From grad school, to startup to acquisition

Abstract

In 2006, John Bicket and Sanjit Biswas took a leave from their graduate research at MIT to start a networking company called Meraki, which eventually grew to a fast-growing, profitable company acquired by Cisco in 2012 for $1.2 billion. In this talk, Sanjit will recount 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 500 employees. He 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.