20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara

Sanjit Biswas is the Founder and CEO @ Samsara, allowing businesses that depend on physical operations to harness Internet of Things (IoT) data. Over the last 8 years, Sanjit has scaled Samsara to $1BN in ARR and a public company with tens of thousands of customers. Before Samsara, Sanjit was the CEO and co-founder of Meraki, one of the most successful networking companies of the past decade. Sanjit grew Meraki from his Ph. D. research into a complete enterprise networking portfolio. Meraki's sales doubled every year from inception and in 2012, Cisco acquired Meraki for $1.2 billion. Huge thanks to Doug Leone for some fantastic question suggestions pre this episode. In Today's Episode With Sanjit Biswas We Discuss: 1. From Founding to $1BN in ARR in 8 Years: What was the founding a-ha moment for Sanjit with Samsara? Sanjit sold his prior company Meraki for $1.2BN, what worked with Meraki that Sanjit took with him to Samsara? What did not work that he left behind? What does Sanjit know now that he wishes he had known when he started Samsara? 2. The Man Who Found Product Market Fit Time and Time Again: What is the one single moment that Sanjit believes you know you have product market fit? What are the biggest mistakes founders make when chasing product market fit? How does being a bootstrapped company change how a company approaches chasing PMF? 3. Mastering a Multi-Product Company: How do you know when it is the right time to launch a second product? Does the second product have to make the first product better? What are the biggest mistakes companies make when going multi-product? 4. The Art of Great CEOship: Does Sanjit believe that the best CEOs are the best capital allocators? What has been the single best and single worst capital allocation decision in Samsara's journey? What are the biggest mistakes Sanjit has made in leadership? How did he learn and grow from them?

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I think product market fit is something you don't want to force. When they call someone out into their office or in from the hallway and say, hey, so and so, you need to see this, right? That's when you know you have something that's a true solution to a big problem. Companies pay to have their problem solved. And so when we talk about things like revenue and revenue growth, for me, it's actually impact and problem solving growth.

• 0:19Harry Stebbings?

  Welcome to 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. And today we feature the most incredible company, a company that in just eight years has scaled to $1 billion in ARR, a public company and tens of thousands of customers. This is Samsara and joined today by Samsara's CEO and founder, Sanjit Biswas. Before Samsara, Sanjit was the CEO and co-founder of Meraki, one of the most successful networking companies of the past decade. Sanjit grew Meraki from his PhD research into a complete enterprise networking portfolio, and their sales doubled every year from inception. And in 2012, Cisco acquired Meraki for $1.2 billion. I want to say a huge thank you to Doug Leoni at Sequoia, some fantastic question suggestions today in preparation for this episode.

• 1:03Harry Stebbings?

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• 1:48Harry Stebbings?

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• 3:12Speaker 00

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 3:14Harry Stebbings?

  Sanjit, I have just heard the most wonderful things from the one and only Doug Leoni. I've spoken to many others, so first thank you so much for joining me today.

• 3:23Speaker 00

  Well, thanks for having me, Harry.

• 3:24Harry Stebbings?

  Not at all, but I want to start with a bit of a weird one. But one of your friends and colleagues told me that I had to start with your first tech project, taking your school online. So what did that teach you about technology and about people?

• 3:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's funny. It's the kind of way back machine test. So that's probably a thirty year old story at this point. We're talking like the early, the mid nineties. And the project that I had was to try to bring my high school online. And this is like right at the beginning of the web browser. So I'm kind of dating myself here, but probably before you were born, but the worldwide web was brand new. And I thought it'd be cool to bring sixteen hundred high school kids online and kind of see what happens. And I was a techie and so I'd been kind of online even at a young age and wanted to find a way to make it accessible. Back then it was very kind of elaborate to get online. You needed to download a bunch of software, FTP and all kinds of crazy stuff. And I thought, you know, the typical. Student isn't going to figure that out. How do we make it just work out of the box?

• 4:23Speaker 00

  So sat there, typed in 1,600 names from the high school yearbook because I couldn't get the roster from the administration. So just kind of brute forced it. We set up web browsers and web servers so you could actually check your email using the web instead of having to set it a command line, which is kind of how things worked back then. We brought our high school newspaper online. So it was really a kind of fun time and everyone got into it. And by the way, I was a new student and I've just moved from Texas. Probably what my friends didn't tell you is I was scrawny. I was like a 12 year old freshman, by the way. So I'd skipped a grade or two along the way, just moved from a, you know, different state, which is practically a different country. And it was a great way to meet people. So I got to meet everyone in the school, quite literally from, you know, the high school football team captain to like the newspaper editor. Really fun experience.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  Taught me a lot about how diverse people are, like lots of different things that they wanted to do online, things that they were curious about. But also how fun technology can be because it like really blew people's minds. Like this is like, you're going from disconnected, like there's no smartphones, there's no internet to, oh my God, like, look at all this stuff online.

• 5:23Harry Stebbings?

  You know, you mentioned there about brute force, people's names in. You know, I know Paul Graham has talked before, really, about doing things that don't scale. Can you talk to me about that? And how do you think about doing things that don't scale today? Whether it's always held true for you and how you think about it today?

• 5:39Speaker 00

  In retrospect, that project was a bit like a startup, right? Like we were trying to do something. We had very scarce resources. We had no money. It was just like spare parts in the computer lab kind of thing. And the brute force was one of the ingredients to that, which is like privacy questions. Like, are we allowed to give this kid a list of names from the roster kind of thing? So I said, well, the yearbook's not private, I'll just use that. So it was just finding a way, I guess. This actually happened over and over. If we kind of fast forward, the first research project that my co-founder, John and I worked on at MIT was called RoofNet. We built the network by literally installing antennas on people's roofs. We got like a 40 foot ladder and like, again, in retrospect, that was kind of crazy and definitely wasn't research, but it was just what was needed to build the platform up.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  So over and over, it's been an unlock, just being willing to kind of roll up your sleeves and go for it.

• 6:26Harry Stebbings?

  Do you find it hard when you suddenly have to transition to scale though? It's like the transition from founder led sales to sales led sales. Suddenly you can't do the antennas anymore. What do you do then?

• 6:38Speaker 00

  You're absolutely right. And at some point, you need to stop because you're kind of getting in the way. You're slowing things down, in other words. So the hardest thing is giving something up that you love doing. Like, I actually loved installing antennas in grad school, and I loved doing many of the early sales of Meraki and Samsara. Because, and I still love spending time with customers. But again, sort of making it a scalable process is the key unlock at the next stage, which is how do you 10x and then 10x again?

• 7:00Harry Stebbings?

  So how do you embrace that transition? Because it's incredibly hard to let go or to realize that actually we can't do that unscalable thing and we need to build process. What would your advice mean?

• 7:11Speaker 00

  So I go through a process which I call rehiring myself. And it's a little bit like, I actually write a job description of what do I think the job needs in the next year or the next couple of years? And I check, like, does my time and sort of how I'm doing things match what the company needs from me and the organization needs from me? The other thing is, people will tell you if you listen, right? They're very polite about it, but they might kind of give you a hint or two. And so you have to have these really big ears and listen.

• 7:36Harry Stebbings?

  In terms of like the reinvention and moving with the company, if we were to take the current job description that you have today, what's the current job description and what do you expect of yourself in this role?

• 7:48Speaker 00

  Well, at this point, Samsara, the consensus numbers have us getting to over a billion in ARR. And so the current job description, in my opinion, is to be building the company, not for today's scale, but actually for scale three to five years from now, which is more products, obviously more customers, just a lot more building. And what you realize when you work backwards from that is the way that I spend my time, it's still important to spend time with customers, for example, because you have to have that true north, the compass needle, the intuition for what the customers need. But I can't be in every product review. I can't be in every sales pipeline review. It just, it wouldn't make sense. So that's the kind of thing where I will actually say, you know, this year, I'm going to drop the sitting in every QBR, right? A quarterly business review. And that's okay, because I feel like our team's got it.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  But I do need to spend time helping write the five-year Product roadmap, because I have a deep sense for where I think this all needs to go.

• 8:41Harry Stebbings?

  And we're going to get into customer visits. I've heard that you take photos, write ups. We're going to get into it. I do have to ask, in terms of like the changing nature of the role of CEO, what was the hardest stage or transition to adjust to?

• 8:54Speaker 00

  There have been quite a few along the way. You mentioned Doug Leoni, who was our partner from Sequoia Capital in Muraki, which is a company before this. That was incredibly challenging to become the CEO of a startup company. And I didn't start out wanting to be a CEO. I was a graduate student, along with my co-founder John at MIT. We were academic researchers. We wanted to go be professors at some point. So that initial transition from project to startup to actually raising venture money. And that was a big transition because I'd never managed anyone before. I never went to like a management training course, had no idea what I was doing. So it was a lot of trial and error and a lot of listening to make sure that what I was doing was useful to people. Because otherwise, again, like I'm kind of getting in the way. I'm not helping.

• 9:34Harry Stebbings?

  Did you feel like in a bit of an imposter in that situation?

• 9:37Speaker 00

  You have that even as a grad student, when you're doing research, like how am I going to further the state of the art? So you kind of get used to this idea of being uncomfortable, but it's very different because there's a shelf of business books. You go to a bookstore and there's like all of these management books and so on. You read through a couple of them. They're actually kind of hard to relate to. And I ended up just kind of putting them all down at the beginning and saying, look, this is actually just a big project, right? So let me do what I know how to do, which is lead a project and kind of get it to the next stage. And that's where some of these kind of operating principles of kind of working backwards from winning essentially, like what does the next stage goal look like? And then let's reverse engineer that. That's where that came from.

• 10:14Harry Stebbings?

  You mentioned Muraki in those early days. I'm really fascinated. I love backing second time founders because I honestly think that we make many mistakes the first time that we wouldn't repeat a second or third time. When you look back at Muraki and translating that to Samsung today, first, what didn't work with Muraki that you have very deliberately left behind and not taken with you to Samsung?

• 10:37Speaker 00

  Like you said, we make a ton of mistakes. We try a ton of things. Let me give you maybe two examples. The first is when we started Muraki, it was more of a technology first company. Like we had a cool technology, which we were kind of bringing with us from MIT conceptually. We had a new idea of how people could build very large networks. We thought that might be useful for community wifi, like free wifi in the town square kind of thing, which in the mid 2000s was an exciting idea. I think Google and a bunch of others were announcing projects like that. Now, the problem with free Wi-Fi is there's no business model attached to it. And at the time, Wi-Fi was still quite expensive. Like bandwidth was expensive, the hardware was expensive. And I do remember at Sequoia, like a bunch of the partners were like, what's the business? And I would just explain the technology and they said, well, that's not a business, right?

• 11:21Speaker 00

  And I think we've kind of figured out the hardware. The funny part, though, was our not a business business actually doubled in rev. We bootstrapped the company the first year, which I can talk about. We didn't actually have venture money. We managed to sell enough product to get off the ground. So that was a feedback loop. We're like, well, people seem to like what we're doing. They want to pay for it. And then revenue doubled and doubled. It was during the global financial crisis that we realized, whoa, you know, you actually need to have a clear ROI and a value proposition, like the fundamentals matter. And so that transition was actually very challenging and something we did differently. It's, I'm sorry, we all, we started market first with this company. We said, who's the customer? What are the problems we can solve in a kind of scalable way? And let's work backwards from that, which is to find the commonality. So that was maybe a big one.

• 12:04Harry Stebbings?

  Why did you decide to raise venture money? We bootstrapped, you doubled our revenues, product was selling, customers liked it. Why raise?

• 12:11Speaker 00

  So we got to close to a million dollars in revenue. And by the way, with Meraki, there was a hardware component. So we were building these routers. And what that means is you need cash upfront to get the product manufactured. And so that was a big challenge, which is essentially having working capital for that. The other piece was we were bootstrapped, but we were kind of, I guess, ramen profitable would be like the YC or Polychrome phase. And we had all been graduate students. So we were used to like living below the poverty line. That was all good with us. We just enjoyed the work. When you went and tried to hire people, you realize they needed to make a lot more than a graduate student did, right? So we realized, okay, while we're profitable, it's not going to really be scalable unless we get a little bit of additional money. Now, we could have taken a bit longer and just gone with taking our time.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  But actually, the venture capitalists started knocking on our door, quite literally. They found our dingy office space, which is like, I think a sublease of a sublease in the warehouse district. People with very nice cars would pull up and quite literally knock on the door because the word spread that like this group of MIT students was out there building routers and doing some interesting things.

• 13:13Harry Stebbings?

  VCs have a way of finding you if you're good, I find.

• 13:16Speaker 00

  We had no idea. We like, we're not listed anywhere. The fact that they found us, like, it's really some pretty impressive detective work.

• 13:23Harry Stebbings?

  What's the second one that you deliberately left behind?

• 13:26Speaker 00

  So I talked about being market first versus technology first. There have been a couple of times where, even in the course of this company, you tend to get really enamored with a cool idea or a cool technology. So for us, it was like AI and computer vision a couple of years ago. We thought it was going to be transformative and it has been for our business. But we found ourselves in this kind of techy engineering habit of we've got this cool new hammer or tool. This is like 2018, 2019. Where can we apply it? And so for Samsung, we served the world of physical operations. Think the supply chains and the factories and so on. So we thought maybe we could build a camera that would inspect products on an assembly line. We called it machine vision. That turned out not to be a great business for us. Not because the technology didn't work, but it actually didn't fit our business model.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  Like the way that it gets installed on the line is highly custom, lots of custom lighting, you need to know the product and so on. So what we found with Samsung is it's really important to have a rinse and repeat recipe, something that's truly plug and play. That was not plug and play. So that was a mistake that we made at Meraki as well. We built some exotic networking products that didn't quite get off the ground. And you would have thought we would have learned the lesson. And we kind of did, but you find yourself reverting to those kinds of problems. Even if you're aware that I shouldn't make the same mistake twice, you find yourself doing it because it's a natural tendency that some of us have.

• 14:42Harry Stebbings?

  When I listen to both, I just think about kind of product market fit quite early, both in Samsung and in Meraki. If you're advising an early-stage founder on that very difficult and lonely process from zero to one in search for product market fit, having done it twice so well, what would you say to them over a coffee or sitting by a fire?

• 15:03Speaker 00

  Well, I think product market fit is something you don't want to force. And the way that I I've always kind of gone about it is just to get out there with customers with beta testers and listen for the wow, where you're showing them something. What we've done in the past is kind of what we call an allergy test. So we'll bring them a few different ideas that we're playing with. And sometimes they'll kind of nod their head or they'll be very polite and that sort of thing. But then you show them something that's truly useful to them and they will quite literally stop you right there and say like, hey, can you click on that? Like, show me that again. Even better is when they call someone else into their office or in from the hallway and say, hey, so and so, you need to see this, right? That's when you know you have something that's a true solution to a big problem. It's probably the beginnings, right? It's not robust enough to be a full on product. But you listen for that feedback loop and then you double down there.

• 15:48Speaker 00

  That has worked for us across both companies and many, many products that we've built.

• 15:52Harry Stebbings?

  Do you agree that if they're not paying for it, it's not important?

• 15:55Speaker 00

  I think so. And this is something I've learned in the world of B two B, which is companies pay to have their problem solved. And so when we talk about things like revenue and revenue growth, for me, it's actually impact and problem solving growth. That means that we are solving a lot of problems for a lot of customers. And that, I think, is an important connection. It's not just dollars or revenue for revenue's sake. It's actually impact and that's why people are paying money.

• 16:17Harry Stebbings?

  What do you think are the biggest mistakes founders make with product market fit? I often find that they set kind of arbitrary metrics to suggest they have product market fit. Number of users, for instance, doesn't say anything about retention or churn or usage or anything in between.

• 16:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:31Harry Stebbings?

  What do you see as mistakes that people make with product market fit?

• 16:34Speaker 00

  Well, I think some of it has to do with the fundraising process. And you see probably a lot more of this as a VC than than I do. But it's because people want to go to investors and show I've achieved product market fit. Now imagine that you didn't have to tell anybody about it. You just had to feel it. Then you maybe would be a little more honest with yourself about like, is this product just getting pulled by the market? Right? Like, that's what you're looking for. It's almost unmistakable. You'd have to be blind not to see it. I've had customers or beta testers call me the next day after going on site. And they'll say, hey, was that thing for sale? Like, can we place an order for that?

• 17:07Harry Stebbings?

  You said about kind of product being pulled out of hand that I'm very kind. You said before about listening to the show. I'm Biggest fan afar of Samsara's business. And you have amazing breadth through your product line. You have three products, well over a hundred million in ARR. How do you know when is the right time to release a second product? Because you're right, I'm a VC and I always say to founders, you've got so much more room to run on your first. People try and diversify too early. When's the right time and how do you advise me?

• 17:37Speaker 00

  Just the Samsara anecdote is fascinating. So our first product that really kind of got us going was real time GPS tracking. So think about all the work trucks that are out there. It's part of different fleets, not just in supply chain businesses, but construction, field services, all these different kinds of businesses. What we found even in 2015 is people didn't have real time visibility of their operations. So they wanted GPS tracking, they wanted a nice interface, they wanted reporting and alerts and that sort of thing. So that was our first product. What was interesting is that got our foot in the door and we started talking to these operations users. What quickly happened is they loved the GPS tracking product. And then they started asking us, hey, is there a dash camera that you all recommend? It works well with your system. You hear that five, maybe 10 times. And then, you know, we said, well, if we built a dash camera, would you use it?

• 18:22Speaker 00

  And they say, oh yeah, absolutely. I prefer that the dash camera was in the same system. So that's how we built our second product, which was basically what's now our safety product. Those conversations were happening when product one was maybe 10 million in revenue. So it was really happening very early for us. And so we organically built product line number two because the customers wanted more. And in this idea of a platform became very clear that folks wanted to be in one system.

• 18:47Harry Stebbings?

  Does product two have to make product one better?

• 18:50Speaker 00

  We think of them as independent products. So we have customers that will transact with either one. They could maybe just buy the safety product or just buy telematics. They do make each other better. There's additional context there. So most of our customers today buy multiple products from us because they're trying to solve a bunch of different problems. But it helps when they fit together. I will say though, what we learned is concentric circles matter. So if you can be solving a problem for the same customer, it's the same person you're talking to. Maybe they have two problems they need to solve. That's way better from a customer conversation perspective because that single lead that you have can lead to two pretty productive sales conversations.

• 19:26Harry Stebbings?

  How do you know when to listen to customers? Oh, I'd love you to solve this. It may not actually be the right thing to do now. It may not actually be the right thing for the rest of your customer base. And it's only that small segment. How do you know when to listen to them and do the camera and the safety platform? Or not, and that's not where we're going.

• 19:44Speaker 00

  We try to use like an eighty twenty rule. So if eighty percent of our customers would benefit from something, we want to bring it onto the platform. Now, there's a bunch of stuff that we get asked for by customers that are exotic or esoteric. So there we partner. But if you hear something like the dash cameras, we heard about apps from our customers, we heard about tracking equipment, those kinds of things, you say, oh, I'm hearing this all over the place, and I'm hearing in multiple geographies, multiple market segments, we should build something there. That's kind of what we tend to do.

• 20:12Harry Stebbings?

  In terms of like, we should build something there, it's a really interesting combination of engineering and sales, obviously in terms of the ability to build and then the ability to distribute. I heard that you became a sales savant, love that word, having really not been, respectfully. They said you were like an engineering mastermind, and now you're a sales savant. And I think it's a very difficult transition to make. How did you make that transition? And what really enabled you to make it so well?

• 20:40Speaker 00

  I do think that there's something deep about founder-led sales, which is you have this amazing advantage of you actually know how the things are built, right? You may not actually be the best or most classically trained salesperson in terms of running a perfect sales process and that kind of thing. But you can be in a meeting and navigate in a very dynamic way, which is, oh, tell me more about that, or is that something that's a big problem or a little problem? Like, it's a very sort of interactive conversation. And I actually think that on the other side of the table, the prospect loves that, because here they have someone who can solve their problem, perhaps solve more problems for them, and really wants to partner. That's something that is very rare, that if you're a prospect, you don't get that conversation very often. So I think founder CEOs especially

• 21:23Speaker 00

  have an advantage there. When you're speaking to a customer, they know you have the ability to shape the roadmap. It's not going to change what you do next quarter, but it's going to change what happens two to three years from now.

• 21:33Harry Stebbings?

  I hope that you spend on average two days a week with customers. Can you just walk me through how you approach that customer engagement? Cause you've also then got the picture, I hear you take pictures, you do write-ups. And I loved it, but I haven't heard of pictures and write-ups before. So could you take me to this process as in-depth as possible, actually? Just so I can understand and so founders can get it.

• 21:55Speaker 00

  Getting that face time with the customer is so valuable, it's so high bandwidth. As travel opened back up, I realized, hey, it's worth it to get out on site. And that's when I started actually bringing others with me. So we travel in pairs or sometimes a trio. And that's really fun because I brought our president who runs all of go-to-market for us. But I also will bring folks like our chief people officer, who's like, you know, runs HR. He doesn't typically get out in the field, but he has a lot to sort of see with our customers. And when we talk about talent brand and why people come to Samsara, it's around real world impact. And so he connected immediately. I wish we could do more of it two days a week. That's kind of the maximum time allocation that I can devote to something like that because there is a company to run.

• 22:36Harry Stebbings?

  Talk to me about pictures and notes. What do you do with them and then how do you distribute them to the rest of the team?

• 22:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's sort of like Instagram, right? Like a picture can be really powerful and describe a lot. And our customers are the world behind the curtain, right? They're the infrastructure of the planet. So if you think about, we have customers that are some of the largest chemicals distribution companies in the world, or the largest crane rental companies in the world. You don't get to peek behind the scenes quite so much. So I don't know if you've seen shows like How It's Made. I grew up glued to the TV watching stuff like that. And so I'm always taking pictures behind the scenes and our team loves it. They get a lot of context and sometimes the engineers will say, hey, what's that thing over there? Or can I ask them about how they're tracking pallets or something? So it leads to more conversations than not. So that's kind of why we do it.

• 23:21Harry Stebbings?

  You mentioned some of your clients there and that in a lot of cases, like real businesses, traditional, amazing producers of hard materials. Sales cycles are also often said to be much longer. Is that true? And how have you seen sales cycles vary over the life of Samsara?

• 23:39Speaker 00

  I would say it's pretty typical enterprise sales cycle. So we have a few different teams in the company. Our mid-market teams will close deals within a quarter and that sales cycle is inside of 90 days. Our field or your major account teams might take six months to a full year to close a deal. But that's pretty similar to other kinds of enterprise software. And you think about quotas and cycles and things like that. And we benchmarked pretty well there. So I think that's maybe a misperception. You do have to sell. So we have what's called a see, try, buy motion. So you see the product with the zoom screen share. You can do a trial. So plug and play and see it in your environment. And at that point, the ROI becomes very clear. And then we work out commercials and negotiate and close. That process is pretty similar to, I think, how a lot of software companies do things.

• 24:24Harry Stebbings?

  One thing that's astonishing with Samsung is how much more efficient you are as a business and how that's kind of changed over time. What's driven the efficiency, bluntly? When I was looking at, I was looking at these different charts of your efficiency. And over the last eight quarters, it's been pretty unparalleled. What's driven the efficiency gains?

• 24:40Speaker 00

  Well, I'd say two things. One is we have a direct sales force. So they become more productive the longer they're in seat. And we've been growing so much as a business, we're adding capacity on a continuous basis. So you need to give them time to ramp. The sales reps are financially inefficient. And you know, all of this, right? Like, they're still kind of coming up to speed and still learning the product, learning the customer base, building a pipe. Once they have that, the cruising altitude has always been very efficient. And so it's kind of just seeing that through. That's maybe area number one. Area number two is we have developed just a clearer sense of process of what needs to happen next. And customers actually want to move quickly because they don't want to spend time in the sales process. They want to kind of get the product and get going. So we found that aligning more closely with how the customer likes to buy has really unlocked a tailwind of growth.

• 25:24Harry Stebbings?

  It is nitty gritty. But what do you find is the ramp time for sales teams?

• 25:28Speaker 00

  It varies. So part of it is getting a few of those sales cycles under your belt. So we can ramp within a few quarters, right? And it varies by, it's not that we hire people that have sold this kind of product before. So typically speaking, people have to understand the industries, the vocabulary and the jargon, that sort of thing. So there's like a bit of just a initial period. And then you just have to get in there and try it. I think we can make enablement even better. But to answer your question, it's a couple of quarters.

• 25:52Harry Stebbings?

  When hiring people, would you rather hire someone who's sold to that contract size, that amount dollar before, or who's sold to this industry before? I think a lot of founders struggle between domain expertise and deal size. Which one do you lean on for the experience that they've had? Where do you sit on that one?

• 26:10Speaker 00

  That's a great question. I would say the deal size tends to be where we focus a little bit more. Are you used to transactional selling of a few K A C B has just really moved through things really, really fast? Or are you a consultative seller where you sit down with the customer? Maybe you go visit them, figure out the kind of business value proposition and come back to them with that. That takes longer. You could have been selling H R software or C R M. You know, these are all kind of similar conversations because it's business value. But that's a different way of selling than just picking up the phone and closing deals really fast.

• 26:41Harry Stebbings?

  You also recently announced kind of this massive hiring spree that will be taking place in terms of sales. Can you just walk me through this? Because when I saw it, I was like, wow, shit. Like, I mean, fantastic. And what a nice surprise compared to the doom and gloom that we see. But I think you and Salesforce both on the same day announced like we're going to be aggressively hiring.

• 27:03Speaker 00

  You know, as I mentioned earlier, we're a direct sales company primarily. So for us to be in front of more customers, we need more people on the sales team. And the recipe is working, so we're continuously adding capacity. I wouldn't say it was a moment in time where we said like, let's press the button and hire a bunch of salespeople. It's been a continuous build for us and it will continue to be.

• 27:22Harry Stebbings?

  I have a slightly contentious topic, but I'm intrigued to hear your thoughts. You have a flexible slash hybrid workforce. Why? I have a belief that I don't think any function is better, hybrid or flexible. Every single one is better in person. What am I missing?

• 27:38Speaker 00

  First of all, I think it's hard to find a one size fits all policy. As a small startup, we benefited tremendously from being literally in the same room together because you just overhear conversations. So the cycle time is super fast. The difference that we saw when we went to Flexwork in the pandemic was access to talent. So we were about thousand-ish employees, maybe a little bit more. And we're in the Bay Area, that's where our headquarters is. And so there's quite a lot of tech talent, sales talent out. Here. But what was interesting is a lot of our salespeople were moving. They're moving to San Diego or Austin, Texas. Then we said, well, if we've got teams out there, we didn't know how long this remote work thing was going to last. We said, let's do an experiment and hire people from this kind of broader talent TAM. And what was fascinating is I would say our talent quality went up, right?

• 28:21Speaker 00

  Because now we were able to find that fantastic salesperson who, you know, wanted to live in Austin, right? Who didn't want to live in San Francisco for a variety of reasons. They also happen to be time zone aligned with our customers who are spread all over and not just in the US, but Mexico, Canada, et cetera. So we were able to get closer to the customer. We were able to increase our talent TAM, like so access to many, many more pools of talent. I'm talking about 10, 20, 30x increase, not like a 20%, but like a 10x kind of thing. You don't want to be talent TAM limited. We're a couple of thousand people now. We'd probably start lowering our talent bar if you're trying to hire such a big direct sales force in one location.

• 28:59Harry Stebbings?

  What've been the biggest hiring mistakes you've made, Sanjit?

• 29:01Speaker 00

  The ones that come to mind are when it wasn't a stage fit. For example, there may be someone who's been very successful at a bigger company. Maybe they grew a business from X hundred millions to Y billions, right? If you're an early stage startup, it doesn't make sense to bring that person in quite yet. Or you could, but you're taking real risk, right? Because that person's not going to have all the infrastructure they're used to. They're not going to have the brand behind them. They won't have a huge number of reference customers. Those sorts of things happen over time because you get wowed. You're like, oh, my gosh, this person is so amazing on paper, but are they appropriate for this stage? So that's one. And then two is sometimes I would say when we've moved really fast on a hire and not done the references, it can backfire on you because someone, again, may look great on paper.

• 29:46Speaker 00

  And then you realize, wow, they're really a terror to work with behind the scenes. Like they're not cooperative. You want people that work well in a team. And that's something you find out via references because the individual's achievements are what's on the resume, not the sort of credit history, I guess, of how they operate in that organization.

• 30:02Harry Stebbings?

  If you think about raw smarts, you think about hard work and ambition, and you think about like culture and like good person, how would you rank the three of them?

• 30:12Speaker 00

  You want hardworking people that work well in a team. So those two, maybe number two and number three, I rank very highly. And then smarts, I think, again, it's not about book smarts or IQ test or something like that. It's a little bit more street smarts, right? If you're in front of a customer, are you listening to them? Are you solving their problem? Or are you just pitching the product, right? That's what I mean by smart. So I think we look for people that are kind of well-rounded in that regard. But you want to make sure that they've got that drive, that ambition, the grit, the motor, whatever you want to call it.

• 30:41Harry Stebbings?

  Are you ever okay not to hire a team player? I'm not a team player, so I'm completely unemployable. But I am good at what I do and I am unhinged in many ways. I would be a good hire if you unleash me on my own in a dark room. Is there ever a time to hire not a team player or a role where it's okay?

• 31:03Speaker 00

  It's also about talent fit, right? Now, I will say, we have some people who are extraordinary technical architects. And they would say, I'm not a people manager. I'm not a big people person. I don't like big meetings. And that's totally fine. We don't want a lot of big meetings anyway. So there, what we say is, hey, you help build the next product, right? And then we will bring in product managers and we'll have engineering managers and so on that will help get the thing made, but we need someone to architect it. You know, there are some personality types and some roles where it is a little bit more of kind of individual brilliance, but you want those people to have the ability to work with the other people in the company, right? Otherwise, it really isn't going to be productive.

• 31:41Harry Stebbings?

  Do you agree that the best CEOs are the best resource allocators?

• 31:45Speaker 00

  The CEO is the chief capital allocator of the company. And that's essentially where the company is spending its time. It's where the people time is going and you're paying their salaries. So that tends to be for a software company where most of the money is spent. We have always kind of had a capital allocation strategy and happy to talk more about it. But I think somebody has to make that call and be the editor in chief.

• 32:05Harry Stebbings?

  Talk to me about the capital allocation strategy. I have questions, but I want to hear this.

• 32:08Speaker 00

  You know, we were talking earlier about what are some of the differences between Meraki and Samsara? With Meraki, we were kind of glad to see another year. This is a company that survived the global financial crisis. Like, we didn't raise a lot of venture capital because the markets got tight and so on. In some ways, we didn't build for the long term because we were just, again, trying to get to the next revenue milestone. Like, how do we double? How do we double again, kind of thing? With Samsara, we said, if we do this right, we will scale 10x and then 10x again and 10x after that. So we need to be building for the long term, which means you're allocating capital for the long term. That means allocating engineering budget, for example, to scale the products that are already in the market, but also planting seeds for stuff you're going to ship one to three years and then three plus years out.

• 32:49Speaker 00

  So we have a kind of seventy, twenty, ten capital allocation strategy when it comes to R and D. That's worked really well for us. We've basically built our products organically by having money set aside to invest in teams to go build those next products and try things over time.

• 33:04Harry Stebbings?

  What do you think was the best capital allocation decision you made?

• 33:08Speaker 00

  Maybe I'll answer the question in a little bit of a meta way, which is I'm glad we took risk, period, right? So we were talking about multiple products earlier and how we went from GPS tracking to safety cameras. That was again, early in the company's trajectory. We were doing ten or maybe fifteen million in ARR. A lot of people might have said, just stay focused. You know, there's still bugs in the product or still new feature asks, like just allocate all the capital there. We said, hey, we're going to fix those and we're going to invest, but we're also going to try this new thing. It didn't cost us a tremendous amount of money to build that first prototype of the product and then V one and V two. But it took time and you needed to plant those seeds so you could harvest them years out. So I'm glad we did that. It's really important to, again, have a sort of ladder of risk where you're saying, hey, this is low risk,

• 33:52Speaker 00

  but we're going to try a couple of high risk, high reward things as well.

• 33:54Harry Stebbings?

  When you say that it didn't make a ton of sense, no offence, why do them then?

• 33:59Speaker 00

  Because if you build for the long term, you're going to be glad you did them three years out, right? So products two and three, I'm super glad we have them now. Like product two for us, safety is now our number one revenue product. Very glad we did that. And along the way, we tried a couple of other products, you know, products three, four, five, that maybe won't have the same trajectory, but you won't know until you try.

• 34:18Harry Stebbings?

  What risks did you not take that you wish you had taken?

• 34:21Speaker 00

  We took a lot of risks. So I wouldn't say there's this list of things that I wish we tried. And this company grew very, very fast. So Samsara is about an eight-year-old business. You can see the numbers were public, so it's grown very fast. So we took quite a lot of risk and it's paid off well. I would say the intensity was something that we only were able to pull off because it was the second time through company. Because I think the ship would have blown apart had our team not been through it before.

• 34:45Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think you were able to move at that speed because of the prior experience and because you had the confidence of the prior experience?

• 34:52Speaker 00

  I absolutely think so because for us it was a pattern matching sort of thing of like I mentioned product market fit. We weren't questioning it. We just knew what it felt like. And then when it came time to build a sales team to start scaling up, we had people that we'd also worked with, that we enjoyed working with that came and joined us again. And that enabled us to move so, so fast. So I think the pattern matching, but also the people matching where we had kind of role fits for them.

• 35:15Harry Stebbings?

  Is there anything why being a second time or serial founder makes you worse? Maybe you're more jaded, you're more cynical. I'm just trying to disprove, I was trying to do the, is it the steel man or the straw man or whatever the thesis is. I'm trying to prove my own theory wrong that like investing in serial founders is like the best strategy.

• 35:33Speaker 00

  Well, I think you actually get an interesting selection bias of people who opt into it again. So, you know, I think there are many founders who will say, having been through it once, I probably wouldn't get back on the roller coaster. Like one ride was enough. For us, we literally opted into it a second time as we began Samsara. And that's what the name Samsara means. It's the cycle of reincarnation and rebirth. So we very much said, okay, we're going to do this. So there probably are a bunch of second time founders who are maybe reluctant or unsure or want to do it in a sort of lighthearted way. We were fully committed to this business. So if you can find founders like that, I think it's really powerful. That being said, there are a lot of first time founders who are phenomenal. Jensen from Nvidia, I think that's his first startup. That's the sort of thing where you'd also don't want to sort of filter out first timers because some first timers just go and

• 36:18Speaker 00

  go and go. Toby, you mentioned, there's a long, long list, right? So you wouldn't want to miss a Mark Zuckerberg or a Toby or a Jensen.

• 36:24Harry Stebbings?

  What's the worst capital allocation decision you've made on the flip side?

• 36:28Speaker 00

  I mentioned some of these products that we've tried out. Sometimes you again become really deeply enamored with the product or the technology. You really want it to work. You really want to believe in it. Machine Vision, which was that product line I mentioned earlier, there were signs probably a quarter or two into it that it wasn't going to be scalable because of the manual installation required for it. I think we were like, okay, let's see if we can just like power pass those, right? At some point you need to call it and reallocate. We should have made that call a little bit earlier, but it was a single digit million. So it's not like a huge downside.

• 36:59Harry Stebbings?

  How fast do you know when it's not working on a product and on people, the two vectors?

• 37:05Speaker 00

  On people, that's way more challenging because you have to really be honest with yourself. You know, the keeper test essentially, which is if someone was leaving, would you try to find a way to convince them to stay? Or would you sort of be like, I'm kind of glad that they're moving on? I've applied that test. I've seen that elsewhere in the organization where someone's really not a fit. And it doesn't mean they're bad at their job or they're worthless or something. It's just not a fit for the org. You have to call it. And sometimes the person is with you or they're already there. They're feeling that this wasn't a fit. And they're looking for a way out. So it's again, a very practical reality when you have thousands of people. That's gonna happen.

• 37:40Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, on Meraki, when you sell for, you know, a billion to reportedly, or not reportedly, whatever one it was, bluntly, your financial profile changes. How do you think about your relationship to money today?

• 37:52Speaker 00

  You're right. Your financial profile absolutely changes. As you get to the point where you have a family and, you know, you're trying to think about a house and all that kind of stuff. It helps to have money. It helps not to be worrying about it because then you can focus on where you have the most impact. The liquidity from that sale took care of all of that, right? Like, I love books, by the way. I remember the biggest thing for me was not stressing about buying a hardcover book. And it's just fun, like to be able to not think about buying $25 bucks. Like, it's pretty cool. For everyone, it's a little bit different. I didn't grow up from a very affluent background. My parents were very much middle class. So I think the values are there. And once you have the money and you keep those values intact, it's a huge weight off your shoulders, right? Which is kind of obvious, but you don't realize it until many years later where it's like,

• 38:33Speaker 00

  I'm just not worrying about that, right? I'm not worried about my kids or any of that kind of stuff. Which means I have more bandwidth to either build companies or spend time with my kids or do things that are more meaningful than worrying about the salary and the financial side. Now, just to kind of elaborate on that, as you do a second company, you actually have a lot more flexibility in terms of, we didn't raise seed funding for Samsara because John, who's my co-founder, and I both did very well from Meraki. We were able to be that seed check. So again, we were able to move so much faster because we didn't have to go fundraise. Now, fundraising can be valuable for feedback, and so we'd get feedback, but we didn't have to go around saying, hey, do you want to invest in the company?

• 39:11Harry Stebbings?

  Is money a score? How do you actually view it?

• 39:14Speaker 00

  Let me actually talk about in the company sense first because we were talking about capital allocation. And something that's really interesting that people sometimes lose sight of is companies reinvest their sales, right? It makes intuitive sense, like you get revenue, it has a gross margin, you can like reinvest that back in the company. I don't know the numbers exactly for Samsara, but it's in the billions in terms of what we've reinvested in the business so far. That is mind blowing in terms of our ability to build, right? And you see this with some of the biggest, best companies that are out there, whether it's Amazon or Microsoft. You look at them over long periods of time, think about how much capital has been reinvested into an Apple or an Amazon or any of these huge companies. It's absolutely mind blowing. So money is important for that reason, which is it makes it a sustainable model.

• 39:58Speaker 00

  And then you can do more, you can make more bets, you can build more products, that sort of thing. That's the core of why I think money is important. The side effects of that, if you're an equity owner in the company, you share in that upside, but it's actually driven off of the business that you're building. It's not an end to itself, it's actually a side effect. Does that make sense?

• 40:15Harry Stebbings?

  Sam, did I listen to you now? When does being a CEO become natural? Because now, you know, I hear you speak, you're a very natural gifted CEO. And I interview many CEOs, you go back to your engineering, no offence, less CEO, obvious candidate. When did it feel natural?

• 40:32Speaker 00

  I would say it's probably a few years into Meraki. There was a moment where I realized that my salary was allocated under G and A, not R and D. So it's a very in the weeds sort of view. I was like, wow, I guess I'm overhead. But for me, that was actually an important milestone, which is like, this is an important job, right? The leader of the company, we talked about capital allocation, you're as a founder CEO, you're the soul of the company as well. So I think those kinds of things make it feel natural over time, which is, hey, this is the job, right? It's not being an engineer, it's not being the chief salesperson, it's actually being the leader of the whole business. And so that probably for me happened maybe as Meraki became a hundred people or something like that.

• 41:14Harry Stebbings?

  Why do you say you most need to improve as a leader today?

• 41:17Speaker 00

  Oh, how much time do we have? We're entering the next phase of growth for Samsara, which is really scale growth, right? And the way that you continue to achieve scale, you mentioned you've interviewed people like Mark Benioff and others. They've seen tremendous scale. The CEO they are today, the way they operate is very different than, you know, early-stage startup CEO. You're getting a lot more leverage. You're thinking a lot more strategically. You're thinking like three, five, seven years out. So for me, that's where I'm constantly pushing myself of, hey, as much as I love being involved in the details, am I spending enough time on the long term? And that's a question of time allocation, which is you really have to carve it out.

• 41:55Harry Stebbings?

  Final one, we mentioned like relationships to money personally. You are also a father. And I've again spoken to something crazy, like a hundred like multi-billion dollar founder CEOs with children. And 98 said that essentially teaching children to have the same level of hunger and ambition, despite being brought up in a much more affluent family, is one of their hardest and most significant worries. How do you bring up kids with that same work ethic despite the financial cushion?

• 42:24Speaker 00

  Well, first of all, my kids are young. They're all under 10 at this point. So first, we spend time. Like when I'm in town, I try to be home by dinner and bedtime and all that kind of stuff. I think that interaction is really important. So it's not an intellectual or academic exercise. It's actually just like hard time face to face with the kids. And we try to emphasize things like building, things that you actually can't buy us with money. Even if it's like building a Lego construction, it's something that just takes a little bit of trial and error and effort. So it's not like you can just, maybe you could find someone to build a Lego for you, but that's really silly. Kids love things like that, right? It's things like writing stories and being inquisitive and that sort of stuff. Money doesn't pave the way there. So we try to find those kinds of timeless things. Money makes a lot of things easier, right? Like my kids, you know, we have a nanny at home.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  So they actually have a lot of face time with people. They're not watching the TV, et cetera. But the stuff that's truly, I think, enduring, the problem-solving ability, creative function, being able to sit down and focus, those are things I don't think money buys.

• 43:21Harry Stebbings?

  I want to move on to a quickfire answer. I say a short statement and you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

• 43:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, it sounds great.

• 43:28Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so let's start with what do others not know that you know to be true?

• 43:32Speaker 00

  Let me kind of go back to the idea of long-term building. I have seen this now through with two startups. If you can build for the long term, you're so much better off than you are building kind of a year at a time.

• 43:43Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think most startups build for the long term?

• 43:46Speaker 00

  Maybe not most first time through startups. Eventually, they figure it out. Like, I would say like, Facebook is the prime example of it's a first time founder who's done phenomenally well. Now they're absolutely building for the long term. But I think everyone goes through this period of you're trying to stay alive and kind of put one foot in front of the other.

• 44:01Harry Stebbings?

  Who's best place to win the AI battlefield? Is it startups chasing distribution? Or is it incumbents chasing innovation and speed of integration of models into existing technology?

• 44:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've been thinking about this one quite a bit. So I think on the large scale infrastructure side, if you look at who's won the hyperscaler wars, right? Like, who runs the biggest clouds? It was actually some of the best capitalized companies, right? You've got Amazon and Microsoft and Google and now Oracle. So in that sense, AI infrastructure may be well suited for companies that can invest billions of dollars ahead of time in building big data centers. The applications, on the other hand, I think that sort of rapid feedback loop and kind of creativity is really well suited to startups. So again, I think AI is going to be transformative in many ways. And so it maybe isn't an either or, it's where do people play in the stack?

• 44:52Harry Stebbings?

  Frontline workers will be removed by AI. Contrarian statement, that's not what I actually believe, but like, discussion topic. How do you feel about that?

• 45:01Speaker 00

  I think we're going to have frontline workers for a very long time because some of these jobs are difficult to automate. If you think about what's going on with AI, a lot of the sort of disruptive impact might be in the back office or the sort of white collar jobs. Frontline work transformed 100, 150 years ago when agriculture got the combine harvester and diesel engines started showing up everywhere. What happened is a bunch of jobs transitioned, right? A bunch of jobs that weren't so fulfilling, were hard work, were actually quite dangerous, kind of went away because automation kicked in and cranes showed up. And so I actually think that disruption happened in our great, great grandparents' generation. What we're seeing now is a similar disruption, maybe on the white collar side. And I actually think we're going to come out of this with better jobs that are more fulfilling,

• 45:44Speaker 00

  which are, again, more creative and more unique to us and where we get leverage from technology like AI.

• 45:50Harry Stebbings?

  Do you agree that AI is the most foundational technology that you've had in your career?

• 45:54Speaker 00

  I would say looking pretty big. So I've lived now through the internet wave, which we talked about earlier, the mobile phone kind of disruption and wireless technology and now AI. So I feel really fortunate. I'm not, you know, in my early 40s. So this is still kind of mid-career for me, but this one feels huge.

• 46:10Harry Stebbings?

  You can be CEO of any other company for a day. What company would it be, Sanjit?

• 46:15Speaker 00

  It's an interesting one. I would love to live in the shoes of Jensen from Nvidia just for a day, because I think the work they're doing is so incredible. He's been at it for 30 years. So just understanding how he's laddered his time and his investments. If I could do a day with him, that would be incredible.

• 46:31Harry Stebbings?

  Tell me, you've got Doug Leone and Mark Andreessen on your board. Starting with Doug, what's been the biggest lessons from working with Doug?

• 46:37Speaker 00

  So with Doug, I would say it was really about being direct. Doug is a very clear communicator. He's very straightforward. And actually, he's just a great guy. Like, he was very just straight with you. So I would say that's my biggest takeaway from Doug is just tell people what you're thinking, what you're feeling, and just be straightforward with them.

• 46:54Harry Stebbings?

  What about Mark? What have you learned from Mark?

• 46:56Speaker 00

  So Mark is a very different personality, as I think many people know. What I learned from Mark has been his information diet. So he's talked about this a little bit, but I think Mark spends time on X or Twitter, gets a lot of what's going on in the moment. And then he reads some really old, old books, right? Like stuff that's maybe out of print and hard to find, sort of the timeless sort of thought classics. That barbell of information is really fascinating because we all have a limited amount of bandwidth to take in. And so being able to kind of do the timeless stuff and then what's current is really interesting.

• 47:26Harry Stebbings?

  What are you seeing in terms of fastest adoption of EVs and then slowest adoption in terms of countries?

• 47:32Speaker 00

  So fastest adoption of EVs would probably be China. Norway is maybe technically the fastest. I think 80 something percent of all new vehicles sold there are EV, which is remarkable given the weather. There have been a lot of government subsidies, lots of initiatives there. China is pretty far along. I think that's also maybe driven by the government. Again, air quality is a significant issue for them. So EV and the energy transition there. And then slowest has been really in the US. And it actually varies by regions of the US. Some of that is because our geography is so broad, right? Like, we've got a lot longer distances here to cover. And the very slowest has actually been heavy vehicles, what are called Class 8. So these are the big semi trucks that you see or HGVs that you see in Europe.

• 48:13Speaker 00

  Those are the hardest to transition and they're starting to happen now because the technology hasn't quite been ready.

• 48:18Harry Stebbings?

  What's been the biggest surprise or something you didn't expect about being in public?

• 48:23Speaker 00

  There's a lot that people tell you about how your time allocation changes because every 90 days you're doing earnings and you're out as a public company reporting. What I didn't appreciate is that's maybe 5-10% of my time allocation, but as a CEO, you're already quite busy, right? Your schedule's packed. So finding an extra 10%, you have to pull back on something else or carve out time. So it actually forced me to go find another 5-10% of efficiency in my own calendar. No one told me that I would need to do that, but I found it some way.

• 48:52Harry Stebbings?

  What do you know now that you wish you'd known before you had your first child?

• 48:56Speaker 00

  Well, first of all, it's actually, you know, just from a priorities perspective, when you're on the other side of kids, you just realise, hey, these are people that I'm going to be with for decades and decades and decades, and I really want to see how it turns out. So you were, you know, if you think about startups and building for the long term, your kids are like the ultimate startups and it's really what you put into it and the relationship you build and that sort of thing. So I don't think I understood how special that is and how it's actually different. I have three kids, so each kid is different in their own way and they're young and you can already see divergence in their personalities and their interests. So anyway, I think it's such a special thing, I don't know that I would have been able to explain it to myself.

• 49:35Harry Stebbings?

  Eight years so far, where is Samsarum? Where are you in 10 years? Are you still CEO? Do you still want to be with the business? Do you want to be third business? How do you think about that?

• 49:44Speaker 00

  So I think we've got a lot of runway with Samsar because, you know, the world of physical operations that we serve is so broad and vast. We're talking about 40% of world's GDP. So there are a lot more problems for us to work on and solve. And what we're doing is kind of building up a platform, like a system of record where all this data is in there and we can solve even more problems with it. So 10 years from now, I would love for us to have a dozen or dozens of applications on the platform. I think the world's going to be very different. I think there will be autonomous vehicles, there may be delivery drones, there'll probably be some robots, there'll be a lot of AI. And I think that's going to be a really interesting space to be working in, which is like, physical operations is going to be with us forever, right? It's the infrastructure of the planet. How will that transform as we kind of go through this, this digital journey?

• 50:27Harry Stebbings?

  Sanjay, listen, I told you, I've been a big fan of the business from afar for a while. I was super keen to make this one happen, so thank you so much for joining me today.

• 50:35Speaker 00

  Awesome. Well, thanks for having me, Harry.

• 50:38Harry Stebbings?

  Eighteen billion dollars in market cap, a billion dollars in ARR in eight years. That is the most incredible story. If you want to see the full episode in video, you can check it out on YouTube by searching for 20 VC. But before we leave you today, there is no shortage of helpful AI tools out there. But using them means switching back and forth between yet another digital tool. What was supposed to simplify your workflow just made it way more complicated. Unless, of course, you're in Notion. Notion combines your notes, docs and projects into one space that's simple and beautifully designed. And you can leverage the power of AI right inside Notion across all your notes and docs without jumping between your work and with a separate AI-powered tool.

• 51:21Harry Stebbings?

  Or to make the tedious tasks like summarizing meeting notes or finding next steps, freeing you up to do the deep work. It allows you to save time and write faster by letting Notion AI handle the first draft, jumpstart a brainstorm, or turn your messy notes into something polished. And you can try Notion for free when you go to notion.com/20vc. That's all lowercase notion.com/20vc to try the powerful, easy-to-use Notion AI today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show. And speaking of game-changing products like Notion there, Intercom is a complete AI-powered customer service platform and the only platform to combine a help desk, AI chatbot and proactive support tools.

• 52:04Harry Stebbings?

  It also comes with a fully featured inbox, ticketing, help center and messenger, making it not only complete, but also the most powerful support platform out there. Intercom, every single tool you need, all in one place, enhanced with AI, so you can give every single customer the fastest, most personalized experience imaginable. Learn more at intercom.com. And finally, travel and expense are never associated with cost savings, but now you can reduce costs up to 30% and actually reward your employees. How? Well, Nirvan rewards your employees with personal travel credit every time they save their company money when booking business travel under company policy. Does that sound too good to be true? Well, Nirvan is so confident you'll move to their game-changing

• 52:47Harry Stebbings?

  All-in-one travel corporate card and expense super app that they'll give you $250 in personal travel credit just for taking a quick demo. Check them out now at navan.com/20vc. As always, I so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for an incredible episode this coming Monday with Henry Ward, founder and CEO at Carter.