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Bloomberg Radio New York

07:29 min | 10 months ago

"sunil vien sanni" Discussed on Bloomberg Radio New York

"You so much Well with everything going on in the world I love love when our Bloomberg team draws our attention to innovation going on around the world And I definitely saw that last weekend of Panama some of the unicorn startups in Latin America Now it's Ashley Vance's turn in a story in this week's new upcoming issue of Bloomberg business week out later on this week To me is introducing us to a company that discuss its business with the news media Bloomberg for the first time Yeah I had never heard of it before reading this story The company's called meter It's founded by two brothers and it's got a new way to get workplaces online as well as some noteworthy backers as well Join us now is Ashley Vance features writer for Bloomberg businessweek Ashley's also the author of Elon Musk Tesla SpaceX and the quest for a fantastic future Ashley joins us on the phone from Palo Alto California Joel Weber is the editor of Bloomberg businessweek He's with us in the Bloomberg interactive brokers studio Joel is actually right a couple of brothers such as these could go off in the graduate college early They could go off and they could basically do anything They could go work at a crypto startup or start their own crypto company They choose to solve a problem that many people would say wait a second that's not necessarily the you know for lack of a better term sexy thing to be doing right now That's right Although maybe starting another crypto company wouldn't be the right call right now either Good point What I liked about the story was just when we think about the way the world works there are things that the world seems to maybe have forgotten and have you tried turning off that router You have bad Wi-Fi is one of them And I've done that at home many times I've turned it on to during the pandemic It worked sometimes The other place that that happens is in offices And it makes these brothers interesting is this whole startup is about bringing better Wi-Fi to the office which hey in these times of RTO anything counts right Ashley so where did this idea come from Yeah well these brothers are fascinating I mean to your point anneal and sunil vien sanni are their names and I mean they're kind of throwbacks to me They had this business in college and installing networking equipment at offices and they realized it was just too hard And so they decided to go fix the problem they'll all this new networking hardware and software at themselves but the big idea here is you're a company you move into a new office space You want to set up Internet It's still this kind of archaic process where you have to call about 5 different companies to make that happen And so they want it to be more like setting up your telephone or your water in your office where you essentially just kind of click a button or a button on a website and it appears And so it's one thing to for you and I to have this idea and I like to tell you were dating yourself there actually But they actually have an interesting rolodex and they were able to get some interesting backers Who did they call and who put money behind them Yeah the back is kind of like a who's who but that you can imagine And Silicon Valley you've got the Collison brothers who started stripe Diane Greene who started VA you got turban who runs silver Lake Sam Altman at OpenAI I mean the funny thing about this story is they list of investors is incredibly impressive but this company is operated for about 6 years It almost complete secrecy And so all these people somehow kept this a secret This is the first time the founders ever talked that anyone written a single story about this company called leader It's so interesting actually because these guys you know you could try to solve a problem from Silicon Valley or from Virginia or from New York City But these guys actually moved to Shenzhen because the hardware in this they really wanted to understand the hardware here Talk about what they did in order to really make it so they understood the ins and outs of the business Yeah I thought this was kind of when I started to think they were the real deal They had this previous networking business that they started in college and they took all that money and they just blew on a whim almost to Shenzhen and decided they were going to manufacture their own line of routers and switches and access points but they had to talk their way into it And so they lived in a hostel for 18 months and did manage to talk their way into a factory They would sleep on the factory floor and they had their beds They had no beds even in their hospital It was also of their networking gear And so these were two kids that you know they believed in themselves and then they wanted to know every little piece of how this works And so they funded before they got all these big name backers They funded all of that themselves and lived through it So I get it and I could see and as you report that a lot of companies they've already got a lot of clients out there some larger ones But is there success based on really lining up Massive companies who already have invested so much in their own networks at this point They want to get there but it's obviously a harder sell Traditionally what you do is you're in a building you've bought a ton of equipment probably for the Cisco you probably have people on staff who manage all that stuff You've invested millions of dollars to have the Internet working at your office And so to rip all of that out and bet on a startup is a little bit harder But if you're a company you could be a large company that's moving into a new office that you don't want to go through all that pain again with the idea as you call meter and they set everything up for you and Bill you per month And so I think that's the easier sell right now is startup companies moving to a new spot And once you're in the cloud everything goes great right That was good What else could go wrong here though Ashley I mean you know they've got serious challenges ahead of them which is like the network If your Wi-Fi not working at the office you're going to hear about it if there's some security disaster you're going to hear about that and possibly get egg on your face publicly And so it's a young company They have to prove that their networking gear is as good as they say it is So this is going to be it's going to be a long march that said they reminded me a lot of kind of like a young VMware Just if potentially this huge infrastructure play if they get it right And so it's a big deal Does a company like this Ashley in like I don't want to put the cart too much before the horse but it's got some big name backers and they're looking for an exit here Is this the type of company that IPOs or gets acquired by an established player Like a Cisco Yeah Exactly Yeah this is a concern because Cisco through the years has been a lot of the most acquisitive companies ever And what generally happens is as soon as you're doing well and networking Cisco buys you a Juniper by you and there's a tendency for the technology to languish Of course these founders as they always say you know probably they're not going to do that They're in this for the long haul They're going to be the ones who stick it out There will see if history is our guide Cisco tends to end up with this stuff but these brothers seem quite determined.