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

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

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)

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.

Well, thanks for having me, Harry.

Not at all. But I 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?

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."