As kids in India, Sunil and Anil Varanasi played basketball—in some sense, both with each other and against each other.
"It got so competitive,” said Sunil. "We used to go home and argue: 'I made that shot! It was a foul! You traveled!' Then, we started recording, so we could go back and watch the videos in slow motion."
Anil confirms this, recounting the rollicking five-on-five games they corralled their friends into. Those games got just as competitive, as each brother fielded his own team of friends.
"We recorded those, too," said Anil. "From afar, it looked like we were fighting, not playing basketball. It was intense."
I talked to the two of them side-by-side, as they sat in the San Francisco conference room of Meter, the enterprise-focused internet infrastructure startup they co-founded almost a decade ago. Sunil and Anil look alike enough, but the thing that gives them away as brothers to me is that they share the same steady gaze—unrushed and curious, concentrated but kind.
Which gets at the other thing that’s striking about the brothers-co-founders: This competitiveness seemingly isn’t part of a visceral sibling rivalry. Instead, it seems to be more about their reverence for and understanding of one another, cultivated over a shared lifetime.
"I think the colloquial way of saying it is that we’re incredibly competitive in practice games, but when it comes to real games we play for the front of the jersey, not the back," said Anil.
Then, in unison, they both say: "Always, we’re always on the same team." Anil continues: "I can’t think of a single thing I’ve done in my life…" And Sunil finishes the sentence: "That didn’t involve him."
Momentarily, Anil takes the wheel to make sure I understand something.
"By the way, you shouldn’t do this in the article: Don’t ever put my name before his," said Anil. "I hate it and I see it everywhere, in articles, in internal documents."
I thought, why not? The order of their names seems to be a matter of cadence as far as I can tell, but Anil’s insistence that Sunil’s name be first, struck me as a testament to their commitment to being seen as a team.
Meter is backed by a long list of individuals and firms that need little introduction, including Sequoia Capital , OpenAI’s Sam Altman, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, Stripe cofounders John and Patrick Collison , Lachy Groom, Jeffery Katzenberg’s WndrCo, VMware co-founder Diane Greene, and more. The company’s customers include Greylock and Accel, Bridgewater, and hundreds of individual schools. Meter’s raised $85 million to date in the pursuit of a sweeping goal—to ensure internet will be a utility in the 21st century.
And today, Meter is launching a new product that seeks to deliver a new kind of accessibility and usability. Fortune can exclusively report that Meter is unveiling a product called Command, an interface that allows anyone—not just network engineers—to troubleshoot their Wi-Fi by essentially asking their computer: What’s up?
"Building technology for both novices and experts is possible now," said Anil. "And that's what I think we got right with Command."
'Command line '
Taking its name from the phrase “command line,” Command allows customers to manage all their hardware and client devices across multiple locations from a single interface. You personally can quickly access information that’s long been the province of highly-technical network engineers. If, say, your internet is unstable on one device or set of devices, you can go into the interface, and using natural language, ask what’s up—and the product will answer in natural language. Essentially, you can type into the system, "why isn’t my internet working" and get an actionable response.
I talked to Sequoia Capital’s Ravi Gupta about Command, and he had a metaphor for me: The lights and electricity in any sizable building.
"If the lights went out in this building, we’d be trying to figure out what the heck went on," said Gupta. "There would be some number of steps we’d have to take to figure out what had happened and when it’s coming back. But it would be a lot better if there was something we could text quickly asking, 'Why did the lights go out?'"
Now, if you apply this to the internet, it goes something like this.
"It can be as disruptive if the internet goes out as if the electricity goes out at this point," said Gupta. "So, if somebody has the ability to ask why the internet’s not working, and the answer can come back after running a quick query, that’s a fundamentally different picture than what we currently have."
I’ve seen Command in a real-time demo, one that felt rather fast to me but that Anil assured me could be faster. We’ll see how it works at scale, and my sense of the technical part of it has limitations. However, there is one thing that I can say without a doubt: It was an interface I intuitively understood.
Command is the next chapter in a story that very easily could have ended just a few years ago.
'Constraints are what build great companies '
There are certain ways in which Meter is a classic Silicon Valley story, from its big name-backers and tech customers. Then there are others in which it diverges from the pattern—for all the big names attached, the company isn’t an upstart that’s raised money at a rapid clip or wild valuation. Per its last funding last round, Meter is valued at $350 million, and while that’s not nothing, it’s rather small in a system where everyone’s looking to mint a unicorn. On this point, Anil says: "Constraints are what build great companies, Google raised $26 million in total. We are dilution sensitive. And none of this means we won’t raise multiples of this in the future."
Meter’s story has also not been perennially up and to the right, a point that Anil and Sunil are refreshingly candid about. When I asked the two of them about what COVID meant for Meter, they both visibly shuddered in a way that very few founders usually let me see.
Things looked pretty bleak for Meter throughout 2020. As other startups found momentum in a remote-only world, Meter was struggling—rolling out internet infrastructure requires a lot of hardware, a lot of moving that hardware around, and making in-person visits to customers. Anil says it was a "mind-numbingly hard" time.
Danyal Kothari, Meter’s head of operations, joined the company in 2019, and rode it out with the company through COVID. I asked Kothari: Was there ever a moment in the depths of 2020, where you wondered if this was gonna be okay?
"I would be lying if I said there wasn't," he said.
Customer visits stopped overnight, and those accounts in many cases disappeared right as Meter was also caught up in the chip shortage that rattled even the largest tech companies.
Retaining the physical office became untenable, so Kothari’s home temporarily became Meter’s makeshift warehouse for deliveries.
"I live in the suburbs, a really quiet community, and for six months after COVID we had all of our shipments coming to my house," said Kothari. "My wife started asking me: 'Hey, can I get Sunil’s number? I want to ask him for equity.' The UPS driver also hated us. He’d do his normal Amazon delivery, drop off some toilet paper, and then he’d come to my house and deliver these 300-pound boxes."
Eventually, Kothari’s wife got her garage back and, though Kothari joined Meter when it had four employees, it now has 80. He says that in some ways, COVID helped Meter in the long-term, because the product at the time just wasn’t fully ready.
"I would not have been surprised if, in an alternate universe where COVID didn't happen and we continued the course we were on in March 2020, we’d have deployed to a number of customers that would have churned and maybe had a reputational risk," said Kothari.
But that’s how it works for startups, says Lachy Groom, an early Stripe employee and now a Meter investor. Groom invested early, and the Varanasis put him to work, he says. And Groom was in the mix in 2022, when as Meter settled into a new groove, there was another near-miss: Meter got massively tied up in an outage that may have traced back to Apple —but it was Meter that was on-the-hook as customers experienced outages. It reminded Groom of his early days at Stripe.
"I remember these periods at Stripe where it felt like the world was ending," Groom told Fortune . "And for us at Stripe, we had a number of periods, 2013 and 2014, where we kept experiencing these bad outages. You can’t go down, because if you go down people are just going to switch. And a successive string of outages can make you feel like the world is ending."
In the end, it became clear the problem was inextricably tied to Apple—but by that point, Sunil, sleeping in the office days at a time, had led the team successfully rewriting every line of Meter’s code.
Meters and Stripes
Almost as soon as I get on the phone with Groom, he draws a line between the Varanasis and the Collisons.
"You know, I seem to have a decent hit rate investing in immigrant brothers from countries that begin with 'I,'" he said.
There are personal comparisons between the Collisons and the Varanasis—both sets of brothers are inclined towards the philosophical, and gravitate towards a broad range of topics . The first time I met Anil, he taught me that we don’t entirely understand what happens inside a burning fire, even though it first appeared perhaps as far back as two million years ago.
There are also mission comparisons, Groom says. Both Stripe and Meter take inherently complex services—payments and networking respectively—and distill them into user-friendly offerings. Both are design-focused and also own the full stack. And the word utility comes up again: Groom sees both companies as aiming to become essential utilities for their customers, where the services work without the customer having to think about underlying complexities.
Meter was last valued at $350 million, so the company's got a long way to go to get to Stripe tier. And utility isn’t exactly a sexy word—it’s the most boring set of squares on a Monopoly board. The bear case here ultimately falls along those lines: This is a behind-the-scenes business that has a lot of moving parts and could run into margin problems. (Perhaps, the Stripe comparison is a useful one here too, as the company’s margins have over the years been subject to speculation ).
The bull case is equally simple: There’s a long road ahead, but the internet is everywhere and over time, will only be more so.
"Everyone uses the internet, so their TAM is everything and everyone," says Groom. "There’s so much between now and making the internet a utility that they have to accomplish."
‘That’s the difference between us’
Sunil and Anil don’t know every single step that it’ll take to get Meter to the place where it reaches the heights of Stripe or the entrenchment of a public utility provider, though they’re confident they're heading in the right direction, together.
"It also comes back to us playing competitive sports together, and it's a team effort," said Sunil.
I asked them about their all-time favorite basketball players. Sunil has an extensive, classic answer:
"For me, there are multiple favorites depending on the position," he said. "Jordan, LeBron, Bill Russell, all for different things. These are some classics, like Kareem."
Anil has a very different answer: "Unreasonable as I am with most things, there's only one person that matters, and it's Kobe."
I ask: What does that say about the two of you?
"That one of us is reasonable, rational and sound, and I’m the other person?" Anil laughs.
Sunil jumps in: "No! I think that’s the difference between us. Anil is really good at distilling information really quickly and making a decision. Not every decision is perfect, but it’s important to be able to do that."
The thing that’s striking about their answers is that they’re all versions of the right answer. And in a startup, you need multiple versions of the right answer. And you need to be able to argue, be accountable, and keep score.
Because that’s the only way you win.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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