• 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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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.

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

They’re driven by working together. If they were going to work alone, it would be a lot less interesting. They want to solve very hard problems, whether technical, business design, or empire design. They care a lot about progress and the speed of innovation. They care a lot about power law people; they want to attract those people, partner with th

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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.

First time founders think about product. Second time founders think about distribution. Exceptional founders think about both, and how they work together.

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.