Sanjit Biswas: Samsara's $18BN Market Cap & $1BN in ARR in 8 Years | E1092

1. 0:00 – 0:43

   Intro

   1. HSHarry Stebbings0:00

      What do you think are the biggest mistakes founders make with product-market fit?

   2. SBSanjit Biswas0:03

      Well, I think some of it has to do with... With Samsara, we said, "We need to be building for the long term," which means you're allocating capital for the long term. If we do this right, we will scale 10X and then 10X again. 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. I think product-market fit is something you don't want to force. Get out there with customers, with beta testers, and listen for the wow. What we've done in the past is kind of what we call an... (screwing sound)

   3. HSHarry Stebbings0:31

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

   4. SBSanjit Biswas0:40

      Well, thanks for having me, Harry.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings0:42

      Not at all. But I

2. 0:43 – 3:34

   Starting in Tech: The First Project

   1. HSHarry Stebbings0:43

      want to start with a bit of a weird one, but one of, um, (laughs) 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?

   2. SBSanjit Biswas0:59

      Yeah, it's funny. It's, uh, the kind of Wayback Machine test, so that's probably a, a 30-year-old story at this point. We're talking, like, the early, mid-90s. 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 kinda dating myself here, but, you know, probably (laughs) before you were born, but, you know, like, the World Wide Web was brand new, and I just thought it'd be really cool to... I went to public school here in California. I thought it'd be cool to bring 1,600 high school kids online and kinda see what happens. I was a techie, and so I'd been kind of online even at a young age, um, and wanted to find a way to make it accessible. Back then, it was very kind of, um, 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 gonna figure that out. How do we make it just work out of the box? So, um, sat there, typed in 1,600 names from the high school yearbook 'cause I couldn't get the roster from the administration, so just kind of brute forced it. We set up, uh, web browsers and web servers so you could actually check your email using the web instead of having to sit at a command line, which is kinda 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. Um, and by the way, I was a new student, and I'd just moved from Texas, and probably what my friends didn't tell you is I was pretty 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 to, you know, everyone else that was in my grade. So really fun experience, 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, 'cause it, like, really blew peoples' 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."

   3. HSHarry Stebbings2:55

      Can I ask a weird one? Was it hard being the young one? I mean, li- you know, uh, we spend our lives trying to fit in. It's, it's very hard to fit in when you're especially younger, especially in kind of school and academic environments. Was that a difficult and shaping time?

   4. SBSanjit Biswas3:09

      You know, in retrospect, it, it probably should've been more difficult, but maybe I was-

   5. HSHarry Stebbings3:13

      (laughs)

   6. SBSanjit Biswas3:13

      ... oblivious to it? I, I did see a picture from my high school yearbook. I think I was four foot 10 inches tall, so I must have been a foot shorter than everybody else. I hadn't, you know, really kinda sprung up yet. And so it's kind of funny. I m- I was a super nerdy kid, like, but just approaching people like, "Hey, do you wanna try the internet?" (laughs) So, uh, maybe it helps to be a little oblivious, uh, at that point in time.

   7. HSHarry Stebbings3:33

      I mean, it's

3. 3:34 – 6:30

   Tackling Early Challenges and Learning Curves

   1. HSHarry Stebbings3:34

      sweet though. (laughs)

   2. SBSanjit Biswas3:36

      (laughs)

   3. HSHarry Stebbings3:36

      Um, can I ask, you know, you mentioned there about brute force peoples' names in.

   4. SBSanjit Biswas3:40

      Yeah.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings3:41

      Uh, you know, I know Paul Graham, uh, has talked before with regards to you about doing things that don't scale. Can you talk to me about that and how 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?

   6. SBSanjit Biswas3:54

      Well, first of all, in, 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, in the computer lab kinda thing. And so just finding a way to make it happen was the key, and the brute force was, was one of the ingredients to that, which is like, you know, we couldn't get everyone's support, or people were busy at the time, so it was just hard to get... And, and there were, you know, privacy questions, like, "Are we allowed to give this kid a list of names from the roster?" kinda thing. So I said, "Well, the yearbook's not private. I'll just use that." So it was just finding a way, I guess. Uh, this actually happened over and over if, if we kinda 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 peoples' roofs, and we got, like, a 40-foot ladder, and, like, again, in retrospect, that was kinda crazy and definitely wasn't research, but it was just what was needed to build the platform up. So over and over, that's, it's been an unlock, just being willing to kind of roll up your sleeves and, and go for it.

   7. HSHarry Stebbings4:55

      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?

   8. SBSanjit Biswas5:07

      Yeah. You know, u- um, you, you're absolutely right, and at some point you need to stop because you're kinda getting in the way. Uh, 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 at Meraki and Samsara because, and I, 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?

   9. HSHarry Stebbings5:33

      So how, 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-

   10. SBSanjit Biswas5:44

       Yeah.

   11. HSHarry Stebbings5:44

       ... what would you advise... It's something that I struggle with today, actually, honestly. What would you advise me?

   12. SBSanjit Biswas5:48

       Yeah. You know, so, um, I go through a process which I call rehiring myself, um, and it's, 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, i- does my time and, and sort of how I'm doing things match what, what needs to, the company needs from me and the organization needs from me. And usually there, it comes out that, you know, hey, I probably need to stop, like, designing hardware or trying to be involved in every sale or, you know, being, being in all these details, which makes sense at the beginning, like, when you're getting off the ground. The other thing is people will tell you if you listen, right? Like, they're very polite about it, but they might kinda give you a hint or two, and so you have to have these really big ears and listen.

4. 6:30 – 7:48

   Defining a Leadership Role at Samsara

   1. SBSanjit Biswas6:30

   2. HSHarry Stebbings6:30

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

   3. SBSanjit Biswas6:43

      Well, at this point, Samsara, uh, uh, which is the, the current company, is at, at quite a bit of scale. So we're a public company now. Um, you know, the consensus numbers have us getting to over a billion in, in ARR. So we've really got something big going on. And so the current job description, in my opinion, is to be building the company, not for today's scale, but actually for a scale three to five years from now, which is more products, obviously more customers, just, you know, a, a lot more building. And what you realize when you work backwards from that is the way that I spend my time, it, 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, 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. Um, so that's the kinda thing where I will actually say, you know, "This year, uh, I'm going to drop the sitting in every QBR, right, uh, quarterly business review." And that's okay, because I feel like our team's got it. But I do need to spend time helping write the five-year product roadmap because I, you know, I have a deep sense for where I think this all needs to go.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings7:47

      I wa-

5. 7:48 – 9:36

   Confronting Impostor Syndrome as a CEO

   1. SBSanjit Biswas8:02

      You mentioned, um, you, you mentioned Doug, uh, Doug Leone, who was, uh, our partner from Sequoia Capital in Meraki, which is the company before this. That was incredibly challenging to become the CEO of a startup company. And again, just for a little bit of background-

   2. HSHarry Stebbings8:17

      Mm-hmm.

   3. SBSanjit Biswas8:17

      ... um, 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 kind of s- you know, project to startup to actually raising venture money and having this responsibility for a team of a dozen plus engineers and so on, 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 kinda getting in the way, I'm not helping.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings8:51

      I, I get you. Uh, did you feel like in a bit of an imposter s- like, in, in that situation?

   5. SBSanjit Biswas8:56

      Yeah, absolutely. And I think you have that even as a grad student when you're doing research. Like, how am I gonna further the state of the art? So you kinda 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 kinda hard to relate to, and I ended up just kinda putting them all down at, 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 kinda 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, what does the next stage goal look like? And then let's reverse engineer that. That's where that came from.

   6. HSHarry Stebbings9:35

      You mentioned

6. 9:36 – 14:46

   Key Lessons from Meraki Experience

   1. HSHarry Stebbings9:36

      Meraki in those early days, and I'm really fascinated. I, I love backing second-time founders 'cause I honestly think that we make many mistakes the first time that we wouldn't repeat a second or third time. (laughs) When you look back at Meraki and p- like, translating that to Samsara today, first, what didn't work with Meraki that you have very deliberately left behind and not taken with you to Samsara?

   2. SBSanjit Biswas10:00

      Um, like you said, we make a, a ton of mistakes. We try a ton of things. L- let me give you maybe two examples. The first is, uh, when we started Meraki, it, it was more of a technology first company. Like, we had a cool technology which we were kinda 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 kinda thing, which, you know, in the mid-2000s, was an exciting idea. I think Google and a bunch of others were announcing projects like that. Now, the, the problem with free wifi is there's no business model attached to it, and at the time, wifi 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-... W- What's the business? And I would just explain the technology, and they said, "Well, that's not a business," right? And I think we've kinda figured out the hardware. The f- 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, we managed to sell enough product to get off the ground. So, that was a feedback loop. We were like, "Well, people seem to like what we're doing. They wanna 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 propo- like, the, the, the fundamentals matter. And so that transition was, was actually very challenging, and something we did differently at Samsara. We a- we started market first with this company. We said, "Who's a customer? What are the problems we can solve in a kinda scalable way? And let's work backwards from that, which is to find the commonalities." So, that was maybe a big one.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings11:30

      Why did you decide to raise venture money? You bootstrapped, you doubled revenues-

   4. SBSanjit Biswas11:34

      Yeah.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings11:34

      ... product was selling, customers liked it. Why raise?

   6. SBSanjit Biswas11:37

      Yeah. So, we got to close to a million dollars in, in revenue. And by the way, w- with Meraki, there was a hardware component, so we were building these routers. And what that means is you need cash up front to get the, the product manufactured. Um, and so that was a big challenge, which was 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 Paul Graham phra- 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. W- 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 gonna really be scalable unless we, we get a little bit of additional money. Now, we could have taken a bit longer and just, you know, gone with taking our time. But actually, the, the venture capitalists started knocking on our door, quite literally. They found our dingy office space, which was like a, I think a sublease of a sublease (laughs) in the warehouse district. And, you know, these people with very nice cars would pull up and quite literally knock on the door, 'cause word spread that, like, this group of MIT cl- students was out there building routers, uh, and, and doing some interesting things.

   7. HSHarry Stebbings12:44

      I, I, I love that. And, uh, VCs have a way of finding you if you're good, I find. (laughs)

   8. SBSanjit Biswas12:49

      Well, we're not listed anywhere. (laughs) Like, so, the fact that they found us, like, it's, it's really some pretty impressive detective work.

   9. HSHarry Stebbings12:55

      Oh, I, I would've said, like, they are incredible. And especially with data transparency today, it's even harder to hide from VCs. (laughs)

   10. SBSanjit Biswas13:02

       Yeah.

   11. HSHarry Stebbings13:02

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

   12. SBSanjit Biswas13:06

       So, I, 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 cool technology. So, for us, it was, like, AI and computer vision a couple of years ago. We thought it was gonna be transformative, and it has been for our business. But we, we found ourselves in this kind of techie engineering habit of, of we've got this cool new hammer or tool. This is, like, 2018, 2019. Where can we apply it? And so for Samsara, we, we served the world of physical operations. Think, you know, the supply chains and the factories and, and so on. So, we thought maybe we could build a camera that would inspect products on a assembly line. We called it machine vision. And detect defects, and, you know, part, carton problems, that sort of thing. That turned out not to be a, a great business for us, not because the technology didn't work, but it actually didn't fit our business model. Like, the way that it gets installed in a line is highly custom, lots of custom lighting, you need to know the product, and so on. So, what we found with, uh, Samsara is it's really important to have a kind of 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. We kinda did, but you, you find yourself reverting to those kinds of, uh, problems. Now, it wasn't a big diversion for us. Like, it was a, it was a kind of relatively small experiment that we ran for a year or two. But it's the kind of thing where 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.

   13. HSHarry Stebbings14:35

       Yeah. I totally understand the natural tendency there. When I listen to both, I just think about kind of product/market fit quite early, both in Samsara and in Meraki.

   14. SBSanjit Biswas14:44

       Mm-hmm.

   15. HSHarry Stebbings14:45

       If you were

7. 14:46 – 20:02

   Striving for Product-Market Fit

   1. HSHarry Stebbings14:46

      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?

   2. SBSanjit Biswas15:00

      Well, um, I think product/market fit is something you don't wanna force. And, 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, and listen for the wow, where you're showing them something, and, you know, w- 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 kinda nod their head, or they'll be very polite and, 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." Or even better is when they call someone out, i- 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, uh, that they have. 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. That has worked for us, uh, across both companies and, and many, many products that we've built.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings15:53

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

   4. SBSanjit Biswas15:57

      I think so. And this is something I've learned in the world of B2B, 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.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings16:19

      Can I ask, what do you think are the biggest mistakes founders make with product/market fit? I often find that they set kind of arbitrary, uh, metrics to, 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.

   6. SBSanjit Biswas16:34

      Yeah.

   7. HSHarry Stebbings16:34

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

   8. SBSanjit Biswas16:38

      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, (laughs) 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, and it's, it's, it's almost unmistakable. You'd have to be blind not to see it. Because you just, like, I've had customers or beta testers call me the next day after, um, after going on-site, and they'll say, "Hey, was that thing for sale? Like, can we, can we place an order for that?" And that is magic, right? Like, that means you're really onto something, and again, like, you'd have to be really (laughs) dense to ignore something with, like, a powerful signal like that.

   9. HSHarry Stebbings17:24

      You said about a kind of product being pulled out of hands there. Man, it's so, uh, I'm, uh, very kind you said before about listening to this show, I'm the biggest, like, fan by far from, of, uh, Samsara's business, and you have amazing breadth to your product line. You have three products well over 100 million in ARR.

   10. SBSanjit Biswas17:42

       Mm-hmm.

   11. HSHarry Stebbings17:42

       I'm, I'm sure numbers are updated now-

   12. SBSanjit Biswas17:44

       Mm-hmm.

   13. HSHarry Stebbings17:44

       ... but that's when I saw it. Like, 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?

   14. SBSanjit Biswas18:01

       You know, just the Samsara anecdote is fascinating. So our first product was, th- that, that really kind of got us going, was real-time GPS tracking. So think about all the work trucks that are out there as part of different fleets, not just in supply chain businesses, but construction, um, 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, they loved the GPS tracking product, and then they started asking us, "Hey, is there a dash camera that you all recommend that works well with your system?" You hear that five, maybe ten times, and then, you know, we said, "Well, if we built a dash camera, would you use it?" And they say, "Oh, yeah, absolutely. I'd 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, um, and we've, we've now added AI and workflows and a bunch of deep analytics on top of that. But 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, and this idea of a platform became very clear, that folks wanted to be in one system.

   15. HSHarry Stebbings19:18

       Does product two have to make product one better?

   16. SBSanjit Biswas19:22

       We, um, 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 make the, when they, um, f- 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 solved, that's way better from a customer conversation perspective because that, that single lead that you have can lead to two pretty productive sales conversations.

   17. HSHarry Stebbings20:01

       (laughs) This is a tough question.

8. 20:02 – 25:45

   Listening to Customers vs. Following Vision

   1. HSHarry Stebbings20:02

      How do you know when to listen to customers? "Oh, I'd love you to solve this." Mm, 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?

   2. SBSanjit Biswas20:21

      Yeah. We try to use, like, an 80/20 rule. So if 80% 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, you know, exotic or esoteric. That's where we tend to partner. So we have customers that, uh, route produce, right, like the groceries, and, uh, they have very specific rules around, like, the crispness of lettuce, right? Like, something has to be delivered early in the morning versus in the afternoon because they don't want it to spoil. That's not gonna be applicable to a customer in construction or, you know, a local government or someone like that. 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.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings21:10

      Uh, in terms of like, "We should build something there," it's a really interesting combination of engineering and sales, obvio- uh, obviously in terms of the ability to build and then the ability to distribute.

   4. SBSanjit Biswas21:20

      Mm-hmm.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings21:20

      I heard that you became a sales savant. Love that word.

   6. SBSanjit Biswas21:25

      (laughs)

   7. HSHarry Stebbings21:25

      Um, having really not been, respectfully. They said you were like an engineering mastermind or wizard, uh, and now you're a sales savant, and I think it's a very difficult transition to make. Uh, w- how did you make that transition, and what really enabled you to make it so well?

   8. SBSanjit Biswas21:41

      Uh, well, first, I, I think I need to talk to some people about managing expectations because I'm definitely not (laughs) a sales savant. I, I, 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, is that something that's a big problem or a little problem?" Like, it's, 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, right? 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 have an advantage there, or just founders in general. My co-founder does this too. When you're speaking to a customer, they know you have the ability to shape the roadmap. It may be not you're g- it's not gonna change what you do next quarter, but it's gonna change what happens two to three years from now.

   9. HSHarry Stebbings22:46

      Do you think the founder will always be involved in sales? I, I asked this of Benioff, actually, when I had him on the show. I said, like, "Do you still sell?"

   10. SBSanjit Biswas22:54

       Mm-hmm.

   11. HSHarry Stebbings22:54

       He's like, "Yeah, I do. F-

   12. SBSanjit Biswas22:55

       (laughs)

   13. HSHarry Stebbings22:55

       "... absolutely, I do."

   14. SBSanjit Biswas22:57

       Yeah.

   15. HSHarry Stebbings22:57

       And I was like-Is, is there ever a time when the founder's not involved in sales?

   16. SBSanjit Biswas23:02

       Y- you know, there, there might be and, uh, uh, no two companies are the same, right? So for us, it benefits us tremendously to be out on the front lines, and I, I love it. I love to get out on the road. Our customers are sometimes in the middle of nowhere, so it can be, uh, a little bit challenging from a travel perspective, but it's always worth it to get out- get out in front of them and see what their problems are firsthand. I personally get a tremendous amount of value from it. You just can't be everywhere at once. So that's the only thing to be aware of is, you can, you know, fly to a certain state, but you can't fly to all the different countries, you can't fly and see all the different industries. So you do need a more scalable process than just a founder doing all that, kind of, product management work.

   17. HSHarry Stebbings23:39

       I heard 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-

   18. SBSanjit Biswas23:50

       (laughs)

   19. HSHarry Stebbings23:50

       ... you do write-ups, and I loved it, but I haven't heard of pictures and write-ups before. So could you take me through this process as, as in-depth as possible actually, (laughs) just so I can understand this so founders can get it?

   20. SBSanjit Biswas24:02

       A- again, this is sort of repeating a pattern that worked for us in the early days and continues to work, which is just getting that face time with the customer is so valuable, it's so high bandwidth. During the pandemic, I actually found that I wasn't able to get on planes a- and visit customers on site because of, of safety concerns, so we'd do Zoom calls, and it ended up being this really fascinating, sort of, silver lining because all of a sudden I wouldn't lose, like, a whole day traveling to see one customer. I could spend the whole day and I could meet eight customers. It's not as good as being on site, but certainly you can be... get a, you know, breadth of industry. So I'd meet a customer, uh, I'd do a call with someone in London in the morning, and then, you know, kind of work my way through the timezones, a bunch of different industries. It was super fun. Um, and that was in 2020. 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, um, you know, our, our, our president who runs all of go-to-market for us, but I also will bring in 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 the, uh, talent brand and why people come to Samsara, it's around real world impact. And so he connected immediately. He said, "Wow, our products are saving lives." Like, we, uh, build products for safety, they save people's lives out in the field, that's really compelling. So for him to be able to connect with that was also really important. So the reason that we, we do so much of it and, and I do so much of it is it's such a high bandwidth, such a powerful tool. I wish we could do more of it. Two days a week i- is, you know, that's kind of the maximum time allocation that I can (laughs) devote to something like that because there is a company to run, but, uh, anyway, it's, it's something that's really been powerful for us.

   21. HSHarry Stebbings25:44

       Talk to me about

9. 25:45 – 30:51

   Transition from Engineering to Sales Leadership

   1. HSHarry Stebbings25:45

      pictures and notes. What, what do you do with them and then how do you distribute them to the rest of the team?

   2. SBSanjit Biswas25:50

      Yeah, this is... it's, you know, sort of like Instagram, right? Like a, a picture can be really powerful and describe a lot, and our customers are the world, uh, behind the curtain, right? They're the infrastructure of the planet. So if you think about, you know, we have customers that are some of the largest chemicals distribution companies in the world, or the largest crane rental companies in the world, uh, you know, the largest food distributors. 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.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings26:15

      No.

   4. SBSanjit Biswas26:15

      Um, I, I, I grew up just glued to the TV watching stuff like that, and so I'm always taking pictures behind the scenes, and our, our team loves it. They get a lot of context and sometimes the engineers will say, "Hey, what's that thing over there?" Or, you know, "Can I ask them about, you know, how they're tracking pallets or something?" So it leads to more conversations than, um, th- than not. So that's, that's kind of why we do it.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings26:37

      You mentioned, um, some of your clients there, and that's, you know, uh, in, in a lot of cases, they're like real businesses, traditional amazing producers of-

   6. SBSanjit Biswas26:47

      Mm-hmm.

   7. HSHarry Stebbings26:47

      ... hard materials. My question to you is twofold. One, um, is on customer education. Often people are like, "Oh, they're a nightmare customer base to serve because when it comes to technology, you have to really educate them." What advice do you have for founders who are told, "Ugh, customer education is a nightmare and you don't want to do that"?

   8. SBSanjit Biswas27:07

      It just never occurs to me to even frame it that way, because I, I really view it as you're partnering with the customer to solve their problems, right? And so if they're not super high tech, you're gonna take them from zero to one and have a tremendous amount of impact in their day-to-day. We've had customers, by the way, that literally were planning routes for thousands of trucks using giant maps on the walls, right? Like, so to take them from that to doing something, you know, online, it was just game-changing for them and, and their eyes light up and very few people want to live in a cave. Like, you know, if you, you show them a smartphone, they're like, "Oh my God, this is amazing." And they're already, they're on their personal side of their lives, like, they're using smartphones, they're, uh, you know, on Instagram or Facebook or whatever. So that's the kind of interesting connection that we've been able to draw, which is people know what digital transformation can look like, how powerful it could be, how they make it happen is actually the challenge. So I view it as like a, a huge blessing to be able to spend time with customers and walk them through that journey, and once you do it once or twice or maybe 10 or 100 times, you have notes that you can share with them of here's how we did change management for 10, 20,000 drivers when you bring them new technology. And we've done things like driver rewards programs where people basically get, you know, Starbucks cards and things like that for being safe on the roads. That has transformed culture for frontline workforces. Like, that stuff is really powerful and it's fun to be able to bring those ideas across industries and across customers. So I kind of view it as you can be this missionary kind of spreading the word of how powerful this technology can be.

   9. HSHarry Stebbings28:36

      The other element I, I do want to discuss kind of frontline work people and AI actually, but, but before we do that, I, I have to ask, sales cycles are also of- also often said to be much longer.

   10. SBSanjit Biswas28:46

       Mm-hmm.

   11. HSHarry Stebbings28:47

       Is that true? And how have you seen sales cycles vary over the life of Samsara?

   12. SBSanjit Biswas28:53

       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, um, and that sale cycle's inside of 90 days. Our field or your major account teams might take, you know, six months to, to a full year to close a deal, but that's pretty similar to other kinds of enterprise software, and, and you think about quotas and cycles and things like that, and we benchmark 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, you know, 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, and negotiate and close. That process is pretty similar to I think how a lot of software companies do things.

   13. HSHarry Stebbings29:38

       Can I ask, when we think about sales cycles, compressing them, reducing them, making them more efficient, one thing that's astonishing with Samsara is how much more efficient you are as a business-

   14. SBSanjit Biswas29:49

       Mm-hmm.

   15. HSHarry Stebbings29:49

       ... and, and how that's gonna, you know, change over time. Uh, what's driven the efficiency, bluntly? When I was looking at it, I was thinking these different charts of your efficiency, and over the last eight quarters, it's been pretty unparalleled. What's driven the efficiency gains?

   16. SBSanjit Biswas30:02

       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 because they're kind of... A- and you know all of this, right? Like, they're still kinda coming up to speed and s- 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, 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 wanna move quickly, 'cause they don't wanna spend time in the sales process. They wanna kinda get the product and get going. So, we've found that aligning more closely with how the customer likes to buy has, has really unlocked a, you know, a tailwind of growth.

   17. HSHarry Stebbings30:50

       It is nitty-gritty,

10. 30:51 – 38:19

    Building and Training Sales Teams

    1. HSHarry Stebbings30:51

       but what do you find is the ramp time for sales teams?

    2. SBSanjit Biswas30:53

       It varies. So, you know, part of it is getting a few of those sales cycles under your belt.

    3. HSHarry Stebbings30:57

       Mm-hmm.

    4. SBSanjit Biswas30:58

       Uh, so we can ramp within a few quarters, right? And it varies by, you know... 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. And so I think we can make enablement even better. But to answer your question, it's a couple of quarters.

    5. HSHarry Stebbings31:20

       Yeah. No, I totally get you. 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?

    6. SBSanjit Biswas31:40

       I would say... 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 KACB and just really move 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 HR software or CRM. You know, these are all kind of similar conversations, 'cause it's business value, but that's a different way of selling than, you know, just picking up the phone and, and closing deals really fast.

    7. HSHarry Stebbings32:13

       No, I'm with you. Although you learn so much, I think. Like, cold calling, I think, must be the most-

    8. SBSanjit Biswas32:18

       You do.

    9. HSHarry Stebbings32:18

       ... character-building thing. Yeah. Um-

    10. SBSanjit Biswas32:19

        Yeah, absolutely.

    11. HSHarry Stebbings32:20

        You, you also recently, uh, announced kind of this massive hiring spree that will be taking place in terms of sales.

    12. SBSanjit Biswas32:28

        Mm-hmm.

    13. HSHarry Stebbings32:28

        Can you just walk me through this? 'Cause when I saw it, I was like, "Wow, shit." Like-

    14. SBSanjit Biswas32:33

        (laughs)

    15. HSHarry Stebbings32:34

        I mean, fantastic, and, like, 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 gonna be aggressively hiring."

    16. SBSanjit Biswas32:44

        Uh, y- 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, and hire a bunch of salespeople." It's been a continuous build for us, and it will continue to be, because i- it's, it's the way that we get out in the world, right? It's the way we get our products in front of customers.

    17. HSHarry Stebbings33:07

        I have, like, a slightly contentious topic-

    18. SBSanjit Biswas33:10

        Mm-hmm.

    19. HSHarry Stebbings33:10

        ... but I'm intrigued to hear your thoughts. You have a flexible/hybrid workforce. Why? I, I have a belief that I don't think any function is better hybrid or flexible. I think every single one is better in person.

    20. SBSanjit Biswas33:24

        Yeah.

    21. HSHarry Stebbings33:24

        Help me understand. What am I missing?

    22. SBSanjit Biswas33:27

        So 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 was super fast. The difference that we saw when we went to flex work in the pandemic was access to talent. So we were about, you know, thousand-ish employees, maybe a little bit more, and i- w- we're in the Bay Area, that's where our headquarters is, and so there's quite a lot of tech talent and sales talent out here. But what was interesting is a lot of our salespeople were moving. They were moving to San Diego or Austin, Texas, or, you know, kind of heading to places they wanted to be. Then we said, "Well, if we've got teams out there..." We didn't know how long, you know, this remote work thing was gonna last. We said, "Let's do an experiment and hire people from, you know, this kind of broader talent TAM." And what was fascinating is I would say our talent quality went up, right? 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 happened to be timezone aligned with our customers, who, you know, 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. Uh, we were able to kind of increase our talent TAM, like so access to many, many more pools of talent. And I'm talking about 10, 20, 30X increase. It's not like a 20%, but like a 10X kinda thing. And that has outweighed for us the sort of reduced bandwidth that you get between teams. So that's kind of the trade-off we made, and it works for our business, because our business scales with, again, that direct touch with the customer.

    23. HSHarry Stebbings34:59

        What was difficult with the transition? 'Cause it is a big transition. What was difficult? Like, if you, all you know now, you could tell yourself some advice, what would you tell yourself?

    24. SBSanjit Biswas35:09

        You know, when we first went in the pandemic, I think everyone thought it would be a couple of weeks or, you know, first a couple of days, then a couple of weeks. It's, it's hard to remember that time. So, if you had perfect knowledge, um, obviously (laughs) you'd probably help the public health people out a lot. But, uh, from a business perspective, this idea that, hey, we're gonna be in this mode for a while, and there may be a silver lining here, so it's not all downside. We found that out kind of through trial and error. We said, "Wow, our productivity is increasing." If you... And as a public company, you can see it, uh, it's in our S-1. Our sales productivity, as we were talking about earlier, got better and better over time. And so there were actually a bunch of benefits, again, from this approach. That would be the main thing, is it's not all downside, that there's actually an upside here. And if you find it and embrace it, it, it's actually something very powerful to harness. Because again, from a talent perspective, you don't wanna be...... talent 10 limited. We're a couple of thousand people now. We'd probably start lowering our talent bar if you were trying to hire such a big direct sales force in one location. Um, so anyway, that was kind of the takeaway for us.

    25. HSHarry Stebbings36:08

        Can I ask you a really weird and hard one? But, like, we always talk about the importance of A-star players and A-plus people, and by definition, you can't have 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 A-plus people. That's, that's what makes them A-pluses, that they're rare.

    26. SBSanjit Biswas36:24

        Mm-hmm.

    27. HSHarry Stebbings36:24

        Like, how do you feel about that? And then is it an inevitable result that all companies will just be made up of also B and C team players?

    28. SBSanjit Biswas36:34

        Uh, you know, I think as a founder, this is a topic that comes up over and over from the beginning of the company, like the first 20 hires to when you get to 2,000-plus hires. The way that I think about it is you, you want to maintain a high bar. Now, the hires that we make now are way more specialized than they were back in the early days, and maybe they have a different risk tolerance or, you know, just kind of different, uh, outlook because we're a public company versus, like, an early stage startup. But you still want to try to hire great people, right? And what, what I've kind of said is don't drop the bar. In fact, we have... I forgot how many thousand, like, hundreds of thousands of people apply for jobs at Samsara. So we can afford to be really selective, and the hiring managers need to look for what makes someone extraordinary. Now, what's interesting is sometimes the A players, they surprise you. Maybe they come from a different industry, right? So they look different than your other A player. But, um, you'll see that in the leaderboards, you know, six months later or 12 months later. You're like, "Wow, that person was fantastic." Now, I, I think to your point, statistically, you, you don't know until you've seen someone or, or seen a group of hires play out, and you wanna make sure that you have a productive team. So we believe strongly in winning as a team. It's not a superhero culture of, like, oh, Hari is, like, this fantastic sales rep. Everyone look at Hari, and that's it. Like, we actually want everyone to be performing at a high level, and that's where we swap notes and we try to train each other. That, that kind of happens with a variety of people, and y- y- you know, that distribution of talent will occur as you hire, you know, 1,000 people.

    29. HSHarry Stebbings37:59

        What have been the biggest hiring mistakes you've made, Sanjit? They're, they're inevitable. What do you think have been the biggest?

    30. SBSanjit Biswas38:06

        The biggest hiring mistakes... So I think you're right, it's inevitable and it's kind of statistical. You hire 1,000 people, you're not gonna get them all right. The ones that come to mind are when it wasn't a stage fit. So, for example, there may be someone who's been very successful

11. 38:19 – 41:12

    Insights from Hiring and Team Building

    1. SBSanjit Biswas38:19

       at a bigger company. Maybe they grew a business from X hundred millions to, 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 gonna have all the infrastructure they're used to. They're not gonna 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 f- for this stage?" So, that's one. And then two is, sometimes, uh, I would say when we move really fast on a hire and not done the references, it can backfire on you because someone, again, may look great on paper and then you realize, wow, they're really a terror to work with behind the scenes. Like, they're not cooperative. Um, and, and again, it's a team sport at this scale, right? Like, you have to have people coordinating and collaborating, and that could be within the sales and sales ops functions, it could be with product, could be with finance. 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, you know, uh, credit history, I guess, of how they operate in an organization.

    2. HSHarry Stebbings39:28

       Can I ask, if you think about tal- like, 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?

    3. SBSanjit Biswas39:40

       Well, hopefully they're not exclusive. Um, we, we do try to find that kind of Venn diagram overlap. But what, what I found works really well is you want hardworking people that work well in a team. So, those two, maybe number two and number three, I rank very highly. Um, and then smarts, I think, again, it... that- that's really... 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- 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 wanna make sure that they've got that drive, that ambition, the grit, the motor, whatever you want to call it, because that... it's, it is, uh, something that it's sustained, uh, delivery, right? Like, you wanna make sure that every week, every quarter, every year, we're just accelerating more and more as a company, and that, that's where everyone needs to be pushing.

    4. HSHarry Stebbings40:32

       Are you ever okay not to hire a team player? Like, I'm not a team player. That's why I'm c- completely unemployable.

    5. SBSanjit Biswas40:40

       (laughs)

    6. HSHarry Stebbings40:40

       But I am good at what I do, and I am-

    7. SBSanjit Biswas40:42

       Yeah.

    8. HSHarry Stebbings40:43

       ... unhinged in many ways. (laughs)

    9. SBSanjit Biswas40:45

       Yeah.

    10. HSHarry Stebbings40:45

        Like, I would be a good hire if you unleash me on my own in a dark room.

    11. SBSanjit Biswas40:50

        (laughs)

    12. HSHarry Stebbings40:50

        Is there ever a time, is there ever a time to hire not a team player or a role where it's okay? And the answer may be no, and Hari, you're just meant to be unemployed. I- I'm fine with that. (laughs)

    13. SBSanjit Biswas41:01

        Well, you know, it's, it's also about talent fit, right? So if that person comes in, like if, if Hari comes in and is basically unabashed that I'm not a team player and I, I take

12. 41:12 – 48:17

    CEO's Perspective on Resource Allocation

    1. SBSanjit Biswas41:12

       out other people, that's just counterproductive, right? We're gonna burn more calories managing and working with Hari than what Hari can produce. So, in that sense, it's like, is it a fit, are you gonna be happy kind of question. Now, I will say, we have some people who are, um, 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, 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, you know, engineering managers and so on that will help get the thing made, but we need someone to architect it. So those... You know, there are some personality types and some roles where it is a little bit more of kind of individual brilliance, and that, that fits, but you want those people to have the ability to work with the other people in the company, right? Otherwise, it's, it, it really isn't gonna be productive.

    2. HSHarry Stebbings42:04

       Yeah, I totally agree. Well, I'm, I'm glad that this job interview went well.

    3. SBSanjit Biswas42:07

       (laughs)

    4. HSHarry Stebbings42:07

       Sadly, I won't be hearing back from you. (laughs)

    5. SBSanjit Biswas42:10

       (laughs)

    6. HSHarry Stebbings42:10

       Um, can I ask you, I think Tobi, uh, at Shopify said to me on the show that resource allocation is the single biggest determinant of success as a CEO. Do you agree that the best CEOs are the best resource allocators?

    7. SBSanjit Biswas42:22

       I think so. I think there's, there's definitely a lot to be learned there. So I kinda think of it as the, 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, the sort of people time is going, and you're paying their salaries. So that tends to be, for a software company, where most of the, the money is spent. We have always kind of had a capital allocation strategy. I'm happy to talk more about it, but I think somebody has to make that call and be the editor-in-chief.

    8. HSHarry Stebbings42:48

       What, what, talk to me about the capital allocation strategy. I have questions, but I wanna hear this.

    9. SBSanjit Biswas42:52

       So for us, um, you know, we were talking earlier about, what are some of the differences between Meraki and Samsara? With Meraki, we were kinda glad to see another year. Like, you know, this was a company that survived the global financial crisis. Like, we didn't raise a lot of venture capital because the, the markets got tight and so on. And so for that business, in some ways, we didn't build for the long term 'cause 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, you know, 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, uh, en- engineering budget, for example, to scale the products that are already in the market, but also planting seeds for stuff you're gonna ship one to three years and then three-plus years out. So we have a kind of 70/20/10 capital allocation strategy when it comes to R&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, uh, over time.

    10. HSHarry Stebbings43:54

        What do you think was the best capital allocation decision you made? Be it the decision to invest in a new product, uh, a specific person, a new geography. When you look back, you're like, "That was the best capital allocation decision we made."

    11. SBSanjit Biswas44:07

        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 maybe 10, uh, 10 or maybe 15 million in ARR. A lot of people might have said, "Just stay focused." Just, you know, "There's still bugs in the product. There are still new feature asks. Like, just allocate all the capital there." We said, "Hey, we're gonna fix those, and we're gonna invest, but we're also gonna try this new thing." It didn't cost us a tremendous amount of money to build that first prototype of the product and then V1 and V2, 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. You mentioned geographies. We did the same thing with Mexico, for example, which is now a, a growing business for us. It's doing really well. We've done the same thing with Western Europe, which is where, um, we've got customers, uh, growing as well. Those are areas that didn't make a ton of sense at, at that moment because there was so much more market in the US, but I'm glad we planted those seeds and we tried things. So that's maybe the meta answer, is like, it's really important to, again, have a sort of ladder of risk where you're saying, "Hey, this is low risk, but we're gonna try a couple of high-risk, high-reward things as well."

    12. HSHarry Stebbings45:18

        When you say they didn't make a ton of sense, no offense, why do them, then?

    13. SBSanjit Biswas45:22

        Because if you build for the long term, you're gonna be glad you did them three years out, right? So again, like, products two and three, I'm super glad we have them now. Like, product two, for us, Safety is now our num- number-one revenue product. It's pretty exciting, right? And so very glad we did that. Maybe we could have acquired our way in, but it would have been a different customer experience. Maybe the product wouldn't have been as deeply integrated. Doing it organically, for me, feels like it was the right answer. I'm really glad we did that. And along the way, we tried a couple of other products, uh, you know, you know, products three, four, five, that maybe won't have the same trajectory, but you won't know until you try.

    14. HSHarry Stebbings45:56

        Oh, totally. Um, can I ask, what risks did you not take that you wish you had taken?

    15. SBSanjit Biswas46:02

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

    16. HSHarry Stebbings46:28

        Can I ask you, 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?

    17. SBSanjit Biswas46:36

        I, I, I absolutely think so, because e- 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 it was the pattern matching but also the people matching, where we had kind of role fits for them.

    18. HSHarry Stebbings47:01

        Is there anything where being a second-time or serial founder makes you worse? Maybe you're more jaded. You're more cynical.

    19. SBSanjit Biswas47:08

        (laughs)

    20. HSHarry Stebbings47:08

        I'm just trying to dispro- I was trying to do the, is it the steel man or the straw man or whatever the thesis is? But, like, I'm trying to prove my own theory wrong that, like, investing in serial founders is, like, the best strategy.

    21. SBSanjit Biswas47:20

        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 this cycle of reincarnation and rebirth. So we very much said, "Okay, we're gonna do this." So there probably are a bunch of second-time founders who are maybe reluctant or unsure or wanna 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. Like, I think, you know, you think about Jensen from NVIDIA. He's been... I think that's his first startup. It's turned out quite good, right? So that's the sort of thing where you also don't wanna sort of filter out first-timers, because some first-timers just go and go and go. Tobi, you mentioned. There, there's a long, long list, right? So you wouldn't wanna miss (laughs) a Mark Zuckerberg or a Tobi or a Jensen.

    22. HSHarry Stebbings48:16

        What's the worst capital

13. 48:17 – 53:51

    Reflecting on Capital Allocation and Risk-Taking

    1. HSHarry Stebbings48:17

       allocation decision you've made, on the flip side?

    2. SBSanjit Biswas48:19

       You know, I, I think I mentioned, uh, 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 wanna 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 gonna 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 past those," right? And at, at some point, you need to call it and reallocate. And, uh, you know, we basically took the teams, and some of those people now work on our AI for the dash cameras and other products. We should have made that call a little bit earlier, but it was single-digit millions. It's not, like, a huge downside.

    3. HSHarry Stebbings48:58

       How fast do you know when it's not working?

    4. SBSanjit Biswas49:00

       Well, first of all, there's two types of not working. There's one, the technology doesn't actually work for the customer and breaks. Like, that's, that's super visible. That's maybe not even a question. The second is actually more challenging, which is when the product works and the customer's getting value from it, but it's not scalable. And that's happened to us a couple of times, where, hey, this is a really cool product, but it requires a lot of handholding and installation, in which case our business model doesn't work. It's not a product. It's almost more of a professional service that, that drags a product into it. So that one's, like, a little more subtle. I think we know how to recognize it now. And it's essentially that...... um, the amount of overhead to, to shepherd, uh, a customer installation is really high. That, that is very obvious on that one. On people, that's way more challenging because you have to really be honest with yourself and, uh, you know, the keeper test essentially, which is if, if someone was leaving would you try to find a way to keep them, you know, convince them to stay or would you sort of be, like, (exhales) "I'm, I'm kind of glad that, that they're moving on"? I've applied that test. I've, I've, kind of, 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, they're worthless or something, it's just not a fit for the org. You have to call it. And sometimes the, the person is with you or they're already there, they're feeling it that this wasn't a fit and they're looking for a way out. So, it, it's, again, a very practical reality when you have thousands of people. That's gonna happen.

    5. HSHarry Stebbings50:20

       Yeah. I always remind myself that if it's not working for you, it's probably not working for them and they could be better somewhere else. I, it's ki- it does make you feel better and it's probably a lie to yourself in some ways, but it's also probably true in others.

    6. SBSanjit Biswas50:32

       Yeah.

    7. HSHarry Stebbings50:33

       So I, I try and remember that. Can I ask, on Meraki, when you sell for, you know, a billion two reportedly, or, or not reportedly, whatever one it was, bluntly your financial profile changes. Uh, I've spoken to Doug about this before. Um, how do you think about your relationship to money today?

    8. SBSanjit Biswas50:49

       Yeah. You know, uh, you're right. Your financial profile absolutely changes and it's, it's really interesting to think back 'cause as I mentioned earlier, I started out as a grad student and planned to be a professor, which is not the most lucrative (laughs) career path. So it's never that the, the drive was money, right? Now, as, 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, uh, y- y- like, I love books by the way. I remember the biggest thing for me was not stressing about buying a hardcover book 'cause, you know, they're, they're not the best value but they're kind of fun, and it's just fun, like, to be able to not think about buying $25 books. Like, it's pretty cool. So for everyone it's a little bit different. I didn't grow up n- 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 kee- keep those values intact, it's a huge weight off your shoulders, right? Which is kind of obvious, but you don't realize until many years later where it's, like, 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, you know, the, the financial side. 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 'cause 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, you know, go around saying, "Hey, d- do you wanna invest in the company?"

    9. HSHarry Stebbings52:32

       I- is money a score? Like, how do you view it? I, I, l- it's what a lot of people say on this show, which is like, "Oh, it's a, it's a barometer for how well I'm doing." How do you actually view it?

    10. SBSanjit Biswas52:43

        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, 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. And again, you can see there's Republic, so it's all, it's all there. That is kind of 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, you look at them over long periods of time. Think about how much capital has been reinvested into an Apple or an Amazon or, 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, right? And then you can, 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, it's not an end to itself, it's actually a side effect. D- does that make sense?

    11. HSHarry Stebbings53:50

        Yeah, it totally

14. 53:51 – 56:13

    Evolution into a CEO Role

    1. HSHarry Stebbings53:51

       does. Sanjeet, I listen to you now. When does being a CEO become natural? 'Cause now, you know, I hear you speak. You're a very natural, gifted CEO and I interview many CEOs. E- eh, you go back to your engineering, no offense, less CEO-

    2. SBSanjit Biswas54:07

       (laughs) Yeah.

    3. HSHarry Stebbings54:07

       ... obvious candidate. When did it feel natural?

    4. SBSanjit Biswas54:11

       I, I'm trying to remember. There, there was a moment where I realized that my salary was allocated under G&A, not R&D (laughs) , so it's a very in-the-weeds s- sort of view. I was like, wow, I guess I'm overhead (laughs) . So, uh, but, but for me that was actually an important milestone which is, like, this is an important job, right? The leader of the company, you, you're... Uh, we talked about capital allocation. You're, a- as a founder/CEO you're the soul of the company as well. So I, 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, you know, 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 100 people or something like that.

    5. HSHarry Stebbings54:55

       Where do you say you most need to impro- improve as a leader today?

    6. SBSanjit Biswas54:59

       Oh, h- how much time do we have? (laughs) Um, uh, you know, I, I think for, for me, y- you know, as we kind of talk about rehiring myself, 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, you've interviewed people like Marc Benioff and others, they've seen tremendous scale. The CEO they are today and the way they operate, it's very different than a, you know, early stage startup CEO. You're getting a lot more leverage. You're thinking a lot more strategically. You're, 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, you know, being in- involved in the details, am I spending enough time on the long term? And, and that's a question of time allocation which is... You really have to carve it out.

    7. HSHarry Stebbings55:44

       Uh, final one. We mentioned, like, relationships to money personally. You are also a father and I've, again, spoken to, uh, s- something crazy like a hundred, um, like, multibillion 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-

    8. SBSanjit Biswas56:09

       Mm-hmm.

    9. HSHarry Stebbings56:09

       ... is one of their hardest and most significant worries. How do you bring up kids

15. 56:13 – 57:34

    Instilling Work Ethic in Children as a CEO

    1. HSHarry Stebbings56:13

       with that same work ethic despite the financial cushion?

    2. SBSanjit Biswas56:16

       Well first of all, my kids are young. They're all under ten at this point. First, we spend time. Like, I, I'm always... 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...... c- you know, 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 (laughs) 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, you know, that, that sort of stuff, m- 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, so they, they actually have a lot of face time with people, and they're not watching the TV, et cetera. But the, 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.

    3. HSHarry Stebbings57:18

       Uh, and I, I totally agree with you and, uh, I think it'd be desperately soul-destroying if you told your child that you were building Lego-

    4. SBSanjit Biswas57:23

       (laughs)

    5. HSHarry Stebbings57:23

       ... with someone else doing it.

    6. SBSanjit Biswas57:25

       Yeah.

    7. HSHarry Stebbings57:26

       Um, I wanna move on to a quick fire round. So I say a short statement and you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

    8. SBSanjit Biswas57:31

       Yeah, sounds great.

    9. HSHarry Stebbings57:33

       Okay, so let's

16. 57:34 – 1:06:31

    Quick-Fire Round

    1. HSHarry Stebbings57:34

       start with, what do others not know that you know to be true?

    2. SBSanjit Biswas57:37

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

    3. HSHarry Stebbings57:50

       Do you think most startups build for the long term?

    4. SBSanjit Biswas57:53

       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, uh, you know, I, I think everyone goes through this period of you're, you're trying to stay alive and kind of put one foot in front of the other.

    5. HSHarry Stebbings58:09

       Who's best placed 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?

    6. SBSanjit Biswas58:22

       So I think on the large-scale infrastructure side, if you look at who's won the hyperscaler wars, right, like who, who runs the biggest clouds, it was actually the, 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, uh, 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, um, 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, where do people play, uh, in the stack?

    7. HSHarry Stebbings59:00

       Frontline workers will be removed by AI. Contrarian statement, that's not (laughs) what I actually believe-

    8. SBSanjit Biswas59:06

       (laughs)

    9. HSHarry Stebbings59:06

       ... but like discussion topic. How do you feel about that?

    10. SBSanjit Biswas59:11

        I think we're gonna have frontline workers for a very long time because some of these jobs are, uh, difficult to automate. Uh, 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, uh, agriculture, you know, got the, the combine harvester and diesel engines started showing up everywhere. And what, 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, you know, you didn't have to work in the field and that sort of thing. 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 gonna come out of this with better jobs that are more fulfilling, which are, again, more creative and more unique to us and where we get leverage from technology like AI.

    11. HSHarry Stebbings1:00:07

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

    12. SBSanjit Biswas1:00:11

        I would say it's, it's 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, um... I'm, you know, in my early 40s, so this is still kind of mid-career for me, but this one feels huge.

    13. HSHarry Stebbings1:00:28

        Is it tough for you as well? Because you have this kind of unbelievable business and now bluntly, Wall Street and everyone around you is like, "Well, everyone needs an AI story."

    14. SBSanjit Biswas1:00:38

        (laughs)

    15. HSHarry Stebbings1:00:38

        And it's like, no, Graham Short said some horrible, amazing things with AI. But can we focus on the amazing business we have as well and on the AI story? Is that frustrating?

    16. SBSanjit Biswas1:00:48

        Not really. So we talked about our safety product, the dash cameras. Those were really... What differentiated us is we incorporated AI in them years ago. So we have been deep believers in this area for some time. Again, it's the application. So when we talk to investors on Wall Street, a lot of what we're doing is connecting the dots, educating them about these end markets, like, uh, construction or, you know, uh, field services type vertical industry and saying, "Here is how a raw technology like an AI can be impactful." It can speed up, uh, workflows. It can actually detect risk and help you avoid it. It can help you, you know, really be more efficient in terms of how everything runs. It can help you with sustainability transitions. Those sorts of things are really e- exciting for investors. I think they say, "Wow, there's going to be a lot of value unlocked there, and you could build an even bigger business." So we just try to connect those two dots together.

    17. HSHarry Stebbings1:01:35

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

    18. SBSanjit Biswas1:01:40

        (laughs) Uh, I have a lot of respect for so many CEOs. I would love to live in the shoes of, uh, Jensen from NVIDIA just for a day, because I think the work they're doing is so incredible. I would also say they've been at it for, or 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.

    19. HSHarry Stebbings1:02:00

        That would be a fun thing to do. Tell me, you've got Do- uh, Doug Leone and Marc Andreessen on your board. Starting with Doug, what's been the biggest lessons from working with Doug?

    20. SBSanjit Biswas1:02:09

        So with Doug, I would say it was really about being direct. Uh, Doug is a very clear communicator. He's very straightforward. And he's actually, he's, 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.

    21. HSHarry Stebbings1:02:28

        What about Marc? What have you learned from Marc?

    22. SBSanjit Biswas1:02:30

        So Marc has a very different personality, as I think many people know. What I learned from Marc, uh, has been his information diet. So he's talked about this a little bit, but I think Marc spends time on X or Twitter and, r- you know, gets a lot of what's, 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, timeless, uh, 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.

    23. HSHarry Stebbings1:03:04

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

    24. SBSanjit Biswas1:03:10

        So fastest adoption of EVs would probably be China. Uh, 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. You know, that's, there have been a lot of government subsidies, lots of initiatives there. China's is pretty far along. I think that's also maybe driven by the government. Again, air quality is a, is a significant issue for them. So EV and kind of, um, the energy transition there. And then slowest has been really in the US, um, and it actually varies by regions of the US. Some of that is because our geography is so broad, right? Like, we've got lot longer distances here to cover, and the, the, the very slowest has actually been heavy vehicles, what are called Class 8s. So these are the big semi-trucks that you see, or HGVs that you see in Europe. Those are the hardest to transition, and they're, they're starting to happen now because the technology hasn't quite been ready.

    25. HSHarry Stebbings1:04:00

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

    26. SBSanjit Biswas1:04:06

        You know, uh, I think it, th- there is a lot that people tell you about how your time allocation changes, because every 90 days, you're doing earnings, and you're out, uh, as a public company reporting. What I didn't appreciate is that's maybe, maybe 5, 10% of my time allocation. But as a CEO, you're already quite busy, right? Your, 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, but I found it some way.

    27. HSHarry Stebbings1:04:36

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

    28. SBSanjit Biswas1:04:42

        (laughs) Well, first of all, it's actually, you know, just from a priorities perspective, uh, when you're on the other side of, of kids, you just realize, hey, you know, th- these are people that I'm gonna be with for decades and decades and decades, and I really want to see how it turns out. 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, and they're young, and you can already see the sort of, um, divergence in their personalities and their interests. So anyway, I, I think that it's, it's s- such a special thing. I don't know that I would have been able to explain it to myself.

    29. HSHarry Stebbings1:05:26

        Eight years so far. Where is Samsara, and where are you in 10 years? Are you still CEO? Do you still wanna be with the business? Do you wanna be third business? How do you think about that?

    30. SBSanjit Biswas1:05:37

        I think we've got a lot of runway with Samsara because, you know, the, the world of physical operations 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 dozens or, or, a dozen or dozens of applications on the platform. I think the world's gonna 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 gonna be a really interesting space to be working in, which is, like physical operation is gonna be with us forever, right? It's the infrastructure of the planet. How will that transform as we kinda go through this, this digital journey?

Episode duration: 1:06:31