Meraki: From Bootstrap to Billion Dollar Acquisition
Speaker: Sanjit Biswas, CEO and John Bicket, CTO, Meraki
Date: Tuesday, February 5 2013
Time: 4:00PM to 5:30PM
Location: 32-G449/Patil Conference Room
Host: Daniela Rus, CSAIL
Contact: Victoria Palay, 617 253 8924, palay@csail.mit.edu
Relevant URL: In 2006, John Bicket and Sanjit Biswas took a leave from their graduate research at MIT CSAIL to start a networking company called Meraki, which eventually grew to a profitable company generating over $100M a year and was recently acquired by Cisco for $1.2 billion.
In this talk, Sanjit and John will talk about the history of Meraki, from the Roofnet project at MIT CSAIL, to bootstrapping the business from the sales of their first product, to scaling up to over 350 employees. They will also share some of the lessons learned along the way, and will discuss some similarities between building computer systems as Ph.D. students and building a company.
Both the speakers will also be available for Q&A after the talk.
About the speakers:
Before starting Meraki, Sanjit Biswas and John Bicket were Ph.D. students working on Roofnet, a networking research project led by Prof. Robert Morris in the PDOS group at MIT CSAIL. As CEO and CTO of Meraki, they managed Meraki through several stages of growth and product development, led the company's expansion from wireless into security and switching, and the sales of its products into over 25,000 customer networks worldwide. In Dec. 2012, Cisco acquired Meraki for $1.2 billion, with plans to continue growing the business as the new Cisco Cloud Networking Group.
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