for the next 12 to 18 months too.

Scott Kinka (31:16):

Gotcha. Is there a time when the chaos does happen? Do you have a longer look?

Anil Varanasi (31:22):

Yeah, I think over the course of 20, 30 years, chaos will definitely happen.

Scott Kinka (31:28):

It’ll take that long and we’re going to be at

Anil Varanasi (31:31):

Always does. Technology’s on a J curve, right?

Scott Kinka (31:34):

Yeah.

Anil Varanasi (31:35):

Something happens, takes a really long time for it to dissipate and it suddenly just shoots up. We saw this with the steam engine, we saw this with the telephone, we saw this electricity, we saw this with networking over and over again, systems level things. It’s ironic that open AI’s first product was called GPT because normally GPT economics stands for general purpose technology and all general purpose technologies have a J curve. Just takes a really long time for them to go into the economy and dissipate

Scott Kinka (32:09):

Completely. And in particular where we’re just, I say all the time and we do quite a but bit of this kind of discussion around ai. We’re in the era of get some right now. And what you mean by that, every CEO, every board of go get some ai. I don’t really know what I’m going to use it for in my business right now, but I’m going to just go get some. Yeah, we’ll figure that out. And I think it’s an even more interesting thought process around the J curve in any technology adoption when the technology itself is learning. We’ve really had that kind of scenario too. Yeah,

Anil Varanasi (32:43):

Great point.

Scott Kinka (32:43):

It’s almost difficult to judge. You get into when’s the singularity and is it thinking and turning tests and it’s going to be, I think the rules by which we’ll judge our progress are not even set, which is kind of what’s going to be really interesting over the next to your point

Anil Varanasi (33:01):

20. Yeah. But also humans by definition, just always want more. Again, even five years ago, somebody who told you touring test would be passed, it’s been passed, who cares? We really are like, it doesn’t matter. What is this thing doing for

Speaker 3 (33:17):

Me?

Anil Varanasi (33:19):

So I think that sort of thing will continue until a new generation of people enter the workforce where they’ve used these things from the ground up and that’s the default way they do things. That’s when change will happen. And why I even say this whole 20 year thing is you want people who grew up using these things and it takes for them to be in decision-making roles before things will change.

Scott Kinka (33:44):

That’s super interesting way of thinking about it. Okay, well justified prediction there. What, what’s the most recent leadership advice or leadership lesson that you’ve had that you wish you knew when you started Meter you learn every day. What’s the most recent one that you’re like, man, if I had only had that 10 years ago?

Anil Varanasi (34:08):

I don’t think anything comes to mind, but the thing that I constantly do think about is how much time are you spending with customers? I think that can actually just keep going up and up and up. Usually as businesses grow, that tends to go down. When you start a company, you’re always talking to customers. Then over time you end up talking to customers less and less. And then culturally too, as companies grow, you end up talking to customers less and less. You’re constantly doing things internally and trying to get this process done, that thing done, whatever. But I think if you can actually try to push the inverse of that curve saying as time goes on, we should talk to customers more. That probably is something I’ve been thinking a lot about.

Scott Kinka (35:07):

That’s amazing. Yeah. Make sure you don’t get stuck in the business of being in business.

Speaker 3 (35:11):

Yeah, that’s right.

Scott Kinka (35:12):

At the end of the day. Alright, love that. Last one. I asked this to everybody. Maybe your marketing department prepared you, maybe they didn’t, but

Anil Varanasi (35:21):

Legal preparation,

Scott Kinka (35:22):

I love this, if that makes it better. Whatever the dystopian future that’s going to happen descends upon us and you can choose whichever one you like, but there’s only one app that’s still working on your phone and you get to choose.

Anil Varanasi (35:38):

Yeah.

Scott Kinka (35:38):

Which one is it?

Anil Varanasi (35:40):

The only one that matters? The browser.

Scott Kinka (35:42):

Okay. Fantastic.

Anil Varanasi (35:43):

That’s it. Nothing else matters. Information retrieval is the only one because I can get to anything else from the browser.

Scott Kinka (35:49):

I love it. Okay. I mean, that’s a simple one. We’ve had so many strange answers to that one. You have no idea. I think the answer somewhat depends on what you think the dystopian future is going to be.

Anil Varanasi (36:02):

What’s your answer? What do you think?

Scott Kinka (36:03):

Dystopian assumed look good. I assumed game somewhere, so I always say music or flashlight, one or the other. Super useful. Anil. This was the best half hour I spent all week. I’ll be

Anil Varanasi (36:15):

Honest. How 10 are you to say?

Scott Kinka (36:17):

A lot of fun. Looking forward to doing a lot more with you guys. Obviously Bridgepoint and Meter are partnered and we’re starting to do some good things together. We’re thrilled to have you on here. It was great to spend a half hour together and I hope our listeners enjoyed it as much as I did.

Anil Varanasi (36:33):

Awesome. Thank you again, Scott, for having me.

Scott Kinka (36:34):

Well, thanks so much for being a guest here on the bridge and for those of you who are listening, we’ll see you soon on another episode.