Sunil and Anil Varanasi love classic movies. Think: The 400 Blows, Citizen Kane, and Twelve Angry Men.
Now, this isn’t what you’d necessarily expect, at least not at first glance. The brothers are the cofounders of Meter, an internet infrastructure startup focused on enterprises, and what they do is surface-level unsexy, deeply technical, and non-literary.
But talking to the two of them, they’re both implicitly and expressly interested in where art meets technology. In the nearly hour-and-a-half I spoke to them on-the-record, we talked about why they believe the internet needs to be (and can be) an electricity-like utility, basketball's GOATs—and what it means for something to be beautiful. When the Varanasi brothers told me they kept a list of movies they loved, I thought 'sure.' Then, less than an hour after getting off our Zoom, a log of dozens of their favorite movies was in my inbox. Among them: Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, half of Stanley Kubrick’s filmography, and all-time great Westerns like The Searchers.
It’s the kind of list kept only by patient cinephiles. So, I asked Sunil which ones he felt most applied to Meter. What he sent me via text starts: "Just like life is like a box of chocolates, so is Meter. Meter is a melting pot of experiences, talent, and ideas."
Sunil then proceeded to answer in the form of a lifecycle metaphor for the company. François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows is about "coming of age and experimentation," and that’s where it starts.
"Truffaut masterfully shows the relentlessness and dissatisfaction of being young," reads Sunil’s analysis, which I agree with.
Then Sunil moves to classic Westerns—Sergio Leone’s masterpieces Once Upon a Time in the West and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, about "facing tough antagonists" and "losing our battles." Stories of "relentless pursuit" and forward momentum also came up, like Citizen Kane and Spartacus, as did their admiration of Kubrick’s famously painstaking 2001: A Space Odyssey. (The spacecraft exteriors in 2001 were so realistic that they had to be cleared by NASA for security purposes.)
There were a few others, but the one that stuck out to me is a text I’ve loved for most of my life: Amadeus, the 1984 movie directed by Miloš Forman and adapted from the play by Peter Shaffer. In his text, Sunil said that it felt applicable for its execution of "brilliant moments" and "in terms of admiration and inspiration."
But Amadeus is many other things too: It’s about how the desire to be great can swallow you whole, about the fear of mediocrity, and about what it’s like to encounter someone else’s deeply sublime work. It’s about being able to see greatness in something because you have just enough knowledge to understand how impossible it is to achieve.
It’s a movie about envy and divinity, and the small things that take a piece of music—or anything else—and make it transcendent, not just good. Much like a piece of classical music performed by a grand orchestra, unless you know what you’re looking at, it’s hard to tell when something is truly great. And you often have to advocate for what you're working on. And very few have so adamantly made the case for their art as Tom Hulce’s Mozart in Amadeus. In one scene, he frantically defends his opera to the Habsburg emperor:
Sire, only opera can do this. In a play if more than one person speaks at the same time, it's just noise, no one can understand a word. But with opera, with music...with music you can have twenty individuals all talking at the same time, and it's not noise, it's a perfect harmony!
And in some ways, it’s an especially salient moment for that thought: Fortune has the exclusive on Meter’s new product, Command, and we utilized it as a chance to get the company’s brother cofounders in a rare on-the-record interview. Amadeus is about drawing the lines between recognition, excellence, and transcendence. And it’s too early to know where Meter’s story will land, but Command is clearly a microcosm of where the company is headed: It’s a product with many underlying parts, but the goal is harmony.
Read the whole story here.
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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