EP 98: Sanjit Biswas (CEO, Samsara) on Building to $20B: The CEO Behind One of The Fastest Growing Startups Ever

In less than 8 years, Sanjit Biswas scaled Samsara from 0 to over $1B ARR. In our latest conversation, Sanjit shares all the lessons he’s learned about running a hyper-growth organization, including all the changes he’s made since growing and selling his first company Meraki to Cisco for $1.2B and going on to scale Samsara to $20B. A great episode for anyone who wants to continuously reinvent themselves within a rapidly changing workplace. (00:00) Intro (01:28) Samsara's Journey: From Startup to Billion-Dollar Valuation (06:50) The Evolution of Samsara's Product Line: From Temperature Sensors to AI (12:48) The Impact of ELD Mandate on Samsara's Growth (14:16) Expanding Horizons: Samsara's Multi-Product Strategy (29:41) Leadership Lessons: Scaling a Company and Rehiring Yourself (38:07) Insights on Hiring: Finding the Right Fit for Growth (40:56) Maintaining High Hiring Standards in Rapid Growth (42:21) Innovative Hiring Practices: Talent Calibrators and Bar Raisers (43:12) Embracing a Flexible Workplace Post-Pandemic (43:20) Navigating the Shift to Remote Work and Its Impact on Talent Acquisition (45:06) Evaluating Employee Performance and the Keeper Test (46:42) Lessons from Legendary Venture Capitalists and Building Board Relationships (50:16) Samsara's Journey: Building a Billion-Dollar Business (50:34) From Academic Project to Commercial Success: The Meraki Story (54:35) The Power of Direct Sales and Learning from Customer Interactions (01:14:24) Reflecting on Growth, Culture, and the Future of Samsara (01:24:08) Closing Thoughts and Advice for Future Founders Produced: Rashad Assir & Leah Clapper Mixed and edited: Justin Hrabovsky Executive Producer: Josh Machiz Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA 🎙 Listen to the show Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-logan-bartlett-show/id1606770839 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5WqBqDb4br3LlyVrdqOYYb?si=3076e6c1b5c94d63&nd=1 Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS9zb0hJZkhWbg 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode, Logan goes behind the scenes with world-class entrepreneurs and investors. If you're interested in the real inside baseball of tech, entrepreneurship, and start-up investing, tune in every Friday for new episodes. Executive Producer: Rashad Assir Producer: Leah Clapper Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 📱 X - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member. Tap follow and enable notifications to stay ahead of the game.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Logan Bartlett?

  Welcome to the Logan Bartlett Show. On this episode, what you're going to hear is a conversation I have with Sam Sarr, co-founder and CEO, Sanjit Viswast. Sam Sarr today is a business doing over $1 billion in annual recurring revenue with a valuation of over $20 billion. Now, Sanjit was also the co-founder and CEO of Maraki, which he founded in 2006 and sold to Cisco for $1.2 billion. Sanjit and I talk about a bunch of different things, including the lessons he learned from Maraki that helped him form the decision to go after Sam Sarr, what it's like working with legendary venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, as well as Doug Leone in the early days of Maraki, as well as some of the things he's learned about scaling himself into the CEO and leader of Sam Sarr,

• 0:43Logan Bartlett?

  trying to rehire yourself every year, as well as prioritizing different initiatives and color coding your calendar so you know how you spend your time. A really fun conversation with Sanjit that you'll hear now. Thanks for coming on. Great to connect.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 0:57Logan Bartlett?

  I first want to start out, Sam Sarr, how do you describe what the business does?

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Well, I like to start with the customer. So what we're doing at Sam Sarr is we're building technology for the world of physical operations. So think the construction companies, the energy utilities, logistics providers, they all want to find ways to operate smarter. And the way they're doing that today is through data, and we help them get that data. So we have a system of sensors. We do a lot of data processing, which turns into AI to help them find signal in all that data. And then we give them the ability to take action on that. And for them, it's about being safer and be more efficient, because these are industries with a lot of people, labor-intensive industries and asset-intensive industries.

• 1:36Logan Bartlett?

  And so the two main products today are safety and then telematics.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  So safety is around basically helping large fleets be safer on the roads. And that's about breaking bad habits, checking your mobile phone when you're driving, or following distance, those kinds of things. It turns out if you take an active approach to coaching drivers, breaking those bad habits, you reduce risk on the roads. And for our customers, that turns into massive savings in terms of insurance costs and obviously lower injuries, which is what they want for their teams.

• 2:03Logan Bartlett?

  And then the telematics side?

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Telematics plays very closely with that. It's basically GPS tracking with a lot of intelligence on top. So we can tell you if you have 5,000, 10,000 trucks out on the road. Are they making their stops on time? Are they stuck in traffic? Are they going to be late to your end customer down the road? That kind of.

• 2:21Logan Bartlett?

  Real time visibility around all that.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Exactly. Real time visibility. And then, once you have these two building blocks, it really is a sort of underpinnings of a bigger platform. So, we can help with workflows, with compliance. We can track all the equipment that's part of our operation. We can now help manage all the devices, like the tablets and iPhones and that sort of thing that you're using as part of all this.

• 2:40Logan Bartlett?

  One of the interesting things that I learned about your journey was that you sold Meraki to Cisco for 1.2 billion. What year was that?

• 2:49Speaker 01

  That sale was 2012, so a little over 10 years ago.

• 2:51Logan Bartlett?

  A little over 10 years ago. And then you stayed on through 2015.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  2015, two and a half years.

• 2:56Logan Bartlett?

  And then you decided you want to do another company? And you picked an end market before a product? Was that, is that the right order of operations?

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's right. So, Meraki was a networking company. My co-founder, John, and I were PhD students together. We built computer networks at MIT. And so, what Meraki was, was technology first. We started with the product in mind and wanted to bring it to the world. As we started Samsara, we started with the customer in mind, the market in mind, and said, "We want to help and be useful in the world of physical operations." We didn't know the first thing about it. Neither of us had ever driven a commercial vehicle. We'd never worked in a warehouse. So, it was a pretty steep learning curve.

• 3:33Logan Bartlett?

  And so, how did you land on that end market? Was it just some broad thesis, "Hey, the cloud is coming for other industries, and so this presents an opportunity"?

• 3:42Speaker 01

  I wish it was so sophisticated. I think we were just curious nerds. We were looking at a bunch of data about where can you have impact in the world? And one of the things that struck us was how much of the world's energy is used by infrastructure and operations? How much of carbon emissions come from operations? How many people work in these industries? And what was really fascinating is we didn't know anyone here in Silicon Valley working on problems for that customer. We knew tons of people in enterprise from our background. We knew lots of people working in consumer. We didn't know anyone thinking about infrastructure. And that, to us, was a sign that it was probably an under-invested and under-penetrated market. And that's what we found as we got into it.

• 4:22Logan Bartlett?

  Did you have any high school classmates in Texas that were in the industry or anyone? When you could call on Wayback, it probably lends itself a little bit more to this.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, we had a little bit of a preview because we were selling networking in the previous life at Meraki and everyone was deploying Wi-Fi networks. You know, we were in schools and offices, but we were also in warehouses and truckyards and that sort of thing. And if you got a chance to set foot in one of those industries, it was like going in a time machine. It was like 1995 all over again. There was literally Windows XP up on the screens, pen and paper everywhere. And that to us was a sign that, okay, you know, there's a transformation that's going to happen.

• 4:57Logan Bartlett?

  There's some job to be done within it. And so then do you, do you cold email prospective customers and say, hey, I sold Meraki and it was a successful outcome and I want to watch what you do? Or what do you, what do you say to people to actually figure this out?

• 5:09Speaker 01

  So we did a lot of cold calling, cold emailing. One of the most humbling things was the customers we were talking to hadn't really heard of Meraki or Cisco Systems. When you say Cisco and operations, they think the food distributor, Cisco with an S.

• 5:22Logan Bartlett?

  SY.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So it was in many ways, just kind of going back to square one, which was, I think, really good because in operations, people don't have a lot of time. And so they're not going to take your call or spend time with you unless you have something of usefulness to them. So anyway, in the first year, we ended up just kind of going onsite a lot and that's how we got our ideas.

• 5:42Logan Bartlett?

  And so the pitch, I remember reading, you'd say, can I be an intern for a day or something and watch people just work? And so did you just observe, hey, there's different processes going on here and this is interesting?

• 5:53Speaker 01

  And, and look, we tried to show up with the product because otherwise it's just sort of random. Who is this random person wanting to be an intern for a day? So we would say, hey, we're building sensors for the world of operations. We'd like to learn more. We'd like to show you what we have and like to learn more. Can we spend the day with you? And that actually seemed to work, especially in and around Northern California. That's where initial customers were. People were familiar with the tech industry. They knew that people try a lot of ideas and a lot of things and they were receptive to taking calls.

• 6:19Logan Bartlett?

  Was hardware a core component of what you were going to do from the start? You felt like that was a disintegrated bundle, much in the same way you had done previously?

• 6:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. And again, we were pretty open minded because we were starting market first or customer first. What we discovered is while the interest was in the data, no one had a way of getting the data into the cloud. Right? So our first product was basically a temperature sensor that was Bluetooth connected, very, very simple. It's kind of the simplest sensor we could imagine. And that's what we brought into the cold chain. So pharmaceutical companies and food and beverage. And then from there, we evolved into what is now the product family we talked about.

• 6:54Logan Bartlett?

  In that process of finding product market fit, I remember reading that it was actually the customer that led you to a different use case, that the temperature sensors actually wasn't really-

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Not our most successful product.

• 7:08Logan Bartlett?

  It didn't really have product market fit, is that right?

• 7:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, and again, we had a bunch of hypotheses, right? And so one of the ideas we had was if you had a temperature sensor and your refrigerator failed, it would prevent a lot of product loss, right? If you're in pharma, it might be lots of product or samples or something like that. If food and beverage, you know, a lot of temperature sensitive product. So we kind of went in thinking, we just put these on the walk-in freezers. We basically sound an alarm or do an SMS alert if something was broken and then we'd be heroes, right? Like, because we'd save tens of thousands of dollars of product. We deployed these sensors and it was kind of crickets. Like, you know, you put the sensors in and it turns out in 2015, refrigerators were really good. And so we didn't know that because we thought these things must break, etc. And so it was actually our customers.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  I remember one of our first customers was Cowgirl Creamery. So they make these like fancy cheeses you see at Whole Foods, like $10 cheese. And they said, you know, we like the idea, seems useful. Our fridges and freezers don't really break. Can we move these around? We said, yeah, sure. Where do you want to put them? And it turns out they had a real problem, which was the cheese was going bad when it was out for delivery. So they'd be delivering from their operations up in Petaluma to Whole Foods all over the Bay Area. And it was a pretty warm summer that year in 2015. And they were discovering that loads were getting rejected because people were saying, hey, this cheese is sweaty or we're not going to take delivery. And it turns out the temperature sensors that they put on their vans started going off. And so there were temperature anomalies.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  What was going on is the delivery folks were leaving the doors open by accident. Like, they'd just forget to latch them. The hot air would come in, it would ruin the product. And so that was actually the first use case that really started, you know, getting some traction. And then they asked us, can we get a couple more? We said, absolutely. We made them some more. And then they asked us, is it okay? Is this a secret or are we allowed to tell other people in the industry? Because this is very useful. So that's how we got initial traction. And then we'd spend the next week with them and we discovered that they knew when things were going wrong, but they didn't know where. And so they could tell you at 2:30, there was an issue, but they had no idea which Whole Foods it was. And so they asked us, is there any way that you can sense the location? And we said, yeah, that's

• 9:21Speaker 01

  easy enough. We ordered a little GPS puck off Amazon, wrote some firmware, showed up that, you know, the next day. And all of a sudden, like light bulbs went off for everyone. So anyway, that was kind of that initial iteration.

• 9:33Logan Bartlett?

  That it's interesting. And so how long had you been at with the temperature sensors before this this moment happened?

• 9:41Speaker 01

  It was pretty quick. So we started the company late spring of 2015, right around this time of year. And I think we had these initial prototypes in June. So we talked, you know, first 90 days, initial product. And then that iteration process was in the first month, really.

• 9:58Logan Bartlett?

  And so in terms of selling that product itself, the value prop, if you were ordering off of Amazon and writing some firmware around it, was it clearly the, it wasn't proprietary hardware that you were using? And so was the value prop, the the software that you sort of built around it?

• 10:17Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. So the hardware was a means to an end. We just need to get the data into the cloud. At first, it was the temperatures, then it was GPS locations. And, you know, it was commodity hardware, like you were saying, is relatively inexpensive. But the customer wasn't in a position to put those pieces together. Cowgirl Creamery was not going to go on Amazon and write firmware and do all that work. We could do that for them and give it to them in a plug and play sort of form factor. And their interest was not even the hardware, it was the dashboard. So they wanted to see the map of where these trucks were. They wanted to see the graphs of temperature. They wanted email and SMS alerts. So it was all software was where the value was. The hardware was essentially the bridge to get the data in the cloud.

• 10:55Logan Bartlett?

  The timing of the the market opportunity is important in any market, but could this have happened?

• 11:04Logan Bartlett?

  A year to five before, or was there something unique that shifted around that time, be it on a smartphone penetration or Google Map API or something? Was there anything that happened within that? Or was it possible it could have happened a little bit earlier?

• 11:17Speaker 01

  You know, it's hard to say. I do think about that pretty often. One of the big things we benefited from was the 4G network being mature at the time we were starting the company. And if you remember by 2015, you could stream YouTube in HD on your phone, right? That meant that the marginal or incremental cost of data was very, very low because you're streaming HD video content. So sending temperature data samples is really inexpensive. So that was one. The smartphone wave, I think, commoditized pretty high-end hardware. So you could run Linux on a little computer. It was super rugged and robust and you could build it for under a hundred dollars. And so that was again possible by 2015. And then a little bit later, and happy to talk about the other products, the video

• 11:59Speaker 01

  products we built were enabled by low-cost AI inference. And so this is even not, not this year, but a couple of years ago, we saw this pattern, this curve, and that unlocked a ton more value. Wouldn't have been, wouldn't have made a lot of sense to build chips for this use case, but you could piggyback off the smartphone chips and then video chips.

• 12:17Logan Bartlett?

  I do want to talk about the journey of going multi-product, but there was a, there was an ELD mandate, right? That happened at some point in the early days that, how much that shift the, the demand or the urgency on the buyer's side to move forward with a solution like yours?

• 12:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so ELD is basically an hours of service logging mandate. So it's how many hours has someone been on the road if they're in commercial trucking? Congress passed this, I think in 2017, basically to improve safety because people are getting accidents from working long hours. We didn't know about this mandate when we started because we were outsiders and frankly, most of the customers, even when we asked them about it, they're like, it's not going to pass. So everyone thought it wasn't going to happen. It ended up passing and kind of getting shoved through at the very last minute. And so the whole industry started to scramble. We were a relatively small company revenue scale wise. I think these numbers are all public since they're in our S1, but we did about a million dollars in AR that first product year of 2016.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  The mandate passed in 2017 and we grew from one to 17 million. So it was rapid acceleration for us. So I do think it was a catalyst in terms of that growth, but it was a kind of one time thing because there was a moment in time you had to be compliant by the end of that year. So it's not like we could bank on that going forward. So it was a great way to get off the ground. And I actually think it got a lot of customers thinking about technology because before they could kind of resist it or not worry about it because they're so busy. But now they had to figure out how to comply. And while they're putting in technology, well, how do you get more value out of it?

• 13:45Logan Bartlett?

  And so you went multi-product in the early days. When did you start selling the camera product as well?

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the safety product was, I think, born. We started beta testing it in our first year. So we got the GPS product out there. Customers loved it and we started hearing an interesting question, which was, hey, this thing is great. Is there a dash camera like this that you recommend? And I think I heard that maybe half a dozen times. And we said, well, if we built a dash camera, would you use them? They say, yeah, absolutely, because they wanted the ease of use. So that's what we did. We basically went back on Amazon, sponsored by Amazon. Got like a Logitech webcam as a proof of concept, plugged in the USB port, did the same thing, wrote some firmware, brought it to the customers. And they loved it because they could now see what happened, where it happened, when it happened in full HD. And because of the 4G network, we were able to stream it. So no SD cards.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  You didn't have to call anyone. You could just see it from the cloud. So that product, I think, was introduced in the spring of 2017. So about a year, year and a half into product sales.

• 14:45Logan Bartlett?

  Was there any resistance, conventional Silicon Valley wisdom is nail one product before going multi-product? Was there internal resistance to doing more than one thing initially? Or how did you sort of think about the opportunities there, but also it could be a distraction?

• 15:03Speaker 01

  You know, I think internally, we were obviously, we had our plates full because this product was taking off on the telematic side. But I think the company is wired for solving problems. So the ELD mandate technically is a different product in some sense. It's a compliance product. So we had to build mobile apps and workflows and figure out all the compliance engine kind of stuff behind the scenes. At the same time, we're introducing the camera, but everyone was pretty excited to do it because customers were just going for it and they were they were adopting the entire platform. So I think at a product and engineering level, even though the team was getting stretched thin, they wanted to like push into it. And then I think from a business perspective, we knew that the opportunity was to be a data platform. We never wanted to be a telematics company. That was never part of the charter.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  We were just trying to find that foothold. And as we found more and more use cases, more problems, we were pretty excited.

• 15:51Logan Bartlett?

  How did you structure the teams in the early days to make sure that enough resources were dedicated to a separate team and product as you as you got the camera, the safety product off?

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think structure would be a strong word because we were relatively small.

• 16:03Logan Bartlett?

  How many people were there?

• 16:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So the whole company was a couple of dozen people at that point. Engineering teams were relatively small.

• 16:08Logan Bartlett?

  Not a lot of structure.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Not a lot of structure. We did, of course, have this vision of the platform. So we had a backend infrastructure team that would essentially figure out how are we going to store all this data and manage it? Then we had application teams. So telematics was an application. Compliance kind of sat right next to that and was deeply integrated for ELD and then safety become became another application. And then over the years, we added equipment monitoring and a bunch of other ones.

• 16:33Logan Bartlett?

  The technology that that preventing safety accidents and as that came to be was, it sounds like people were asking for that as a as a thing that you could offer. Was it simply accidents were picking up and it seemed like the a good thing to be doing and monitoring the drivers? Or how did how were they actually thinking about it at the time?

• 16:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll give you some context here. So accidents happen just statistically, right? And if you're running a fleet and you have a hundred or a thousand vehicles, you're probably getting in an accident every week and sometimes every day. A lot of those accidents are not the driver's fault. And the unfortunate thing is these customers, these companies have big logos on the sides of their trucks. So they get the finger pointed at them expecting like a big payout. So the core use case was actually exoneration to help the driver explain what really happened and show to, you know, police officer, insurance company, that sort of thing.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  The way the customers were doing this before us was to actually buy dash cameras, like what you see in an Uber or Lyft, the same use case, right? And they were pulling the SD card if an accident happened and, you know, showing it to the fleet manager. So we basically were automating that. As we did that, and our first product was outward facing only, we started to realize these accidents were being caused in many cases, not by the driver, but sometimes it was the driver and it was because they were distracted. So if you think about the timeline here, it's 2016. Everyone at that point did have a smartphone in their pocket and there were all these great apps, right? There's Instagram and, you know, WhatsApp and all this kind of stuff.

• 18:06Logan Bartlett?

  You could stream YouTube.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  You could stream YouTube. You could listen to some great podcasts. And what was going on were the drivers were getting distracted by their phone, right? The fleet managers, the safety managers knew this and they wanted to figure out how to break that habit. So they started coaching their drivers using the dash cameras. So it was a sort of interesting confluence in terms of timing, but accident rates did start going up then and they actually kept going up for a couple of years because this problem became kind of deeper and deeper.

• 18:33Logan Bartlett?

  And so now, as you thought about like the functional use case of like alerting people when they're doing that, and if folks have looked at any video, they can see some of the alerts that go on. Was there any resistance on the driver's side or the customer's side of like the monitoring of them and the big brother element of it? Or was that, hey, the managers cared and they wanted it and so it wasn't really your problem to deal with?

• 18:58Speaker 01

  You're on, you're in the company's truck, you're on the company's time. So they could mandate it, but you also have to remember frontline workforces have high labor turnover. So basically if people don't like working in your organization, they're out of there. So you want to bring people along. Ultimately, because this is safety, I think there was a lot of buy-in and people knew that they had a bad habit. What they didn't want was big brother watching them. So we did a lot of kind of user studies and spending time, again, in the field with drivers. And what we learned was, you know, they wanted to be better. They didn't want to get an accident. No one wants to get hurt on the job. So we built in functionality to do things like alert them in the cab instantly, like within a second or two seconds. And then use that as a nudge. So that's a more recent feature we announced, but the idea being that we're not going to report this to the head office. We just want to

• 19:43Speaker 01

  break your habit of looking at your phone. And doing the real time feedback loop actually changed the game in terms of reducing risk. So it is a material improvement in terms of people's awareness that they have this problem. And drivers got it. So we actually ended up getting to this point where our biggest advocates would be drivers. And we would say, let's not go after the worst drivers. Let's reward the best drivers. And we created leaderboards, safety scores, rewards programs with our customers. And that made it a positive feedback loop, which has continued even to today.

• 20:13Logan Bartlett?

  Is there data you've shared publicly about like decreasing accidents or anything that you can?

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll give you a sort of example. So you're probably familiar with DHL, right? Yellow parcel delivery vans everywhere. They're a big customer of ours and we're in every one of those vans. They put our cameras out there and they reduced the number of accidents they were in by about a quarter, like 26%. It's pretty significant. Even more interesting was the cost. So they self-insure, given their scale. Their insurance costs actually got cut in half because those accidents they were getting in were some of the worst ones. So we prevented the bad accidents. And to your point around driver buy-in, the other thing that happened was driver turnover rates actually got cut in half, too. So people are twice as likely to stay with DHL after the rollout of this technology because they felt like the company had their back. So it was a win kind of all around.

• 21:04Logan Bartlett?

  That's fascinating.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:05Logan Bartlett?

  And so this ultimately proved to be a beachhead into transportation initially. Was that the wedge market? But you've since expanded into other industries. Was that always the goal? Was land with something and expand? Or how did that actually come to be?

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, kind of going back to the beginning, we started with this vision of, hey, how do we connect operations? Transportation logistics was not really the first industry, as I mentioned, like we were working with food and beverage companies. But what we discovered were the biggest challenges were in the field. So logistics companies were pretty sophisticated about field operations. They were kind of natural early adopters of trying these new technologies. And they wanted something better. They actually wanted realtime tracking in 2016, right? They were really frustrated that they would get these breadcrumbs that would update every five or 15 minutes. I remember one customer showed me the system they were using, and I kid you not, it was based on MapQuest. And this is like a decade after I thought MapQuest went away. So that's what they were working with. So the tools were

• 22:02Speaker 01

  not so great. So anyway, logistics ended up being the first use case or first industry that really opened up. But from there, we kind of went industry by industry because it turns out 80% of the problems were the same across different markets.

• 22:14Logan Bartlett?

  Fascinating. So you've talked about the 80/20 rule of product development. Can you can you explain what this means and how you actually operationalize that?

• 22:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, just kind of piggybacking off the industry conversation. We work with customers in food and beverage and logistics. We work with customers in construction. And then we work with, you know, state and local government. It turns out 80% of their use case is the same. They want realtime GPS tracking. They want to be safer on the roads. They want to be compliant, all that kind of stuff. So there, we're able to essentially bring the product across the platform. But 20% of these cases is much more unique to that industry. So it turns out, there are tons of cement mixers out on the roads. They have really specialized software that is aware of like what the mix is, how heavy it is, how much water is in there, all that kind of stuff. So they want to integrate with

• 23:02Speaker 01

  that. Same thing if you're in food and beverage and you're delivering produce. Turns out there's specialized routing software that understands the Christmas of lettuce and which order you deliver stuff in. It doesn't make sense for us to build that. So we integrate there. So that's the 20. And we're always looking for that kind of 80/20 split.

• 23:21Logan Bartlett?

  We talked about getting FaceTime in the early days with customers was an important thing to product development. Did you end up productizing the process of getting feedback from customers? I had heard a story in the early days of Meraki, maybe you built in some mechanism of customers getting feedback in there. So how did that actually play out with Sam Sora and maybe speak to how you productized it within Meraki as well?

• 23:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, so well, at Meraki, there was a dashboard, which is what you use to manage your network. And the way we'd get feedback from IT managers is there was a little box in the corner that said, I wish this page would... And the user would just type in whatever they wanted. The most common wish was make me a sandwich, by the way, so. We never quite got there, but it was

• 24:03Logan Bartlett?

  It's like Mickey Mouse getting votes for the presidential election.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. But we got a lot of great feedback and some of it was UI related. I wish this page would let me do this report. Some of this was related to just product functionality. And so we brought that same kind of idea with us to Samsara and we have a feedback button. Takes a screenshot of the full, full customer contacts. It tells us who they are and it actually gets piped into Slack channels directly to the product and engineering team. So the software developers working on the product can hear directly from customers. And that's actually something that scales with, you know, we have tens of thousands of customers. We have, you know, growing number of R and D engineers. This is actually something you can scale up with the company over time.

• 24:41Logan Bartlett?

  I'd like to ask a question on the 80 20 rule of, was that a lesson learned from Maraki? Cause I, I had heard in the early days, there was a bunch of one-off stuff related to networking that maybe you guys did. And I don't know if that was a, if that was the lesson you learned is like, hey, we gotta pick the core 80%.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, you clearly did your research. So we, we built some kind of esoteric networking products. Again, our background was computer networking research, so we could kind of build anything. And in the very early days of Maraki, we were helping build big free wifi networks to cover cities. Like I think, if you remember City of San Francisco, there was a big initiative to free wifi. This is like almost 20 years ago now. And to do that, you need a lot of kind of complicated software. Like, how do you route packets for hundreds of users? How do you route it across the mesh network, all that stuff? So we were building that at Maraki. And because we knew how to write the software, but also build the hardware, we did some innovative things. Like we put three radios into a really small enclosure.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  We added solar panel support. We did a bunch of like, kind of one-offy stuff. And as an engineer, it was a fun challenge. Like, can you do this, right? Nobody else done this, can you do this? From a business perspective, maybe not the best idea because it just took you deeper and deeper into these really niche markets. Turns out if you were a school or a retailer, you didn't need a solar panel access point with three radios on it. You needed something that was plug and play. It needed to be designed well, it kind of blend into the ceiling, that kind of thing. And so it was taking us down into these weird rabbit holes. And at Maraki, we basically discovered you gotta pull back, solve the common case, solve it across these industries. And that's going to make a much bigger impact.

• 26:22Logan Bartlett?

  Interesting. There's a balance in allocating capital from a product development standpoint between what's already in market, what's on the come, and then maybe aspirational moonshots or something. I don't know if that's the right framing, but how do you think about the split of how you want to invest your time on those three vectors?

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think time allocation and capital allocation are kind of the two of the biggest jobs, at least as a CEO. The way we think about it is we want to double down on things that are working. So as fun as it is to work on brand new products, you can't allocate 100% of your capital and time towards them. We operate on what we call a 70-20-10 kind of split. 70% of our investment dollars and basically the time of the team is going towards making our core products and our platform better. And that might be scalability. We tend to have larger and larger customers every year. So how do we satisfy the needs of someone who has 40,000 trucks on the road instead of 4,000 or 400? How do you provide customer reporting and APIs, all that kind of good stuff? That tends to be in the 70%

• 27:25Speaker 01

  allocation. And the key there is if you have a big enough market opportunity like we do, we're only a few percent penetrated. There's still, you know, 90% of our market hasn't used him sorry yet. And so you want to make sure you're building a great product for that core market. The 20% that comes after that is the stuff that's on the immediate horizon. That would be not a moonshot, but functionality you can see in your eye that that should make a big difference with the customer. Maybe they haven't even asked for it, but it should happen. So that requires a stretch and that's where the 20% comes from. And then the 10% is the longer term stuff that might not really produce material revenue for the next one to three years, but could actually be a really big deal a couple of years out. So it's almost like seed planting up.

• 28:05Logan Bartlett?

  And how do you think about that 10% of at what point to give it more oxygen versus cut bait because you might be wasting time?

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's the decision. So, you know, if you're taking risks, that means you're trying a bunch of things, many of which won't work. If you knew they were going to work, they should probably be in the 20% bucket, right? So the idea is actually graduate from the 10% to the 20% bucket, make it something that we are going to ship and earn revenue from in the next, you know, one to three years. That process basically is around identifying product market fit. Do you have happy customers? Are you getting asked for more product? What's engagement look like? That sort of thing.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  Hey guys, this is Rashad. I work with Logan on the show and I wanted to take a quick break to tell you about Redpoint's other podcast, Unsupervised Learning. Unsupervised Learning is our AI podcast where we interview guests from companies like Perplexity, OpenAI, Adobe, and many others about the topical things that are happening in the very, very rapidly developing landscape of AI. So if you're interested in going deeper, check out the link in this description for our YouTube channel, but also wherever you get your podcasts. So back to the show.

• 29:10Logan Bartlett?

  I've heard as you scaled as CEO, you focused on dropping responsibilities along the way. Were there things that you held on to longer than you should have in retrospect that stand out?

• 29:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I need to drop even more responsibilities. I'm reminded of. So there are a lot of things that are super fun about being a founder. One of them is being able to have that close connection between the customer and the product and being involved in all the nitty gritty operations. That can actually become a bit of a problem if you let it go on too long because then you're actually involved in the product design meetings and you need to be involved in the bug meetings. You're in all those details, which means you're not involved in recruiting or in some cases, talking to investors are kind of the broader functions. And so every year I basically go through this kind of self-eval reflection process of where did my time go? Did it need to go there and what should be different about the next year?

• 30:08Speaker 01

  And because the business is scaled every single year, it forces you to say, okay, I'm kind of overheating on this. So I would say product is an area that I'm still very involved in, but more on the roadmap and sort of the kind of strategic decisions as opposed to there was a time where I would see every check in, like all the code being written.

• 30:26Logan Bartlett?

  More than 20% probably.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  More than 20% stuff and I miss that tactical feel, but it's just not something that I could scale.

• 30:33Logan Bartlett?

  Not sustainable.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:34Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's an interesting lesson. Were there transitions that you've made recently? Post-IPO and things that, yeah, I guess stand out?

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say the business has grown. When we went public, we were about half a billion in revenue. We just crossed a billion in ARR last year. We're now profitable. And so a lot of the focus in that post-IPO period was around financial discipline, getting more efficient. And this wasn't coming externally. We just wanted to get there and demonstrate we could do it. And we got there even faster than what we'd set out to do. So I was really proud of that. But at this point, we have a sustainable model and we just need to keep it scaling at this high level of growth. And that's where my focus is. So it's almost like just hitting refresh on what's the most important thing for me to focus on. So it wasn't that that's not important anymore. It's more that we figured out how to do it. So now we have to figure out how to keep scaling and how to keep adding products and markets.

• 31:29Logan Bartlett?

  In terms of tracking where your time goes, do you have methods? Or is this more a broad brush, like zooming out of like where you spent time? Or are you actually tactically color coding things within your calendar?

• 31:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I will print out my calendars and, you know, actually do a time allocation. We've figured out how to automate this because that's not the most scalable thing either. But once you get the hang of it, it actually happens pretty quickly and it's low overhead compared to how much time you have to allocate. So I kind of think of it just the way we think of FPNA. Like you want to have your plan versus actuals essentially in terms of what you were up to.

• 32:05Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, Google Calendar does a decent job of allowing you to color code it or whoever's working with you to color code it.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, my biggest challenge, I get a lot of phone calls from folks at the company, customers, things like that. So I need to figure out a way to connect my phone into that.

• 32:18Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, interesting. Yeah, it's hard to know the batch or the ad hoc stuff that happens. Rehiring yourself as CEO along the way, I assume this ties into that concept of the responsibilities. But can you maybe speak about the concept of rehiring yourself and how you think about it?

• 32:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you think about it, as a founder CEO, you have the most change in your job, right? Because when you're small, like I remember at Samsara even, we were ordering furniture from Ikea and I would make sure it showed up and help make some of the desks, right? I no longer assemble our office furniture, but you know, you do whatever it takes.

• 32:53Logan Bartlett?

  That was a responsibility shed in the early days.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. But I'm actually glad we did it because it set the right tone. Like we're a very hands-on company. So the way that I think about it is as organizations growing underneath you, you have to be hitting refresh. Otherwise, you're going to slow everything down, right? So the only way to do that is on a periodic basis, I do about once a year now, is to go back and it's kind of doing like a 360 review of yourself and then figure out, well, what does the company need from me next? And you can write out the bullet points and then you check the time allocation. It sounds really simple. I think a lot of people, myself included, get caught up in the day to day and you get sort of whisked away in one direction or the other, and then you're over allocated or under allocated somehow.

• 33:33Logan Bartlett?

  You never had ambitions to be a CEO, right? The RoofNet was, or Meraki was an evolution of RoofNet and then you became a CEO and had a great success with Meraki and now here you are again doing it. What did you learn about managing people along the way that perhaps was unintuitive to someone that is listening to this and is trying to figure out how to scale their managerial capabilities of a team?

• 34:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, a lot of learnings along the way, mostly by just learning by doing, right? So the background, as I mentioned earlier, I was a PhD student before either of these companies and actually got pretty close to finishing. So we're kind of like all but dissertation. So my plan had been to go into academia and teach and do research.

• 34:20Logan Bartlett?

  Do your parents still ask you if you're going to finish?

• 34:22Speaker 01

  They do. And what's funny is I think MIT gave us 20 years to come back, like I'm on leave technically. So that was 2006. I've got two more years.

• 34:30Logan Bartlett?

  You've got two years.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Exactly. But what was, what was interesting for me was leading a research project and leading a small company is actually very similar because you're, you're doing a lot of juggling. You're actually doing a lot of communicating, you know, to people working on the project, to others sort of in and around. So the similarities were there. Managing at scale and leading at scale is actually quite different. And so what I try to do is, is learn from the best, right? I watched a ton of YouTube videos. I listened to interviews and I'm always trying to figure out, okay, what's the difference between, we're about 3,000 employees now, what's the difference between 3,000 and 30,000? What are some creative ways that you can learn to operate at that scale? And it's a really fun challenge. And so if you're an engineer by nature, it's, you kind of think of it as problem solving

• 35:14Speaker 01

  as opposed to I need to go read the stack of like. Harvard MBA books or something like that.

• 35:19Logan Bartlett?

  That's interesting. Yeah. YouTube is a fantastic resource for it's amazing how how close you can get to anyone in the world and hear their insights.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. And and you can kind of do it on a Sunday night or whenever you have some spare time. And I love the long form because it's not a newspaper interview where it's been cut down. It's actually them sharing their experience.

• 35:38Logan Bartlett?

  Totally. Yeah. In the early days of Samsara, you would actually go two days on site every every week. Is that right?

• 35:46Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, every.

• 35:47Logan Bartlett?

  I assume that hasn't scaled. What are you doing? I guess it's an interesting principle. What are you doing to that end today?

• 35:54Speaker 01

  It's evolved. So in the early days, because we were gathering all this feedback, we were deploying product. It was really important to go on site. During the pandemic, actually, it was simply not possible to go out on site because of protocols and that's sort of thing. So I switched doing Zoom check-ins. And this would be with both existing customers who've been on the platform for a while and then prospects, which is just customer meetings. And that was really interesting because all of a sudden I could see a customer in California and someone in Ohio and then talk to, you know, an operation in London. And so it was really amazing. And I learned the importance of being able to get a much broader set of experiences in. So not just California, in other words, but all over the world because we have customers all over. So as the pandemic sort of wore off and you could travel again,

• 36:37Speaker 01

  now what I do are travel weeks. I've got one coming up next week. I'll be on the road. I think I'm in like seven cities in four days or something like that. But that's how I learn is by going and setting foot on site, spending time with the customer. In many cases, we're talking to the C-level execs, which is great. But I'll ask them, could I get a tour of the dispatch center or the safety managers, you know, group or that sort of thing. And you learn a lot about what goes on on the front lines from there.

• 37:02Logan Bartlett?

  How many people was Meraki when it sold?

• 37:06Speaker 01

  Probably low 300s, I think.

• 37:08Logan Bartlett?

  Okay, so and then you stayed. How big was it by the time you left Cisco, the business unit?

• 37:12Speaker 01

  It grew a lot. So Meraki, as part of Cisco, continued just, we were doubling revenue, actually a little faster.

• 37:20Logan Bartlett?

  So thousands of people.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got to about 1500 or maybe a little more than that. I'd have to really think about it.

• 37:25Logan Bartlett?

  So so 3000 today, 1500. Hundred at Maraki, so forty five hundred, you've probably hired, you know, some number six thousand or something, whatever, whatever it is. So a lot of hiring that you've done and a lot of different reps of interviews, I'm sure, and asking questions. Philosophically, do you gravitate towards people that spike in certain dimensions and augmenting maybe shortcomings or questions about them? Or do you do you tend to gravitate more to well roundedness and high floors of what individuals can do?

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, there have been, again, this is something that I learned kind of by trial and error. There have been people that interview really well, but perform poorly. And so what I try to do is actually understand that case the most. Like if someone interviews poorly, you're not hiring them. So it's actually not so bad. If someone interviews really well, has a great looking resume, but then shows up and doesn't gain traction, the question is why? Because clearly they were good enough to get your attention, they're good enough to get through the process. And often that's a question of fit, right? So maybe they were good at their previous company, but maybe their previous company was a hundred thousand employees. And so the job was very different than the job in a much smaller organization. So what I look for is that kind of spike. I look for someone who can both understand the big picture,

• 38:45Speaker 01

  understand what the company is trying to do, but also get into the details when needed. We call it core sampling at Samsara. It's this idea that, you know, even your leaders, they have technical knowledge, even in sales or marketing or wherever, where they can get into the details. And that's a really great way of just checking that are we doing the right things? And if we're not, like fixing it, right? I've found that many execs that I've hired over the years where it didn't work out, didn't have that kind of capability or weren't trained that way. And so it's a big shift. On the other hand, there are many other people we've hired from great companies that have scaled, that still have that sort of core ability.

• 39:19Logan Bartlett?

  Is there something you can ask in an interview that tries to tease out if someone has that competency to scale or drill down and actually do the job in the full manner that it requires?

• 39:31Speaker 01

  I've found that it's about the details. So I will ask them about, you know, like if they're a sales rep, for example, you can ask someone about a big win they're proud of. And You know, sometimes people will talk about the customer they sold or how big the deal was. Sometimes they'll tell you about how they got in the door, right? They'll say, I talked to so and so and they'll use full names. They'll give you like sort of crystal clear detail and it's almost like you're there. And it's almost like they're reliving it. That to me tells me that they were involved, even if they weren't like doing every single step. They were aware of it. Same thing in engineering and this applies even to like, you know, I remember when I interviewed a person who's now our SVP of Software Engineering, he was able to give me details about like the codex and things like that, you know, that's, that's what, and it's not necessary for an SVP level job,

• 40:16Speaker 01

  but it just shows they, they care.

• 40:18Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, you can't bullshit at that level of specificity.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:21Logan Bartlett?

  And you're not making it up.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:23Logan Bartlett?

  It's not platitudes or hollow.

• 40:26Logan Bartlett?

  There's a balance of when you get to a company of 3,000 people, there's a tension that inevitably exists of hiring people to fill individual roles while also keeping the bar high and not settling for the people you're seeing. How do you think about that trade off and making decisions to actually bring people in or hire?

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I think that's, it's really key is keeping the high bar because there is an urgency bias. Like everyone needs that role filled and you kind of need it filled yesterday. It's more of a, you all have to have an appreciation that if we hire the wrong fit, we're not going to achieve our goals or objectives. And it actually becomes painful for everyone involved, right? Like the individual, the team, like everyone kind of suffers a little bit. So sometimes it has to be learned by experience. And then sometimes it's, you can set up the process such that there are like third party checks. I think Amazon calls these bar raisers, right? Folks that aren't necessarily even in that immediate hiring vicinity that are just there to maintain the standard and kind of be a bit of an audit. We do something similar and it works really well for us.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  And actually, again, kind of sets the tone of we're going to be disciplined about this because we're building for the long term. We're not just trying to like fill the hiring number for this quarter. We're trying to build a real company here that's going to endure. You've got to have high quality talent for that.

• 41:41Logan Bartlett?

  Into that, that bar raiser, Dole, is there one task with any senior hire? Or how does that actually play out?

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, we call them talent calibrators and Sam Sora. And what we've done is essentially go and look at folks' track records of, you know, people that have been hiring managers. How have they done over time in terms of their accept and reject rates and things like that? But also, did the people they hired go on to have really great performance ratings? If they did, that's someone we want. They have good talent taste in other words. Not everyone has that ability. It's a really impressive skill. And so we will ask them to be on the final round of interview panels. And our interviews are basically principles based. So in terms of how we operate, we're trying to check for that. And this is one of those checks towards the end of the panel. So they're not overwhelmed by the front of the funnel, but they are kind of like a final check.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  And the idea is people respect the opinion of, hey, you know, they're, they're a good taste of talent, right?

• 42:41Logan Bartlett?

  When Sam Sora moved to a flexible workplace, when did, when did that happen?

• 42:47Speaker 01

  It was a pandemic.

• 42:47Logan Bartlett?

  Pandemic, 2020.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:49Logan Bartlett?

  Talent pool obviously went up quite a bit. How did you approach operationalizing that?

• 42:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:56Logan Bartlett?

  That change? It sounds like you were forced into it, but I assume it unlocked a big pool of, of talent and people you could hire from as well. So maybe talk through that.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. And I think this is now considered like an unpopular stance because everyone said, come on back in.

• 43:10Logan Bartlett?

  The pendulum swing back and forth.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Like it's, it's too hard to keep track of. For us, it was again, the pandemic that basically got us flipped. We were a very much in-person, like five days a week kind of culture. And I think about 80% of our headcount was here in the San Francisco Bay area. So it was very much a centralized culture. So really big shift for us to like adopt flexible work. We were in that camp of like, oh, this is only a couple of weeks and then we'll kind of go back to the office. You know, a couple of weeks turned to a couple of months and you say, well, we have to get really good at this.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  But to your point, the unlock for us was the talent TAM. We were now able to hire AI talent up in Seattle. We never had a Seattle office. There were a ton of people who worked for Amazon and Microsoft who had, you know, the ability, but didn't want to move, right? Now we can go back and hire them and we found dozens of great engineers up there. Same thing, there were salespeople out in New York City and Austin, Texas and other places. So we started seeing these pretty awesome hotspots of talent. And as we leaned into it, we said, this is great from a raw talent perspective. Now, how do we engage them and onboard them? And so that's where we had to start coming up with ways of, well, how do we want to like actually communicate and, and bring people along? So it's, it's this continuous journey. I think we're trying different tactics, but it's working really well for us.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  And most of the company now was hired in flexible mode. So the majority, like we flipped, you know, we were talking about 80 20s. Now 80% of our workforce is outside the Bay Area.

• 44:35Logan Bartlett?

  There's a keeper rule or framework that you've used for hiring that if that person left now, how would I, how would I feel about it? Do you have any other principles that you use to continually evaluate if people are succeeding in a visual role?

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a few. The keeper test for me is actually just a good way of sanity checking because it tends to be that people we hire are good people. Like you like spending time with them and so on. But if the business is scaling, the company is scaling, what they need to do in their role might change drastically, right? And so if they were good at the role two years ago, they may not be good two years from now. So the, this is again, a sort of hitting refresh sort of ability of, do you think that, yeah, if they left, would you, would you do something to go out of your way to hang on to them? So that's really worked well. I find myself having to do that sometimes and it's really tough because you, you really gain trust and connection with people.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  The other thing that we do is we look for those spikes, right? So there's a spike when they're interviewing, which is a kind of attention to detail. But then there's the step change. So especially in exec roles, did the company materially change your benefit? Maybe six months after they started or 12 months after they started, can we point to something that they did? And that might be a new program, it might be a new product, like there's lots of different ways to manifest. If you can't point to that, it's like, what is the impact that they're having? They could be a great person to work with, but if they're not driving change in the organization, helping upgrade the company. They're probably not adding the value that you think they are.

• 46:11Logan Bartlett?

  On the fundraising side, you've been fortunate enough to work with some legendary venture capitalists. You had Doug Leoni from Sequoia, Maraki, Marc Andreessen was.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, little known guy. Yep.

• 46:21Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, people might have heard of him. And then Hamad from General Catalyst was an investor as well. What, um, how did you land with these individuals? What were your motivations in picking different board members besides, you know, no personality and very timid people across the board?

• 46:39Speaker 01

  Well, kind of rewinding the clock back to, it must have been 2006, like when we started working with Doug at Sequoia. Back then, we were a company that was bootstrapped. So Maraki, we could talk about Maraki for an hour, but we came out of grad school. We were in Boston. We had no access to capital. We had no money of our own. There were not a lot of angels back then. And so the way we got the company off the ground was essentially by selling product and getting those early customers. By the time we came out to California and started scaling the business, we got to about a million dollars in revenue with no outside money. And that got the attention of a few venture capitalists. And so we actually had leverage in our negotiation of who would we want to work with?

• 47:23Speaker 01

  And, um, you know, I think for us, it was Sequoia, very well-known firm, obviously very much top tier and well-known at that point, but we didn't know how to choose between partners. So we were like, well, who runs the place? And Doug was, I think, you know, Doug and Mike were the MDs at that point. And that was sort of tongue in cheek because we knew there were a bunch of different partners. But we actually said, what this guy, what Doug knew was sales. What we knew is technology. So we didn't need a technologist to join us. We needed someone who could help us grow the business. So it was very complimentary. And it was a bit of a culture shock. I remember the first couple of meetings because we again came from academia. We want to talk about the algorithms and all that stuff.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  It just like was not of interest to Doug like and we learned a lot from him over the next couple of years about that.

• 48:13Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I share a board with Doug and I I know his style in some of those board meetings.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we came to really appreciate it. And the thing that both Doug and Mark and even Hemant, they all have this in common. Because they're so busy, because they have so much going on, they're very direct and they'll just tell you what they're thinking. There's not a lot of kind of playing games.

• 48:33Logan Bartlett?

  High signal.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  High signal, super high signal. And it's not that they're always right, but and they don't need to be right, but they'll just tell you what they're thinking. And, you know, I've really come to appreciate.

• 48:43Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. And so then with Sam Serra and Mark, how did how did that come to be? And I assume having had the success you had, you had options of who you're going to work with. And so how'd you how'd you end up landing there?

• 48:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, so similar process. We were starting Sam Serra in 2015. Andreessen Horowitz didn't exist when or, you know, I think they maybe didn't a seed stage kind of sense when we were growing Meraki. So we never really had had a chance to interact with Mark or Ben. So as we were raising capital for this company, we actually met a bunch of different firms. And some of these relationships we had, some of them were again new firms. And there was about again fit, like who is going to be right for us? What I really liked about Mark was his kind of strategic lens on everything like he's just, he's like a pattern matcher, deep thinker, and is able to kind of sense really minute amounts of signal and see the trend before it happens.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  And so anyway, we kind of got to know them at the firm. We hit it off and kind of went from there.

• 49:45Logan Bartlett?

  So Sam Serra is now a $20 billion business in the public markets, Meraki 1.2. You sort of, those were the three, I mean, some firms came in later into Sam Serra as well, but General Catalyst, Andreessen and Sequoia, those were kind of the three firms you principally worked with on the journey?

• 50:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 50:02Logan Bartlett?

  Interesting. Muraki, you referenced it, but it was kind of lightning in a bottle in terms of finding, you started out with this technology and it was an outgrowth of your PhD project. And then, how did the transition actually come to be that you decided to commercialize it, turn it into a business? Can you take me through those early days?

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's funny that now it seems like lightning in a bottle. At the time, we were just like trying to figure out how we make this thing work, how we make it happen. The sort of quick backstory, you mentioned the RoofNet project. So John and I were building this network called RoofNet as part of our PhD research. And the very creative name was because we were installing antennas on roofs, and so building a network. And we essentially blanketed Cambridge with free Wi-Fi. And this is, I don't know, what, like almost 20 years ago, right, that we were doing this. So Wi-Fi was a brand new technology. We felt like that was going to be the future of how networks were built. And so what we want to do is take that technology, put it in a box. And we figured out how to take

• 51:04Speaker 01

  our research prototype, shrink it from a $3,000 per node setup that was pretty big, down to a single circuit board and get the cost down into the $50 range. So that's what we started with. On the commercialization part, we didn't know the right way to commercialize it. And so we tried a bunch of things. And we basically put it on our website and it started to sell. So what was interesting about Muraki is there was pull. And I wouldn't say it was product-led growth, but it was more hobbyist-type people who were trying this stuff out. And in that first year of selling, that I said we got to about $1 million, these customers took the product to the far reaches of the world. We had a customer

• 51:47Speaker 01

  in like southern Chile, like a village in southern Chile, and they connected their whole town and their school. We had another customer in an island called Natwuru, which we had to go look up. It's like one of the smallest countries recognized by the UN. So that was like their connectivity. And that was really interesting because we got essentially exposure to a global market within the first year. That was the power of the internet. And we wouldn't have known how to do that. And then from there, we were able to iterate. So the way we found the business was actually through this kind of trial and error process. I think if you talk to Doug at Sequoia, he would call those first couple of years really our walk in the woods. Because we kept getting pulled in all these interesting directions. And again, being academics, we were drawn to the novelty of these things.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  And so we did those projects, we were working with Google on wifi here in San Francisco. We came up with an ad-supported wifi model, so we were doing all kinds of stuff. And the crucible moment for us was actually the 2008 financial crisis. So 2008, 2009, we basically realized we couldn't be doing these science projects all the time. Because the funding for those was drying up. We had doubled revenue every single year, by the way, so it wasn't that there was a problem with our P and L. It was more of like, this can't last very long. You know, people won't be deploying free wifi in fishing villages in Chile if there's a financial crisis. And that's actually exactly what happened, that kind of fell off a cliff. The way we figured out the real commercial strategy was in 2009.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  When we took the technology and started selling it to the enterprise. So we actually had to raise prices from, I think, our initial products were like between 50 and 200 dollars. The enterprise products were about a thousand dollars a device and up. And that was a big shift for us. But once we figured that out, it unlocked the rest of the business. Because now we could really reinvest, like we weren't scrapping together little tiny margins. We had a real gross margin. And that let us go hire way more engineers and scale sales and do a bunch of other things.

• 53:44Logan Bartlett?

  Interesting contrast to the early days of SamSara, how purposeful in the market and determining like what, you know, the end market was going to be versus.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm hoping we learned something.

• 53:54Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it seems like you took a different approach to it. And on the sales side, so you ramped into an outbound, was it an outbound enterprise sale along the way there?

• 54:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Meraki was a channels business. Because computer networking, especially enterprise networking, is sold through value of resellers. And that was an ecosystem that had been established by Cisco over like two or three decades. So we were really fortunate, there was an existing channel we could sell into them. And they had relationships with end customers, so that accelerated growth. When we started SamSara, we went looking for the reseller channel, because they must be just like networking. And we discovered that there isn't a networking like VAR channel to this customer. So we developed basically a direct sales force, it's worked really well for us.

• 54:37Logan Bartlett?

  And how much of your team is now in some sales-related function?

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Roughly speaking, half our company is go to market.

• 54:44Logan Bartlett?

  That's what I remember.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of those are direct quota carrying sales reps.

• 54:47Logan Bartlett?

  Which is, which is a long way from just putting it on the website and

• 54:52Speaker 01

  Yes, the polar opposite.

• 54:53Logan Bartlett?

  What have you, what have you learned about like the enterprise sales motion? Or what were some of the counterintuitive lessons of building a company that has a ton of quota carrying sales reps out there?

• 55:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so many. I think as an engineer and a technology person, you tend to think, oh, I can just find stuff online. I'll discover it. I'll buy with my credit. I don't want to talk to anyone, right? Like, you know, that sounds painful. Our buyer, on the other hand, they're an operations buyer. They're a business person. They're trying to solve problems. They need someone to talk to who can demo a product for them and be more consultative, like actually explain like ROI, and this is what you should expect, and this is what's worked for other people. So it's not a pure technical sales, actually a business problem they need solved. And actually, a lot of our customers have told me over the last couple of years, huge reason they went with Samsara is because of that sales experience. They said, you all really showed us what the product can do, but actually help us solve problems. And then you keep that up even after the sale.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  That means we're a technology partner. That's actually what our go to market team is all about, as opposed to just like, you know, dial for dollars or something like that. That makes it much more purposeful because you say, well, these folks are basically consultants to the customer, and they are selling the product, they have quotas, and you know, they're trying to make their numbers. But the way they do that is by solving problems for the customer. So that was a big breakthrough for me. And then the other thing is just that sales is simple, right? Like, you don't want to overcomplicate it. It needs to be repeatable if you're selling into a big market opportunity with a product, not a service. So for us, we're a product company, it needs to be roughly the same product being sold to every customer. You can only do that if it's super repeatable. So anyway, those are maybe the biggest insights.

• 56:31Logan Bartlett?

  In hiring, uh, uh, sales leadership, you brought people over from Morocco that had been more maybe used to the channel driven sales. Was that, um, I mean, it seems like it worked out. You've had people that have ramped with you for a really long time. Was there learning that motion for sales leadership? Was it mostly? Similar or was it a big change of going indirect versus direct?

• 56:56Speaker 01

  It was a gear shift, but I would say the sales folks that joined us from Meraki, they were just really talented and they were smart. And so what they wanted to know is, do we have a repeatable recipe? And that's really what we spent the first couple of years doing is I would actually cold call along with, you know, like pretty much everyone at the company to learn what is that repeatable motion? And once we had that down, the sales leaders were able to come in. They joined us maybe a year or two later. They stayed at Meraki until they said, wow, these folks are really on to something again. And then they said, okay, well, there's no channel. That's okay. How does it work? How do I put calories in and get opportunities out?

• 57:34Logan Bartlett?

  In the early days of Meraki, I'd heard stories of you actually like installing on the roof of potential customers.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 57:42Logan Bartlett?

  Was that in retrospect, was that the doing things that don't scale kind of adage of, I don't know, Y Combinator and Airbnb and all of that? And it was actually an effective means of seeding the market? Or was that to keep your own sanity as you guys were trying to find product market fit in some use cases?

• 58:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I think it was more practical than anything else. At that point in time, we didn't have a huge team. So we didn't have like even sales engineers, right? Were kind of a rarity for us. So we would just essentially fill in the gaps and do the installs. You learn a lot by going hands on. And so we still do it at Samsara. I actually installed some of our products on cement mixers a couple of months ago. And it was funny because I don't think they knew there was the CEO of the company. They just thought it was like a tech. And I think they were really surprised, but in that process, I got to know the folks on that site. I got to see all the other paperwork that they have going on in their world. And it was just a really good reminder of like what it's like on that frontline.

• 58:47Logan Bartlett?

  The opportunity, how many products do you guys have today?

• 58:50Speaker 01

  We have like four or five product families. These are the applications. They're licensed a little bit differently.

• 58:54Logan Bartlett?

  Does that number stay there or do you keep? I mean, do you end up with dozens in your vision?

• 58:59Speaker 01

  We're building a bunch more products right now. And the idea is to have these all sit on the same platform. So the data that flows between the applications is really pretty powerful. And that's context. It's customer context, like location and all the kind of data histories, the AI models. So for us, it's about standing up more and more applications on the platform.

• 59:18Logan Bartlett?

  I heard Doug Leoni say that he had once told you to blow $5 million.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  He did, yeah.

• 59:24Logan Bartlett?

  What, what was the, I don't know if that was meant tongue in cheek or if it was actually a serious request that you go blow $5 billion, but what, do you remember the story of that? And like what the purpose behind it was other than Sequoia trying to invest more money or something?

• 59:42Speaker 01

  I don't think it was that. I actually think it was Doug pushing us to go do outbound marketing. And this is something that must have been in 2011. I can't remember exactly which year, but I do remember the board meeting. And again, we'd just come out of the global financial crisis. Maraki was built with, I think we burned less than $40 million of capital, maybe even less than that, maybe 20, I can't remember. But we were very frugal because we just survived what felt like the beginnings of potentially the Great Depression, right? Like we were really quite cost conscious. And so I think what Doug sensed was that we weren't hitting the gas as hard as we could because we were always trying to make sure

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  that there was an immediate return, you know, in terms of how we were building and how we were selling.

• 1:00:29Logan Bartlett?

  Did you do that? Was, was marketing where it went or?

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  Yes, but I don't think we got quite to $5 million.

• 1:00:35Logan Bartlett?

  But message received.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  Message received. And we started trying a bunch of interesting things and just, this is a sort of funny aside, you know, we'd never done any advertising. We never did the billboard on 101 or any of that kind of stuff. But because this was again, in this sort of shadow of the financial crisis, ads were pretty cheap. And we discovered that you could go get ads at the San Francisco airport that, you know, that you see at the terminal. And it was relatively inexpensive, like $30,000 campaign. So we tried it for like a month. We wanted like, let's see what happens. And then we saw the ads would stay up for a couple of months because they didn't have enough advertisers, didn't want to show empty billboards. So we actually were able to stretch our dollars massively by just trying things. And so anyway, that's always been a lesson is sometimes you just need to try it. You don't know until you do.

• 1:01:17Logan Bartlett?

  Experiment around.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:18Logan Bartlett?

  When you sold Maraki, you wrote a long letter to employees about the inputs and the process that went into it. I guess reading a little bit back to you, but this was an unexpected event for Maraki. When we started out six years ago, we were three guys at MIT wondering where our bootstrap venture would take us over the next few years. Then you go on to say when Cisco approached us with an acquisition offer, our initial reaction was politely say, no, thanks. But when we took our time to think through the implications, first we decided to break it down into two major components. And so you went about being a public company and studying what that would require versus this. I guess what in writing that, what were you trying to convey to the team? How did you go about thinking? I'm sure it's happened.

• 1:01:59Logan Bartlett?

  I don't know of any examples off the top of my head of a CEO sending a note like that to the company. And so what was the inspiration and the purpose?

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  Well, it's funny, I haven't read that note in many years and I still remember writing it. So you took me back to like, I was like writing that on my phone, I think.

• 1:02:13Logan Bartlett?

  Where were you?

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  We were here in San Francisco and a little bit of the context here. This was a deal that happened very quickly and it was because the conditions were right for all the reasons that you just brought up. So I think we met Cisco in October, maybe around October 20th, if I remember correctly. And then we announced the deal the following month around, right before Thanksgiving. It was like November 19th or 20th. And then the deal actually closed December 20th. So it was like very, very fast timeline wise. So we were, we were basically scheduled to announce it to the company.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  And somehow the blog post on the Cisco blog site went live a day early. And you know, these things happen, but that got picked up by some people on Twitter, which then made its way onto like maybe TechCrunch or one of the blogs back then. And we were like, whoa, this is not how we want our team to find out about this thing. So anyway, that's actually, it was the most scale way for me to get a note out to everybody because we were 300 plus people. But we actually spent that Sunday afternoon calling everyone. So the three of us, myself, John and Hans, who's our third founder, we just like kind of split up the list of employees and we just called every single person. And at first people were like surprised if they hadn't read about it or if they had, they were like glad that we were explaining what was up.

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  They'd all seen the email, but then they actually A, understood where we were coming from and B, were really excited about the future. So I think it set the whole thing off in the right direction. It was kind of serendipity. I think our real plan had been the next morning we'd do like an all hands and kind of do it on stage. But I think the email actually gave people an opportunity to process. So it was that, that's a backstory behind that.

• 1:03:53Logan Bartlett?

  You and John studied together at MIT. How'd you get looped in with Hans originally?

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  I'm trying to remember. I remember we met Hans like the first year of grad school. He was a couple of years older than us. He had gone to MIT for his undergrad. I was an undergrad at Stanford and I actually knew his sister sort of through social circles. And oddly enough, I think Hans was out here in the Bay Area, maybe working at VMware. And he would go do CS classes on the side. I'm not even sure why. And we had ended up in the same CS class in California. And so I had familiarity with them when I moved to Boston and we reconnected. So we're kind of a small world phenomenon, if you will. And this was like 2002 or 2003, many years before we started Marquee. So we just kind of became friends.

• 1:04:42Logan Bartlett?

  We've done a podcast with Philip from Verkata and it's amazing. Hans is now the exec chairman of Verkata and it seems to spend, exec chairman can mean a bunch of different things, but it seems that he's a very active exec chairman. I get the feeling he, they split up a lot of responsibility of doing the traditional CEO responsibilities between the two of them. It's amazing, I guess, the three of you have splintered to start two very impressive, fast-growing, integrated hardware, software businesses that seem to be doing really well.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, and Verkata is an impressive business and that's an entirely different space, like security. But I think this idea of building products in an integrated way is really powerful and profound. And it's not limited to just these two companies. I think a lot of people can do it.

• 1:05:31Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, no, it's fascinating. You all use artificial intelligence or especially your cameras and detection around that. What's your perspective? I guess, as we alluded to earlier, you were doing it before it was cool. And talking about inference five years ago or six years ago or whatever it was. What's your perspective on the types of opportunity that AI presents for Samsung going forward?

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I think, you know, one of the key unlocks to great AI is great data. And so we have a, we're fortunate that we have all of this great, pretty structured data about operations. And now we're thinking about not just, you know, AI-based vision inference at the edge, which is what the dash camera products are able to do. But thinking about L L M's, right? Like, okay, we have all of this great data to train over. Can we predict what's going to happen next or what should happen next? Can we look at what the computer thought should happen versus what actually happened? Point out the anomaly and help a customer. Can you fill out a form automatically with as much stuff as the computer knows? Before someone else has to like type it in manually. So there are all these really practical use cases that we're finding.

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  Generative AI and all these brand new AI models can be used for. And it's all enabled by the data.

• 1:06:46Logan Bartlett?

  As you reflect on the Meraki journey and Sam Sora, I assume will be your last. Your last company, but I guess don't presuppose anything. But as you, as you look at building this company for the, the long term. Are there things, obviously how you went about discovering the market opportunity was different, but are there things you reflect on? From the Meraki journey that you did particularly different in Sam Sora? That you reflect and want to impart to future founders that are kind of thinking about mistakes and avoiding them?

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  I, I think of it less as avoiding mistakes and more about working on the right challenges and focusing on it. We talked a bit about a few different things. But if you think about sales, you could have gotten paralyzed saying, I've never built a direct sales motion before. Or you could just pick up the phone and try it. Right? And so I think having that beginner's mind of just trying things, same thing with the market. Like we'd never seen commercial trucking before or worked in a warehouse. We just kind of got out there. That's something that not a lot of second time founders are willing to try because they have experienced success. And they're kind of like arms length about things. Every startup is hard and I just think as long as you remember that, you'll just dive right in.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  If you try to do a startup in easy mode, you're probably not going to succeed. You, you all know like the odds of making it through the funnel are pretty low. So you have to stack the deck as much as possible. So that was probably the biggest learning is don't let the Meraki win. Kind of taint the way that, you know, you approached the second one. And if anything, use it for pattern matching recognition. Like, once we had product market fit at Samsara, we knew what it looked and felt like. We didn't have to ask anyone. We didn't have to wait for a board meeting. We just went for it. And we've been able to do that over and over. And that, I think, has been the benefit of the experience is the pattern matching ability.

• 1:08:37Logan Bartlett?

  From an accidental entrepreneur to a multi-time entrepreneur with two big successes at your back, did you at any point think about doing anything else going to finish the dissertation or whatever it was at MIT?

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:54Logan Bartlett?

  Going back or was, once you got this bug, was it an insatiable thing that you wanted to pursue?

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  No, it was much more of, we did think about doing other things. So, you know, we talked about the Morocco timeline. We left Morocco at the very beginning of 2015. And I think up until that point, we hadn't really taken vacations. Like, we were just like, kind of all in and pretty intense. So, the first kind of order of business was take some time off. My wife and I, we just had our first kids. We had a baby at home. I think John's, they were expecting their first kid. So it was sort of like, okay, let's just take a breather. And I actually did think about going back and finishing the PhD. And we wrote an academic research paper based on some of the data from Morocco. And amazingly, it got into the top conference. What was funny about it, though, is we wrote that paper.

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  We submitted it and it takes a long time to get peer reviews and all that stuff. And we found out about the acceptance like after we left Morocco, or maybe right around that time. And it had been like many months. And that, for me, was a reminder of like, whoa, the feedback loops in academic research are really long compared to, you know, when you're selling products, right? And you kind of know immediately. So anyway, I thought about going back to academia. I don't know, developed some kind of esoteric hobbies. Where I was like tracking satellites out of my backyard and doing all kinds of things. And then I realized I missed building products. I missed working with great teams and just kind of being out there. So that was, that was my journey. My co-founder, John, he went and played video games for a long time.

• 1:10:25Speaker 01

  Cause it was like waking up from a deep sleep or cryogenic stasis. Like, he was just like, went through like eight years of video games and, I don't know, three months. And then also it was like, we gotta get, we gotta go build some things. So, yeah, for us, it was more of a desire to get back to building products.

• 1:10:40Logan Bartlett?

  I'm sure you get asked to mentor or give advice to founders, I guess, as you.

• 1:10:48Logan Bartlett?

  As you look at founders that have been successful, both people maybe you look up to as well as people that you look at and think that they have really high potential, are there commonalities or through lines or consistencies that you see in the the most successful ones that you enjoy working with or anything that stands out?

• 1:11:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think founders come in all different varieties and everybody is a different person, obviously. A couple of the things I've seen that are really unique with great founders is their ability to think about the big picture and like a decades-long strategy and then get into the details, right? It's really remarkable. And then the persistence, like it takes a lot of grit to do this. And that's something that as we were thinking about starting the second company, we knew that there was a high activation energy because it's a big commit, right? You're gonna, you know, if it works, it takes a decade to see it through. And then you want to keep going, right? We're in a mode where we see, we've got like two decades of roadmap ahead of us, like we want to do a lot. That takes a lot

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  of bandwidth, takes a lot of sort of mental focus. And I've seen just great founders have that, right? So then anyway, that's a characteristic. And then I think just some passion, like you have to be really into doing this because it's not the easiest job. It's like, you know, way easier jobs out there. It's a super fun job, but you have to be into it.

• 1:12:10Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. I heard that hardcover books were your indulgence post-success of Maraki. Is that, how did that come to be? And I, I too have a many bookshelves of hardcover books that I, my wife doesn't love how they're stacking up in our apartment right now. But I'm curious, has that always been something that you've appreciated?

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  Uh, no, it was actually, it was, I mentioned we were grad students. So when we were in grad school, we had no money and we were living in Cambridge and there were all these bookstores, right? Because it's like a super intellectual town. And there would be, there's the Harvard bookstore has like a used section. And so that was my go-to is I would go and like, you know, buy a used book for $4 or something. And so it felt like the biggest luxury after we got in our exit at Maraki to like on Amazon, like, you know, you get into buying paperback books on Amazon or whatever, but then you see like the $27 one and you're like, that's ridiculous. And like that felt like something, well, like, I guess we can do this now.

• 1:13:14Logan Bartlett?

  That's the splurge.

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  That was the splurge. And, you know, it's, it's small things like that, but it actually, it, it still feels like a luxury. It's, it's totally ridiculous, but it still feels pretty amazing that you can do that.

• 1:13:26Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's, it's, um, it's an interesting, uh, tangible item that has such, uh, substance to it, but is also feel, I, I feel like your kids aren't going to be spoiled because of the, their dad having hardcover books around. Right. It feels like, it feels like a reasonable splurge.

• 1:13:46Speaker 01

  They'll probably have no books because they're like, I grew up surrounded by books. I can't stand those things.

• 1:13:49Logan Bartlett?

  That's right. Exactly. You will have traumatized them a little too much.

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:53Logan Bartlett?

  Now, one of the things I guess, as, as you think about building Samsara for a, uh, for the long haul, what are things that you maybe do differently? We talked about the 70, 20, 10. I assume thinking about the 10 would be one thing, but are there other things that sort of stand out, uh, in, in, in building a company to endure?

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. So I think, um, with Meraki, that company also wasn't built to exit in the, in the acquisition sort of sense. It was something that happened for practical reasons because what we realized as we got to scale, we got to about a hundred million dollars in revenue scale. We realized there was a market giant ahead of us. It was Cisco. There were 800 pound gorilla. They had all these channel partners and it was going to be a slog and there was probably a glass ceiling there. And so, you know, that's why that acquisition made sense. We've never had that feeling at Samsara because our market, it's a really big one. You know, you've got operations companies all over the world, but there's no single company that's the dominant market player. So with this company, we've always believed we're going to build and build and build.

• 1:14:57Speaker 01

  With that in mind, it means that there's no specific horizon where it's like, we're just trying to build to that point and just needs to stay together that long and then it can fall apart. This is, we're going to have to live with our decisions into the future, whether it's technology platform or who we hire or company culture. And that has made, um, all of us on the management team much more deliberate. And we kind of sit on our hands before we make a really big decision. We do experiments, but before we like really commit to something, we want to make sure that we can see it all the way through.

• 1:15:26Logan Bartlett?

  As you're, as you're building this company to endure and thinking about the, the longevity of the, of the business and the different,

• 1:15:37Logan Bartlett?

  Milestones that you hit along the way, are there ones you look back on that are particularly gratifying? Because I assume that it wasn't built to be sold, it wasn't built to go public, it wasn't built to 100 million in ARR, nor a billion in ARR, right? Are there ones that stand out that maybe are counterintuitive? I'm sure the IPO, was the IPO virtual?

• 1:15:57Speaker 01

  We were, no, we were in

• 1:15:59Logan Bartlett?

  You were in person, so I'm sure that probably stands out as a fun milestone. But anything that's counterintuitive, because one of the things that we talk about a lot when talking to founders is like enjoying the process and enjoying the milestones along the way. Because it's insatiable, the different hills you can climb, and you will all, there will always be another hill, there will always be someone else to look to. And so as you reflect on the process and the beauty of like the journey, are there things that sort of stand out to you that were particularly impactful?

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  This is kind of like my memory is real for Samsara, but there are definitely some milestone moments like that. I'll give you some on the sales side and some on the product side. On the sales side, in the early days of the company, we were out involved in every single deal, right? And this is a founder-led sales, right? Like you're trying to make sure you've got the right product, but you're figuring out pricing and doing all that kind of stuff. It's pretty fun when you start seeing the first deals close that you didn't even know about until you see the virtual bell is what we call it. It's like a sales force notification. And they weren't necessarily huge, but you're like, wow, this means that like it worked, right? Like the whole like system that we set up worked, and that was early. And then along the way, this company grew very, very quickly.

• 1:17:12Speaker 01

  We went from doing 10K to 50K deals to our first million dollar plus deals within the first year and a half or two years, which is like a big undertaking for any company because you have to deliver for that customer, you have to scale the platform and do all that stuff. And I remember with a big energy utility was one of our first customers. They actually prepaid their contract because it was just how they were set up and all that kind of stuff, but it was a huge responsibility. So it was a big milestone that we got, I think it was a $15 million deal and very young company at that time, but it put the responsibility on us. We had to deliver. So I was really proud that the company, the entire company, engineering,

• 1:17:52Speaker 01

  sales, everybody stepped up support to make that customer successful. And they've expanded with us a ton. They've added a bunch of products. They've told us, told a lot of their peers in the industry about Samsara. But that's a milestone moment for us was the first really big enterprise customer, who's always sort of before you're ready for it, right? That's what it means to be first. So anyway, those are a couple on the sales side. On the product side,

• 1:18:20Speaker 01

  I still remember we worked on the AI distracted driving models. John and I worked on it over like a winter holiday. And this was one of those things where it's like, again, AI inference back in 2018 was like pretty new stuff. The models barely ran and it helped me connect back to those sort of grad school roots of like hacking, reading, we actually like read papers about it, wrote up some code, tried it, and we got it to the point where it worked. But then being able to connect the dots of like, this can help detect distracted driving was an aha. And it was nice to know we still had it, like that we could still connect those dots that fast. And we got that product feature out really, really quickly after that. So that was another sort of like pivotal

• 1:19:05Speaker 01

  moment for us as a company that then, you know, safety is now our number one product line, which is pretty exciting. It's, you know, way up there in terms of revenue. So that was one. And then the most recent one, and this is a product that we're going to release in June, so it hasn't been announced, but it was an idea that actually came from our team. And this is again, the sort of not involved thing where it bubbled up from the inside. It's a really exciting idea and we're going to launch at the customer conference. But the engineering teams kind of prototyped it, they ran with it. And the first time we saw it was when we got a demo in our senior team meeting. That felt really good because it's the opposite of having to drive, read the paper and drive the idea through. This was, these folks came up with a better idea than we would have had.

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  And then executed on it, saw it through, validated with customers. And then at the point we saw it was pretty clear it was going to work. So anyway, that maybe two totally different ends.

• 1:19:58Logan Bartlett?

  Super helpful. I, it, it makes me think of, I mean, you, you have to be one of, if not the fastest companies to a billion in recurring revenue. Certainly doing it in the capital efficiency you've done along the way. And growing that fast, as, as someone that sits on boards and observes sometimes hyper growth. You always sit in fear that growing that quickly is going to lead to things breaking along the way. Were there things that in looking back on the journey, you feel like you particularly got right? That kept it from breaking along the way from a cultural standpoint, from an operational standpoint? Anything that stands out?

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, so I, I share that same concern and fear. And it, it never ends because we as a company are growing headcount to keep up with all this demand. All these new people, they don't know the Samsara culture yet, right? They're learning it along the way. And so you, you need to make sure you don't dilute the culture. And one of the things that we've worked on over the last couple of years is really articulating. What are those cultural values and what are those operating principles? Like, how do we work? And so this idea of like sampling the customer experience, it's really important to how we work. Not all companies operate that way, especially in sort of more abstract enterprise software. But for us, we're solving real world problems. So we try to really make sure everyone knows that, not just in sales or engineering, but like even our finance teams.

• 1:21:19Speaker 01

  They have an appreciation for what the customer is, is experiencing from us. Something like that is something that has to be taught and has to be taught a couple of times. You don't just, it's not like just an onboarding like on the slide for two seconds. We actually talk about it a lot. We talk about it at town halls and that kind of thing. So figuring out how to get everyone to run off the same mental code base is a big challenge. And that's what setting culture is. So that's, I think, the solution for this kind of anxiety that comes with scale. And then keeping that quality bar high on the hiring front, we'd rather hire for quality over quantity. And we will miss our hiring plan if we feel like we're lowering the bar somehow.

• 1:21:59Logan Bartlett?

  Pieces, conventional Silicon Valley wisdom that you agree with or something or disagree with, something that's maybe a counterintuitive operational philosophy. Anything come to mind?

• 1:22:11Speaker 01

  No. So I think maybe the most counterintuitive thing we did was to pick the market segment we did.

• 1:22:16Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  Right? So I have a feeling a lot of the reasons we got term sheets in the series A was because John and I had seen success.

• 1:22:23Logan Bartlett?

  Sure.

• 1:22:24Speaker 01

  I think there was some real skepticism. You're going to sell what to who?

• 1:22:27Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:29Speaker 01

  And, you know, I think that sometimes you have to be truly kind of contrarian in that sense and try to do something that not everyone agrees with you on.

• 1:22:37Logan Bartlett?

  Would you recommend people seek markets more than product market fit?

• 1:22:43Speaker 01

  Well, I don't think those are exclusive. Like, you know, you can kind of start with the market first. Finding product market fit, if you, if you have no idea what you're doing, can take a long time.

• 1:22:51Logan Bartlett?

  The bottoms up approach, I guess.

• 1:22:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:53Logan Bartlett?

  Versus the top down, start landing on industry and determining the, the product that meets the industry's needs versus the opposite approach.

• 1:23:01Speaker 01

  It worked for us. I think the reason it worked.

• 1:23:03Logan Bartlett?

  Both ways worked for you.

• 1:23:04Speaker 01

  Both ways worked. I think the reason the second way worked where we started market first was because it was so underserved. There were problems lying around all over the place.

• 1:23:12Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, probably still are, given the new products you guys are launching.

• 1:23:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And the customers were more than willing to tell us about it, right? Like even when we were talking about, learning about how fleets operate, I remember one of the fleet managers showed me the big printed out map on their wall. I was like, so how do you plan around? They're like, well, maybe from here to, I was like, what? This is crazy. So it's a target rich environment when it's an underserved market.

• 1:23:34Logan Bartlett?

  Interesting. Interesting. Thank you for doing this.

• 1:23:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 1:23:37Logan Bartlett?

  This was awesome.

• 1:23:37Speaker 01

  This was fun.

• 1:23:41Logan Bartlett?

  Thank you for listening to this episode of the Logan Bartlett Show with co-founder and CEO of Samsara, Sanjay Biswas. If you enjoyed this episode, I'd really appreciate it if you shared with anyone else that you think might find it interesting. If you could also subscribe on whatever platform you're listening on, we really appreciate it. You'll hear another fascinating conversation next week, right here on the Logan Bartlett Show. Thank you.