Podbit · The a16z Show
Meraki couldn't beat Cisco on reputation in 2009. So they stopped trying to pitch and started shipping. Attend a webinar, get a free access point. Once mid-market IT teams experienced cloud-managed networking, no argument was needed — the product sold itself.
Where this was said
At 19:55 · chapter starts 17:20
Joe Schmidt pivots to Meraki, specifically probing how the company navigated ACV thinking in its early days and what lessons apply to AI companies dealing with inference costs. Andy obliges with the full backstory: Meraki was founded in 2006 by MIT PhD students whose RoofNet research project — large-scale mesh Wi-Fi installed on Cambridge rooftops — failed as a municipal business model and pivoted into enterprise networking. [1] — Andy McCall "In 2009, everyone thought Meraki was insane for trying to sell enterprise networking when Cisco and HP had already won the market a decade …" 19:05 In 2009, the conventional wisdom was that the enterprise networking market had been won by Cisco and HP a decade earlier. The breakthrough insight was that the cloud made it possible to configure and manage networking equipment remotely — obvious in retrospect, genuinely innovative at the time — and that this mattered most to mid-market companies without dedicated IT teams trained in command-line configuration. The land-grab play was to target buyers who didn't have the staff to work with Cisco's complexity, making Meraki's simplicity not just a feature but a decisive competitive moat. Andy also introduces the ACV philosophy he carried from these experiences: set a floor based on unit economics, then stop thinking about deal size and just stack wins above the threshold.
Set an ACV floor based on your unit economics, then stop thinking about it. If $15K deals are above your threshold, go get as many as possible — don't obsess over squeezing them up. The compounding effect of stacking wins fast is more valuable than optimizing individual deal size in the early stages.
Andy McCall's ACV philosophy: set a floor based on unit economics (e.g. $15K minimum), then stop thinking about it — just get as many deals above the threshold as possible.
Meraki was founded in 2006 by MIT PhD students and acquired by Cisco in 2012, still operating as a healthy business within Cisco today.
In 2009, everyone thought Meraki was insane for trying to sell enterprise networking when Cisco and HP had already won the market a decade earlier. The insight: mid-market companies didn't have trained IT staff, didn't care about social proof, and just wanted something easier to deploy. That's a land-grab market — and cloud-managed networking fit it perfectly.
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