An astonishing 90% of Cisco’s revenue runs through its partners.

• Meter sells customers more parts of the stack than a traditional vendor would, so they keep more of the value.


• It can increase margins by cutting out layers up and down the stack.


• Customers get more value from the network – they save time, for example, which has a value that currently sits unmonetized.


• And Meter can continue to add products that fit i

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I guess there is one thing replicable: a lot of outbound. A couple of months ago, he came across someone doing really interesting work on YouTube with just hundreds of views and sent him a note. “This happens a lot on GitHub, too,” he said. “Someone will write really good open source libraries and 20 people will download.” Send them a note. The aut... See more

Crucially, because Meter is vertically integrated, customers can spend 3-4x as much with Meter as they would with legacy vendors . There are a number of reasons for this:

• Meter sells customers more parts of the stack than a traditional vendor would, so they keep more of the value.


• It can increase margins by cutting out layers up and down the stack.


• Cu

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Put differently, the long-term product and economic impacts of having everything operating on the same plane outweighs the short-term impact of replacing hardware.

Meter is building an internet utility by pursuing the Vertical Integrator strategy:

1. Integrate multiple cutting-edge-but-proven technologies.


2. Develop significant in-house capabilities across their stack.


3. Modularize commoditized components while controlling overall system integration.


4. Compete directly with incumbents.


5. Offer integrated products that are be

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Sunil and Anil spent five years, just the two of them, in China and back home, doing R&D. Learning, tinkering, thinking. They didn’t hire Meter’s first employee until five years in, until they knew what they wanted to build, and how.

my entire investment thesis is that startups have the opportunity to overtake sclerotic incumbents with vertically integrated offerings that are better, cheaper, faster and higher-margin.

So the two parts:

1. Put what you want into the world, over and over, for a long time.


2. Be a person other people want to do things well for.