Logan: We want to double down on things that are work as fun as it is to work on brand new products. You can't allocate a hundred percent of your capital in time towards them. We operate on what we call a 70 2010 kind of split. Welcome to the Logan Bartlett show. In this episode, what you're going to hear is a conversation I have with Samsara, co founder and CEO Samsaray Biswas.
Samsara today is a business doing over a billion dollars in annual recurring revenue with a valuation of over 20 billion. Now Sanjit was also the co founder and CEO of Meraki, which he founded in 2006 and sold to Cisco for 1. 2 billion. Sanjit and I talk about a bunch of different things, including the lessons he learned from Meraki that helped inform the decision to go after Samsara.
If you try to do a startup in easy mode, you're probably not going to succeed. Don't let the Meraki win. Kind of taint the way that you approach the second one. And if anything, Use it for pattern matching recognition. As well as prioritizing different initiatives and color coding your calendar. So you know how you spend your time as the organization's growing underneath you, you have to be hitting refresh on a periodic basis. I do about once a year. Now go back and it's kind of doing like a 360 review of yourself and then figure out, well, what does the company need from me next?
Really fun conversation with Samsara that you'll hear now.
Logan: Thanks for coming on. Great to, great to connect.
Sanjit: thanks for having me.
Logan: I, uh, I first want to start out, Samsara, how do you describe what the business does?
Sanjit: Well, I like to start with the customer. So what we're doing at Simstar is we're building technology for the world of physical operations. So think the construction companies, energy utilities, logistics providers, they all want to find ways to operate smarter. And the way they're doing that today is through data.
And we help them get that data. So we have a system of sensors. We do a lot of data processing, which turns into AI to help them find signal in all that data. And then we give them the ability to take action on that. [00:02:00] And for them, it's about being safer and being more efficient. Because these are industries with a lot of people, labor intensive industries and asset intensive industries.
Uh,
Logan: products today are,
Sanjit: safety and then telematics. So safety is around basically helping large fleets be safer on the roads. And that's about breaking bad habits, checking your mobile phone when you're driving or following distance, those kinds of things. It turns out if you take an active approach to coaching drivers, breaking those bad habits, you reduce risk on the roads. And for our customers, that turns into massive savings in terms of insurance costs and obviously lower injuries, which is what they want for their teams.
Logan: and then the telematics side,
Sanjit: Telematics plays very closely with that. It's basically GPS tracking with a lot of intelligence on top. So we can tell you, uh, if you have 5, 000, 10, 000 trucks out on the road, are they making their stops on time?
Are they stuck in traffic? Are they going to be late to your end customer? You know, down the road, that kind of thing.
Logan: real time visibility around all
Sanjit: Exactly, real time visibility, and then once you have these two building blocks, it really is a sort of underpinnings of a bigger platform, so we can help with workflows, with compliance, we can track all the equipment that's part of your operation, we can now help manage all the devices, like the tablets and that, you know, iPhones and that sort of thing that you're using as part of all this.
Logan: Uh, one of the interesting things that I, I learned about your journey was that you sold Meraki to Cisco for 1. 2 billion. What year was that?
Sanjit: Uh, that sale was 2012. So a little over 10 years
Logan: A little over 10 years ago. And then you stayed on through 2015
Sanjit: about two, two and a half years.
Logan: and then you decided you want to do another company. And you picked an end market before a product was that is that the right, uh, order of operations there?
Sanjit: I think that's right. So, um, Meraki was a networking company. My co founder, John and I were PhD students together. We built computer networks at MIT. And so what Meraki was, was technology first. We started with the product in mind and wanted to bring it to the world. Um, as we started Samsara, we started with the customer in mind, the market in mind and said, we want to help and be useful in the world of physical operations. We didn't know the first thing about it. Neither of us had [00:04:00] ever driven a commercial vehicle. We'd never worked in a warehouse. So it was a pretty steep learning curve.
Logan: And so how did you land on on that? And market? Was it just some broad thesis? Hey, the cloud is coming for other industries. And so this presents an opportunity.
Sanjit: I wish it was so sophisticated. I think we were just curious nerds. Uh, we were looking at a bunch of data about where, where can you have impact in the world? And one of the things that struck us was how much of the world's energy is used by infrastructure and operations. How much of, you know, carbon emissions come from operations, how many people work in these industries. And what was really fascinating is we didn't know anyone here in Silicon Valley working on problems for that customer. Um, we knew tons of people in enterprise from our background. We knew lots of people working consumer. We didn't know anyone thinking about infrastructure. And that to us was a sign that it was probably an under invested and under penetrated market.
And that's what we found as we got into it.
Logan: Did you have any high school classmates in Texas that were in the industry or anyone you could call on way back? It's probably lends itself a little bit more to this
Sanjit: we had a little bit of a preview because we were selling networking in the previous life at Meraki and everyone was deploying Wi Fi networks. You know, we were in schools and offices, but we were also in warehouses and truck yards and that sort of thing. And if you got a chance to set foot in one of those industries, It was like going in a time machine. It was like 1995 all over again. There was literally Windows XP up on the screens, uh, pen and paper everywhere. And that to us was a sign that, okay, you know, there's a transformation that's going to
Logan: There's some job to be done within it. And so then do you, do you cold email, uh, prospective customers and say, Hey, I sold Meraki, uh, and it was a successful outcome and I want to watch what you do or what do you, what do you say to people to actually figure this out?
Sanjit: we did a lot of cold calling, cold emailing. Um, one of the most humbling things was, The customers we were talking to hadn't really heard of Meraki or Cisco systems. When you say Cisco and operations, they think the food distributor
Cisco with an S Yeah, exactly. So, um, it was in many ways just kind of going back to square one, which was, I think, really good [00:06:00] because in operations, people don't have a lot of time.
And so they're not going to take your call or spend time with you unless you have something of usefulness to them. So, um, anyway, in the first year we ended up just kind of going on site a lot and that's how we got our ideas.
Logan: And so the, the pitch I remember reading, you'd say, can I be an intern for a day or something and watch people just work? And so did you just observe, Hey, there's different processes going on here and this seems interesting.
Sanjit: and, and look, we tried to show up with the product because otherwise it's just sort of random. Who is
this random person wanting to be an intern for a day? So we would say, Hey, we're building sensors for the world of operations. We'd like to learn more. We'd like to show you what we have and like to learn more.
Can we spend the day with you? And that actually seemed to work, especially in and around Northern California. That's where initial customers were. People were familiar with the tech industry. They knew that people try a lot of ideas and a lot of things, and they were receptive to taking calls.
Logan: Was hardware a core component of what you were going to do from the start? You felt like that was a disintegrated bundle much in the same way you had done previously.
Sanjit: Yeah, and again, um, we were pretty open minded because we were starting market first or customer first. Um, what we discovered is, while the interest was in the data, no one had a way of getting the data into the cloud, right? So, our first product was basically a temperature sensor that was Bluetooth connected.
Um, very, very simple. It's kind of the simplest sensor we could imagine. And, uh, that's what we brought into the cold chain. So, pharmaceutical companies and food and beverage. Um, and then from there, we evolved into what is now the product family we talked about.
Logan: In that process of finding product market fit, I remember reading that it was actually the customer that led you to a different use case that the temperature sensors actually wasn't
Sanjit: Not our most successful
Logan: didn't really have product market fit. Is that right?
Sanjit: Yeah. And, um, again, We
had a bunch of hypotheses, right? And so one of the ideas we had was, If you had a temperature sensor and your refrigerator failed, it would prevent a lot of product loss, right? If you're in pharma, it might be lots of, uh, product or samples or something like that of food and beverage, you know, a lot of, uh, temperature sensitive product. [00:08:00] So, uh, we kind of went in thinking we just put these on the walk in freezers. We basically, uh, Sound an alarm or do an SMS alert if something was broken and then we'd be heroes, right? Like, cause we'd save tens of thousands of dollars a product. We deployed these sensors and it was kind of crickets. Like, you know, you put the sensors in and it turns out in 2015, refrigerators were really good. So we didn't know that, um, cause we thought these things must break, et cetera. And so it was actually our customers. I remember one of our first customer, customers was Cowgirl Creamery. So they make these like fancy cheeses. You see at Whole Foods, like 10 cheese. Um, and they said, you know, We like the idea, seems useful, our freez our freez uh, fridges and freezers don't really break. Can we move these around? We said, yeah, sure, where do you want to put them? And it turns out they had a real problem, which was the cheese was going bad when it was out for delivery. Um, so they'd be delivering from their operations up in Petaluma to Whole Foods all over the Bay Area. And it was a pretty warm summer that year in 2015. And they were discovering that loads were getting rejected because people were saying, hey, this cheese is sweaty, or we're just not we're not going to take delivery. And it turns out the temperature sensors that they put on their vans started going off. And so there were temperature anomalies. What was going on is the delivery folks were leaving the doors open by accident.
Like they just forget to latch them. Uh, the hot air would come in, it would ruin the product. And so that was actually the first use case that really started, you know, getting some traction. And then they asked us, could we get a couple more? Uh, we said, absolutely. We made them some more. And then they asked us, Is it okay?
Is this a secret or are we allowed to tell other people in the industry? Cause this is very useful. Um, so that's how we, we got initial traction. Um, and then we'd spend the next week with them. And we discovered that they knew when things were going wrong, but they didn't know where. And so they could tell you at 2.
30 there was an issue, but they had no idea which Whole Foods it was. And so they asked us, is there any way that you can sense the location? And we said, yeah, that's easy enough. We ordered a little GPS puck off Amazon, wrote some firmware, Showed up that you know the next day and all of a sudden [00:10:00] like light bulbs went off for everyone So anyway, that was kind of that initial iteration.
Logan: That's it's interesting. And so how long had you been at with the temperature sensors before this moment happened?
Sanjit: It was pretty quick.
So we started the company Late spring of 2015 right around this time of year, and I think we had these initial prototypes in June So we talked, you know first 90 days initial product and then that iteration process was in the first month really
Logan: And so in terms of selling that product itself, the value prop, if you were ordering off of Amazon and writing some firmware around it, was it clearly the, it wasn't proprietary hardware that you, that you were using. And so it was the value prop, the The software that you sort of built around it
Sanjit: A hundred percent. So the hardware was a means to an end. We just need to get the data into the
cloud. At first it was the temperatures, then it was GPS locations. And, um, you know, it was commodity hardware, like you were saying, it was relatively inexpensive, but the customer wasn't in a position to put those pieces together.
Cowgirl Creamery was not going to go on Amazon and write firmware and do all that work. We could do that for them and give it to them in a plug and play sort of form factor. And their interest was not even the hardware, it was the dashboard. So they wanted to see the map of where these trucks were. They wanted to see the graphs of temperature.
They wanted email and SMS alerts. So it was all software was where the value was. The hardware was essentially that bridge to get the data into the cloud.
Logan: The timing of the, the market opportunity is important in any market. But, um, could this have happened? A year to five before, or was there something unique that shifted around that time? Be it on a smartphone penetration or Google map API or something. Was there anything that happened within that or was it possible it could have happened a little bit earlier?
Sanjit: you know, it's hard to say. I do think about that pretty often. Um, one of the big things we benefited from was the 4G network being mature at the time we were starting the company. And if you remember by 2015, you [00:12:00] could stream YouTube and HD on your phone, right? Um, that meant that the marginal or incremental cost of data was very, very low because you're streaming HD video content.
So sending temperature data samples is really inexpensive. So that was one. Uh, the smartphone wave, I think, commoditized pretty high end hardware. So you could run Linux on a little computer, it was super rugged and robust, and you could build it for under 100. And so that was again possible by 2015. And then, um, a little bit later, and happy to talk about the other products, the video products we built were enabled by, uh, low cost AI inference.
And so this is even, not, not this year, but a couple of years ago, we saw this pattern, this curve, and that unlocked a ton more value. Wouldn't have been. Wouldn't have made a lot of sense to build chips for this use case, but you could piggyback off the smartphone chips and then video chips.
Logan: I do want to talk about the journey of going multi product, but there was a, there was an ELD mandate, right? That happened at some point in the early days that, how much that shift? Uh, The demand or the, the urgency on the buyer's side to, to, to move forward with a solution like
Sanjit: Yeah. So ELD is basically, um, an hours of service logging mandate. So it's how many hours has someone been on the road if they're in commercial trucking? Um, Congress passed this, I think in 2017, basically to improve safety because people are getting to accidents from working long hours. Um, we didn't know about this mandate when we started because we were outsiders.
And frankly, most of the customers, even when we asked them about it, they're like, it's not going to pass. Um, so everyone thought it wasn't going to happen. It ended up Passing and kind of getting shoved through at the very last minute. And so the whole industry started to scramble. Um, we were a relatively small company, revenue scale wise. I think these numbers are all public since they were in our S1, but we did about a million dollars in ARR that first product year of 2016. The mandate passed in 2017 and we grew from one to 17
million. So It was rapid acceleration for us. So I do think it was a catalyst in terms of that growth, but it was a kind of one time thing because it was a moment in time you had to be compliant by the end of that year. [00:14:00] So it's not like we could bank on that going forward. So it was a great way to get off the ground. Um, and I actually think it got a lot of customers thinking about technology because before they could kind of resist it or not worry about it cause they're so busy, but now they had to figure out how to comply.
And while they're putting in technology, well, how do you get more value out of it?
Logan: And so you went multi product in the early days. When did you start selling the camera product as well?
Sanjit: Yeah. So the safety product. was I think born, um, we, we started beta testing it in our first year. So we got the GPS product out there. Uh, customers loved it. And, uh, we started hearing an interesting question, which was, Hey, this thing is great. Um, is there a dash camera like this that you recommend? And I think I heard that maybe half a dozen times.
And we said, well, if we built a dash camera, would you use them to say, yeah, absolutely. Cause they wanted use. Um, so that's what we did. We basically went back on Amazon, sponsored by Amazon,
um, got, uh, like a Logitech webcam as a proof of concept, plugged in the USB port, did the same thing, wrote some firmware, brought it to the customers, and they loved it because they can now see what happened, where it happened, when it happened. In full HD and because of the 4G network, we were able to stream it. So no SD cards. You didn't have to call anyone. You could just see it from the cloud. Um, so that product I think was introduced in the spring of 2017. So about a year, year and a half into product
Logan: Was there any resistance, conventional Silicon Valley wisdom is, nail one product, uh, before going multi product. Was there internal resistance to doing more than one thing initially, or how did you sort of think about the opportunities there, but also it could be a distraction?
Sanjit: You know, I, I think internally we were obviously, we had our plates full because this product was taking off on the telematic side, but I think the company is wired for solving problems. So the ELD mandate, Technically it's a different product in some sense. It's a compliance product. So we had to build mobile apps and workflows and figure out all the compliance engine kind of stuff behind the scenes at the same time.
We're introducing the camera, but everyone was pretty excited to do it because customers were just going for it and they [00:16:00] were, they were adopting the entire platform. So I think. At a product and engineering level, even though the team was getting stretched in, they wanted to like push into it. And then I think from a business perspective, we knew that the opportunity was to be a data platform.
We never wanted to be a telematics company that was never part of the charter. We were just trying to find that foothold. And as we found more and more use cases, more problems, we were pretty excited.
Logan: How did you structure the teams in the early days to make sure that, um, enough resources were dedicated to a separate team and product as you, as you got the camera, uh, the safety product off and
Sanjit: Yeah, I think structure would be a strong word
because we were relatively small.
Logan: people were there?
Sanjit: Yeah, exactly. So the whole company was a couple of dozen
people at that point. The engineering teams were
Logan: Not a lot of structure.
Sanjit: Not a lot of structure. We did, of course, have this vision of the platform. So we had a backend infrastructure team that would essentially figure out how are we going to store all this data and
manage it. Then we had application teams. So telematics was an application. Compliance kind of sat right next to that and was deeply integrated for ELD. And then safety become, became another application. And then over the years, we added equipment monitoring and a bunch of other ones.
Logan: the technology that, uh, that preventing safety accidents and as that came to be, um, Was, it sounds like people were asking for that as a, as a thing that you could offer. Was it simply accidents were picking up and it seemed like the, a good thing to be doing and monitoring the drivers or how did, how did, how were they actually thinking about it at the time?
Sanjit: Yeah. I'll give you some, uh, context here. So accidents happen just statistically, right? And if you're running a fleet and you have a hundred or a thousand vehicles, you're probably getting in an accident, you know, every week and sometimes every day. A lot of those accidents are not the driver's fault.
Um, and the unfortunate thing is these customers, these companies have big logos on the sides of their trucks. So they get the finger pointed at them expecting like a big payout. So the core use case was actually exoneration, um, to help the driver explain what really happened and, and show [00:18:00] to, you know, police officer, insurance company, that sort of thing. Um, and so. The way the customers were doing this before us was to actually buy dash cameras, like what you see in an Uber or Lyft. The same use case, right? Um, and they were pulling the SD card if an accident happened and, and, you know, showing it to the fleet manager. So we basically were automating that. As we did that, now our first product was outward facing only. We started to realize these accidents were being caused, in many cases, not by the driver, but sometimes it was the driver, and it was because they were distracted. So if you think about the timeline here, it's 2016. Everyone at that point did have a smartphone in their pocket, and there were all these great apps, right?
There's Instagram and, you know, WhatsApp and all this
Logan: You could stream
Sanjit: You could stream YouTube.
You could listen to some great podcasts. And what was going on were the drivers were getting distracted by their phone. Right. Um, the fleet managers, safety managers knew this and they wanted to figure out how to break that habit.
So they started coaching their drivers using the dash cameras. So it was a sort of interesting confluence in terms of timing, but accident rates did start going up then. And they actually kept going up for a couple of years because this problem became kind of deeper and deeper.
Logan: And so now, as you thought about like, um, the functional, uh, use case of like alerting people when they're doing that. And if folks have look at any video, they can see some of the alerts that go on. Um, was there any resistance on the driver side or the customer side of like the monitoring of them and the big brother element of it, or was that, Hey, the managers cared and they wanted it.
And so it wasn't really your
Sanjit: Yeah, you're, you're, you're on, you're in the company's truck, you're on the company's time. So they could mandate it, but you also have to remember frontline workforces have high labor turnover. So basically if people don't like working in your
organization, they're out of there. So you want to bring people along ultimately because this is a safety.
I think there was a lot of buy in and people knew that they had a bad habit. What they didn't want was big brother watching them. So we did a lot of kind of user studies and spending time again in the field with drivers and What we learned was, you know, they wanted to be better. They didn't want to get an accident.
No one wants to get hurt on the job. [00:20:00] So we built in functionality to do things like alert them in the cab instantly, like within a second or two seconds. And then use that as a nudge. So that's a more recent feature we announced. The idea being that we're not going to report this to the head office. We just want to break your habit of looking at your phone. And doing the real time feedback loop actually changed the game in terms of reducing
risk. So it is a material, uh, improvement in terms of people's awareness that they have this problem. Um, and drivers got it. So we actually ended up getting to this point where Uh, our biggest advocates would be drivers and we would say, let's not go after the worst drivers.
Let's reward the best drivers. And we created leaderboards, safety scores, rewards programs with our customers. And that made it a positive feedback loop, which has continued even to today.
Logan: Is there data you've shared publicly about, like, uh, decreasing accidents or anything that you can,
Sanjit: Yeah. Yeah. I'll give you a sort of example. So, um, You're probably familiar with DHL,
right? The yellow parcel delivery vans everywhere. They're a big customer of ours and we're in every one of those vans. Um, they put our cameras out there and they reduced the number of accidents they were in by about a quarter, like
Logan: Wow.
Sanjit: It's pretty significant. Um, even more interesting was the cost. So they self insure given their scale. Their insurance costs actually got cut in half because those accidents they were getting in were some of the worst ones. So we prevented the, the bad accidents. And, uh, to your point around driver buy in, uh, the other thing that happened was driver turnover rates actually got cut in half too. So people are twice as likely to stay with DHL after the rollout of this technology because they felt like the company had their back. So it was a win kind of all around,
Logan: That's fascinating. Um, and so this, this ultimately proved to be a beachhead into transportation initially, was that the, the wedge market, but you've since expanded into other industries. Was that always the goal was land with something and expand, or how did that actually come to be?
Sanjit: Yeah, kind of going back to the beginning, we started with this vision of, hey, how do we connect operations? Um, transportation logistics was not really the first industry, as I mentioned, like we were working with food and beverage companies. [00:22:00] Um, but what we discovered were the biggest challenges were in the field.
So logistics companies were pretty sophisticated about field operations. They were kind of natural early adopters of trying these new technologies. And, uh, they wanted something better. They actually wanted real time tracking in 2016, right? They were really frustrated that they would get these breadcrumbs that would update every five or 15 minutes. Um, I remember one customer showed me the system they were using and, uh, I kid you not, it was based on MapQuest. And this is like a decade after I thought MapQuest went away. Um, so that's what they were working with, so the tools were not so great. Um, so anyway, logistics ended up being the first use case, or first industry that really opened up. But from there we kind of went industry by industry, because it turns out 80 percent of the problems were the same across different markets.
Logan: Fascinating. So, you've talked about the 80 20 rule of product development. Can you, can you explain what this means and how you actually operationalize that?
Sanjit: Yeah, well, just kind of piggybacking off the industry conversation. Uh, we work with customers in food and beverage and logistics. We work with customers in construction. Um, and then we work with, you know, uh, state and local government. 80 percent of their use case is the same. They want real time GPS tracking, they want to be safe around the roads, they want to be compliant, all that kind of stuff. So there we're able to essentially bring the product across the platform. But 20 percent of the use case is much more unique to that industry. So, um, it turns out, There are tons of cement mixers out on the roads. They have really specialized software that is aware of like what the mix is, how heavy it is, how much water is in there, all that kind of stuff. So they want to integrate with that. Um, same thing if you're in food and beverage and you're delivering produce, turns out there's specialized routing software. that understands the crispness of lettuce and which order you deliver stuff in. It doesn't make sense for us to build that. So we integrate there.
So that's the 20. And we're always looking for that kind of 80 20 split.
Logan: Um, we talked about getting FaceTime in the early days with customers was an important thing to product development. Um, did you end up productizing the, uh, product? [00:24:00] process of getting feedback from customers. I had heard a story in the early days of Meraki. Maybe you built in some mechanism of customers getting giving feedback in there.
So how did that actually play out with Samsara? Maybe speak to how you productized it within Meraki as well.
Sanjit: Yeah. So, um, well, at Meraki, there was a dashboard, which is what you use to manage your network. And the way we'd get feedback from IT managers is there was a little box in the corner that said, I wish this page would dot, dot, dot. And the user would just type in whatever they wanted. Um, The most common wish was make me a sandwich, by the way.
So we never quite got there, but it was,
it was
Logan: Mickey Mouse getting votes for the
Sanjit: Yeah, exactly. Um, but we got a lot of great feedback and some of it was UI related. I wish this page would let me do this report. Some of this was related to just product functionality. And so we brought that same kind of idea with us to Samsara and we have a feedback button, takes a screenshot of the full, uh, full customer context.
It tells us who they are and it actually gets piped into Slack channels, uh, directly to the product and engineering team. So. The software developers working on the product can hear directly from customers. And that's actually something that scales with, you know, we have tens of thousands of customers and we have, you know, growing number of R& D engineers.
This is actually something you can scale up with the company over time.
Logan: I have to ask a question on the 80 20 rule of, um, was that a lesson learned from Meraki? Because I, I had heard in the early days, there was a bunch of one off stuff related to networking that maybe you guys did. And I don't know if that was a, if that was the lesson you learned. It's like, Hey, we got to pick the core 80%.
Sanjit: Yeah, you clearly did your research.
So we, we built some, uh, kind of, esoteric networking products. Uh, again, our background was computer networking research. So we could kind of build anything. And, uh, in the very early days of Meraki, we were helping build big free Wi Fi networks to cover cities. Like think if you remember city of San Francisco, there was a big initiative to do free Wi Fi.
There's like almost 20 years ago now. Um, And to do that, you need a lot of kind of complicated software, like how do you route packets for hundreds of [00:26:00] users? How do you route it across the mesh network? All that stuff. So we were building that, um, at Meraki. And because we knew how to Right. The software, but also build a hardware. We did some innovative things. Like we put three radios into a really small enclosure. We added solar panel support. We did a bunch of like kind of one off stuff. And as an engineer, it was a fun challenge. Like, can you do this? Right. Nobody else done this. Can you do this? Um, from a business perspective, maybe not the best idea because it just took you deeper and deeper into these really niche markets. Turns out if you were a school or a retailer, you didn't need a solar panel access point with three radios on it. You needed something that was plug and play, it needed to be designed well, kind of blend into the ceiling, that kind of thing. And so it was taking us down into these weird rabbit holes. Um, and so And at Meraki, we basically discovered you got to pull back, solve the common case, solve it across these industries.
And that's going to make a much bigger impact.
Logan: Interesting. There's a balance in allocating capital from a product development standpoint, uh, between what's already in market. What's on the come and then. Maybe aspirational moonshots or something. I don't know if that's the right framing. But how do you think about the, the split of how you want to invest your time on those three vectors?
Sanjit: Yeah. I think time allocation, capital allocation are kind of the two of the biggest jobs, at least as a CEO. The way we think about it is we want to double down on things that are working. So as fun as it is to work on brand new products, you can't allocate a hundred percent of your capital and time towards them. Um, we operate on what we call a 70, 20, 10 kind of split 70 percent of our investment dollars. And basically the time of the team is going towards making our core products and our platform better. Um, and that might be scalability. We, we, we. Tend to have larger and larger customers every year. So how do we satisfy the needs of someone who has 40, 000 trucks on the road instead of 4, 000 or 400, um, how do you provide customer reporting and APIs, all that kind of good stuff that tends to be in the 70 percent allocation, um, And the key there is if you have a big enough [00:28:00] market opportunity, like we do, we're only a few percent penetrated.
There's still, you know, 90 percent of our market hasn't used, I'm sorry yet. And so you want to make sure you're building a great product for that core market. The 20 percent that comes after that is the stuff that's on the immediate horizon. That would be not a moonshot, but functionality that you can see in your eye, that. That should make a big difference for the customer. Maybe they haven't even asked for it, but it should happen. So that requires a stretch and that's where the 20 percent comes from. And then the 10 percent is the longer term stuff that might not really produce material revenue for the next one to three years, but could actually be a really big deal a couple of years out.
So it's almost like seed planting up.
Logan: And how do you think about that 10 percent of, at what point, uh, give it more oxygen versus cut bait because it, you might be wasting time?
Sanjit: Yeah, I think that's the decision. So, um, you know, if you're taking risks, that means you're trying a bunch of things, many of which won't work. If you knew they were going to work, they should probably be in the 20 percent bucket, right? So the idea is to actually graduate from the 10 percent to the 20 percent bucket and make it something that we are going to ship and earn revenue from in the next year. you know, one to three years. Um, that process basically is around identifying product market fit. Do you have happy customers? Are you getting asked for more product? What's the engagement look like? That sort of thing.
98 Sanjit Biswas (Samsara) Final Edit yt: Hey guys, this is Rashad. I work with Logan on the show and I wanted to take a quick break to tell you about red points, other podcasts, unsupervised learning unsupervised learning is our AI podcast where we interview guests from companies like perplexity, open AI, Adobe, and many others.
about the topical things that are happening in the very, very rapidly developing landscape of AI. So if you're interested in going deeper, uh, check out the link in this description. for our YouTube channel, but also wherever you get your podcasts. So back to the show,
Logan: I've heard as you scaled as CEO, you focused on dropping responsibilities along the way. Were there things that you held on to longer than you should have in retrospect that stand out?
Sanjit: Yeah. Um, I need to drop even more responsibilities is what I'm reminded of. Um, [00:30:00] So there are a lot of things that are super fun about being a founder. One of them is being able to have that close connection between the customer and the product and being involved in all the nitty gritty operations. Um, that can actually become a bit of a problem if you, if you let it go on too long, because then you're.
Actually involved in the product design meetings and you need to be involved in the bug meetings. You're, you're in all those details, which means you're not involved in recruiting or, uh, in some cases talking to investors or, or kind of the broader functions. And so every year I basically go through this kind of self eval reflection process of, well, where did my time go? Um, did it need to go there and what should be different about the next year? And it, because the business is scaled every single year, It forces you to say, okay, I'm kind of overheating on this. So I would say product is an area that I'm still very involved in, but more on the roadmap and sort of the, the kind of strategic decisions, as opposed to there was a time where I would see every check in
like all the code being
Logan: more than 20%, uh, probably
Sanjit: percent stuff. And, and I miss that tactical feel, but it's just not something that I could
Logan: not sustainable. Yeah, it's, uh, it's an interesting lesson where there are transitions that you've made recently, uh, post IPO and things that, um, yeah, I guess stand out.
Sanjit: Yeah, I would say, um, the business has grown. When we went public, we were, uh, about half a billion in revenue. We just crossed a billion in ARR last year. Uh, we're now profitable. And so a lot of the focus in that post IPO period was around, uh, financial discipline, getting more efficient. And this wasn't coming externally.
We just wanted to get there and demonstrate we could do it. And we got there even faster than what we'd set out to do. So I was really proud of that. Um, But at this point, we have a sustainable model and we just need to keep it scaling at this high level of growth. And that's where my focus is. So it's almost like just hitting refresh on what's the most important thing for me to focus on. So it wasn't that that's not important anymore. It's more that we figured out how to do it. So now we have to figure out how to keep scaling and how to keep adding [00:32:00] products and markets.
Logan: In terms of tracking where your time goes, do you have, uh, uh, methods or is this more a broad brush, like zooming out of like where you spent time or do you actually tactically color coding things within your calendar?
Sanjit: Yeah, I will print out my calendars and, uh, you know, actually do a time allocation. We've figured out how to automate this because that's not the most scalable thing either. Um, but once you get the hang of it, it actually happens pretty quickly and it's low overhead compared to how much time you have to allocate. Um, so I kind of think of it just the way we think of FP& A, like you want to have your plan versus actuals essentially in terms of what you were up to.
Logan: Yeah, it's a Google Calendar does a decent job of allowing you to color code it or whoever's working with you to color code
Sanjit: Yeah, my biggest challenge is I get a lot of phone calls from folks at the company, customers, things like that.
So I need to figure out a way to connect my phone into that
Logan: now interesting. Yeah. It's hard to know the the batch or the ad hoc
Sanjit: yeah, yeah, exactly.
Logan: Um, rehiring yourself as CEO, uh, along the way, I assume this ties into that concept of the responsibilities, but can you maybe speak about the concept of rehiring yourself and how you think about it?
Sanjit: Yeah. If you think about it as a founder CEO, you have the most change in your job, right? Because when you're small, Like, I remember at Samsara even, we were ordering furniture from Ikea and I would make sure it showed up and help make some of the desks, right? Um, I no longer assemble our office furniture, but you know, you, you do whatever it takes.
Logan: That was a responsibility shed in the early days. Yeah.
Sanjit: But I'm actually glad we did it because it set the right tone. Like, we're a very hands on company. Um, So the way that I think about it is as organizations growing underneath you, you have to be hitting refresh. Otherwise, you're going to slow everything down, right? So the only way to do that is on a periodic basis.
I do about once a year now is to go back and it's kind of doing like a 360 review of yourself and then figure out, well, what does the company need from me next? And you can write out the bullet points and then you check the time allocation. It sounds really simple. I think a lot of people, myself included, get caught up in the day to day.
And you get [00:34:00] sort of whisked away in one direction or the other, and then you're over allocated or under allocated somehow.
Logan: You never had ambitions to be a CEO. Right? The roof net was, or Meraki was an evolution of roof net. And then you became a CEO and, and had a great success with Meraki. And now here you are, uh, again doing it. Um, what did you learn about managing people along the way, uh, that perhaps is unintuitive to someone that, um, you know, is listening to this and is trying to figure out how to.
scale their managerial capabilities of a team.
Sanjit: Yeah. You know, a lot of learnings along the way, mostly by just learning by doing, right? Um, uh, so the background, as I mentioned earlier, uh, I was a PhD student before either of these companies and actually got pretty close to finishing. So we're kind of like all but dissertation. So my plan had been to go into academia and teach and do
Logan: Do your parents still ask you if you're going to
Sanjit: They do. And, uh, what's funny is I think MIT gave us 20 years
to come back. Like I'm on leave technically. So that was 2006. I've got
Logan: You've got two years. Yeah. Hmm.
Sanjit: but what was, what was interesting for me was, uh, leading a research project. And leading a small company is actually very similar because you're, you're doing a lot of juggling. Um, you're actually doing a lot of communicating, you know, to people working on the project, uh, to others sort of in and around. So the similarities were there managing at scale and leading at scale is actually quite different. And so what I try to do is, is learn from the best, right? I watched a ton of YouTube videos.
I listened to interviews and I'm always trying to figure out, okay, what's the difference between we're about 3000 employees now. What's the difference between 3000 and 30, 000? What are some creative ways that you can, uh, learn to operate at that scale? And it's a really fun challenge. And so if you're an engineer by nature, it's, you kind of think of it as problem solving as opposed to, I need to go read the stack of like Harvard MBA books or something like
Logan: That's interesting. Yeah. YouTube is a fantastic resource for, it's amazing how, how close you can get to anyone, uh, in the world and hear their insights.
Sanjit: And, and you can [00:36:00] kind of do it on a Sunday night or whenever you
have some spare time. And, um, I love the long form because it's not, a newspaper interview where it's been cut down. It's actually them sharing their experience.
Logan: Yeah. Um, in the early days of Samsara, you would actually go two days on site every, every week. Is that right?
Sanjit: Uh, yeah, every week.
Logan: I assume that hasn't scaled. What are you doing? Uh, I guess it's an interesting principle. What are you doing to that end today?
Sanjit: It's evolved. Um, so in the early days, because we were gathering all this feedback, we were deploying product. It was really important to go on site during the pandemic. Actually, it was simply not possible to go out and site because of protocols and that sort of thing. So I switched doing zoom check ins. And this would be with both, uh, existing customers who've been on the platform for a while and then prospects, which is customer meetings. Um, and that was really interesting because all of a sudden I could see a customer in California and someone in Ohio and then talk to, you know, an operation in London.
And so it was really amazing. Um, And I learned the importance of being able to get a much broader set of experiences in. So not just California, in other words, but all over the world, because we have customers all over. So as a pandemic sort of wore off and you could travel again. Now what I do are travel weeks.
I've got one coming up next week. I'll be on the road. I think I'm in like seven cities in four days or
something like that. But that's how I learn is by going and setting foot on site, spending time with the customer. In many cases, we're talking to the C level execs, which is great, but I'll ask them, could I get a tour of the dispatch center or the safety managers, you know, group or that sort of thing. And you learn a lot about what goes on in the front lines from there.
Logan: how many people was, uh, Meraki when it sold?
Sanjit: Um, Probably low three hundreds, I
Logan: Oh, okay. So, and, and then you stayed, how big was it by the time you left Cisco, the business unit?
Sanjit: It grew a lot. So, um, Meraki as part of Cisco continued, just, uh, we were doubling revenue or
actually a little faster.
Logan: So, thousands of
Sanjit: I got to about 1500 or maybe a little more than that. I'd have to really think
Logan: so, so, so 3000 today, 1500, uh, [00:38:00] at Meraki, so 4, 500, you've probably hired, uh, you know, some number 6, 000 or 7, whatever, whatever it is.
Logan: So, um, a lot of hiring that you've done and a lot of different reps of interviews, I'm, I'm sure and asking questions.
Philosophically, do you gravitate? towards, uh, people that spike in certain dimensions and augmenting maybe shortcomings or questions about them? Or do you, do you tend to gravitate more to well, well roundedness and, uh, high floors of what individuals can do? And if we're not, like fixing. Is
Sanjit: something that I learned kind of by trial and error. There have been people that, um, interview really well, but perform poorly. And so what I try to do is actually understand that case the most. Like if someone interviews poorly, you're not hiring them. So it's actually not so bad. If someone interviews really well, has a great looking resume, but then shows up and doesn't gain traction.
The question is why? Because clearly, They were good enough to get your attention. They're good enough to get through the process. And often that's a question of fit, right? So maybe they were good at their previous company, but maybe their previous company was a hundred thousand employees. And so the job was very different than the job in a much smaller organization. Um, so what I look for is that kind of spike. I look for someone who can both understand the big picture, understand what the company's trying to do, but also get into the details when needed. We call it core sampling at Samsara. It's this idea that, You know, even your, your leaders, they have technical knowledge, even in sales or marketing or wherever, where they can get into the details. And that's a really great way of just checking that, are we doing the right things? And if we're not like fixing it, right? Um, I found that many execs that I've hired over the years where it didn't work out, didn't have that kind of capability or weren't trained that way. And so it was a big shift. On the other hand, there are many other people we've hired from great companies that have scaled. that still have that sort of core ability.
Logan: interview that tries to tease out if someone has that competency to scale or drill down and actually do the [00:40:00] job, uh, in, in the full manner that it requires?
Sanjit: found that it's about the details. So I will ask them about, you know, like if they're a sales rep, for example, you can ask someone about a big win they're proud of. And, you know, sometimes people will talk about the customer they sold or how big the deal was. Sometimes they'll tell you about how they got in the door, right?
They'll say, I talked to so and so and they'll use full names. They'll give you like sort of. Crystal clear detail. And it's almost like you're there and it's almost like they're reliving it. That to me tells me that they were involved, even if they weren't like doing every single step, they were aware of it.
Same thing in engineering. And this applies even to like, you know, I remember when I interviewed, um, a person who's now our SVP of software engineering, he's able to give me details about like the codex and things like that. You know, that's, that's what, and it's not necessary for an SVP level job, but it just shows they, they care.
Logan: Yeah, you can't bullshit that level of specificity, uh, and you're not making it
Sanjit: Yeah. Exactly.
Logan: or hollow.
Logan: Um, There's a balance of when you get to a company of 3, 000 people, um, there's a tension that inevitably exists of hiring people to fill individual roles while also keeping the bar high and not settling for the people you're seeing.
How do you think about that trade off and making decisions to actually bring people in or hire?
Sanjit: Yeah. Um, well, I think that's, it's really key is keeping the high bar because there is an urgency bias. Like everyone needs that role filled and you kind of need it filled yesterday. It's more of a, you all have to have an appreciation that if we hire the wrong fit. We're not going to achieve our goals or objectives.
And it actually becomes painful for everyone involved, right? Like the individual, the team, like everyone kind of suffers a little bit. So sometimes it has to be learned by experience. Um, and then sometimes it's, you can set up the process such that they're like, Third party checks. I think Amazon calls these bar raisers, right?
Folks that aren't necessarily even in that immediate hiring vicinity that are just there to maintain the standard and kind of be a bit of an audit. Um, we do something similar and it works really well [00:42:00] for us. And actually again, kind of sets the tone of we're going to be disciplined about this because we're building for the longterm.
We're not just trying to like fill the hiring number for this quarter. We're trying to build a real company here that's going to endure. You've got to have high quality of talent for that.
Logan: that, that, uh, bar razor, uh, they'll, is there one task with any senior hire or how does that actually play out?
Sanjit: Yeah, we call them talent calibrators at Samsara, and what we've done is essentially go and look at folks track records of, you know, people that have been hiring managers. How have they done over time in terms of their accept and reject rates and things like that? But also did the people they hire go on to have really great performance ratings? If they did, that's someone we want. They have good talent tastes, in other words. Um, not everyone has that ability, it's, it's a really impressive skill. And so we will ask them to be on the final round of interview panels. And our interviews are, um, basically principles based. So in terms of how we operate, we're trying to check for that.
And this is one of those checks towards the end of the panel. So they're not overwhelmed by the front of the funnel, but they are kind of like a final check. And the idea is, uh, people respect the opinion of, hey, you know, they're, they're a good taste of talent, right? Um,
Logan: when Samsara moved to a flexible workplace, when did, when did that happen?
Sanjit: It was a pandemic.
It was
really 2020. Yeah.
Logan: Um, talent pool obviously went up. Quite a bit. Uh, how did you approach operationalizing that, that change? It sounds like you're forced into it, but I assume it unlocked a pool of, of talent and people you could hire from as well.
So maybe talk through
Sanjit: that's exactly right. And I think this is now considered like an unpopular stance because everyone said, come on back
Logan: It is the pendulum swing back and forth.
Sanjit: like it's, it's too hard to keep track of. Um, for us, it was again, the pandemic that basically got us to flip. We were a very much in person, like five days a week, uh, kind of culture. And I think about 80 percent of our headcount was here in the San Francisco Bay area. So it was very much a centralized culture. So [00:44:00] really big shift for us to like adopt flexible work. Um, we were in that. camp of like, Oh, this is only a couple of weeks. And then we'll kind of go back to the office, you know, a couple of weeks, turn to a couple of months and you say, well, we have to get really good at this. Um, but to your point, the unlock for us was the talent Tam. We were now able to hire AI talent up in Seattle. We never had a Seattle office. There were a ton of people who worked for Amazon and Microsoft who had, you know, the ability, but didn't want to move. Right. Now we can go back and hire them. And we found dozens of great engineers up there. Um, same thing. There were salespeople out in New York city and Austin, Texas and other places. So we started seeing these pretty awesome hotspots of talent. And as we leaned into it, we said, this is great from a raw talent perspective. Now, how do we engage them and onboard them? And so that's where we had to start coming up with ways of, well, how do we want to like actually communicate and, and bring people along? Um, so it's, it's this continuous journey. I think we're trying different tactics, but it's working really well for us. And most of the company now was hired in flexible mode. So the majority, like we flipped, you know, we were talking about 80 twenties now, uh, 80 percent of our workforce is outside the Bay area.
Logan: There's a keeper rule or framework that you've used for hiring that if that person left now, how would I, uh, how would I feel about it? Um, Do you have any other principles that you use to continually evaluate if people are succeeding in an individual role?
Sanjit: Yeah, there's a few. The keeper test for me is actually just a good way of sanity checking. Cause it tends to be the people we hire are good people. Like you like spending time with them and so on. Um, but if the business is scaling, the company is scaling, what they need to do in their role might change drastically.
Right. And so if they were good at the role two years ago, they may not be good two years from now. So the, this is again, a sort of hitting refresh sort of ability of. Do you think that, um, yeah, if, if they left, would you, would you do something to, to go out of your way to hang on to them? Um, so that's really worked well. I find myself having to do that sometimes, [00:46:00] and it's really tough because, um, you, you really gain trust and, and, uh, connection with people. The other thing that we do is we look for the spikes, right? So there's a spike when they're interviewing, which is a kind of attention to detail, but then there's the step change.
So especially in exec roles, did the company materially change your benefit? Maybe six months after they started or 12 months after they started, can we point to something that they did? And that might be a new program. It might be a new product. Like there's lots of different ways to manifest. If you can't point to that, it's like, what is the. Impact that they're having, they could be a great person to work with, but if they're not driving change in the organization, helping upgrade the company, they're probably not adding the value that you'd think they are.
Logan: On the fundraising side, you've been fortunate enough to work with some legendary venture capitalists. You had Doug Leone from Sequoia, uh, Meraki, Mark Andreessen was
Sanjit: Yeah. A little known guy. Yep.
Logan: Yeah. Yeah. People might have heard of him. Uh, and then Hamant from General Catalyst was an investor as well. What, um, how did you land with them?
these individuals, what were your motivations in picking different board members besides, you know, uh, no personality and very timid, uh, people across the board.
Sanjit: Well, kind of rewinding the clock back to must've been. 2006, like when we started working with Doug at Sequoia. Back then we were a company that was bootstrapped. So Meraki, we could talk about Meraki for an hour, but, um, we came out of grad school, we were in Boston. We had no, um, access to capital.
We had no money of our own. There were not a lot of angels back then. Um, and so the way we got the company off the ground was essentially by selling product and getting those early customers. Uh, by the time we came out to California and started scaling the business, um, we got to about a million dollars in revenue with no outside money. And that got the attention of a few venture capitalists. And so we actually had leverage in our negotiation of who would we want to work with. And, um, You know, I think for us, it was Sequoia, very well [00:48:00] known firm, obviously very much top tier and well known at that point. But we didn't know how to choose between partners.
So we were like, well, who runs the place? And Doug was, I think, you know, Doug and Mike were the MDs at that point. And, um, that was sort of tongue in cheek because we, we knew there were a bunch of different partners, but we actually said, what, what this guy, what Doug knew was sales. What we knew is technology.
So we didn't need a technologist to join us. We needed someone who could help us grow the business. So it was very complimentary and, uh, it was a bit of a culture shock. I remember the first couple of meetings because we again came from academia. We want to talk about the algorithms and all that stuff.
And. It just like was not of interest to Doug. Like, and we learned a lot from him over the next couple of years about that.
Logan: Yeah. I share a board with Doug and I, uh, I, I know his style and some of those board meetings
Sanjit: yeah,
And we came to really appreciate
it. And the thing that both Doug and Mark and even Hemant, they all have this in common. Because they're so busy, because they have so much going on. They're very direct and they'll just tell you what they're thinking. There's not a lot of kind of playing
Logan: high signal.
Sanjit: High signal, super high signal. And it's not that they're always right, but, and they don't need to be right, but they'll just tell you what they're thinking. And, you know, I've really come to appreciate.
Logan: yeah. And so, so then, uh, with Samsara and, and Mark, how did, uh, how did that come to be? And I, I assume having had The success you had, you had options of who you're going to work with. And so how'd you, how'd you end up landing
Sanjit: Yeah. So similar process. Um, we were starting, uh, Samsara in 2015. Uh, Andreessen Horwitz didn't exist when, or, you know, I think they maybe did in a seed stage kind of sense when we were growing Meraki. So we never, it really had. had a chance to interact with Mark or Ben. Um, so as we were raising capital for this company, we actually met a bunch of different firms.
And some of these were relationships we had, some of them were again, new firms. And there was about again, fit, like who is going to be right for us. What I really liked about Mark, um, was his kind of strategic lens on everything. Like [00:50:00] he's just, he's like a pattern matcher, deep thinker, and is able to kind of sense really, uh, minute amounts of signal and see the trend before it
happens. Um, and so anyway, uh, we kind of got to know them, uh, at the firm, we hit it off and, uh, kind of went from there.
Logan: So, so, uh, Samsara is now a 20 billion business in the public markets, Meraki 1. 2. You sort of, those were the three, I mean, some firms came in later into Samsara as well, but General Catalyst, Andreessen, and Sequoia, those were kind of the three firms you principally worked with on the journey.
Sanjit: Yeah, that's right.
Logan: Interesting.
Logan: Meraki, we, you referenced it, but it was, uh, kind of lightning in a bottle in terms of, um, finding, you started out with this technology and it was an outgrowth of your PhD project. Uh, and then how did, how did the transition actually come to be that you decided to commercialize it, turn it into a business?
Can you take me through those early days?
Sanjit: Um, it's funny that now it seems like lightning in a bottle at the time we were just like trying to figure out how we make this thing work, how we make it happen. The, the sort of quick backstory, you mentioned the RoofNet project. So John and I were, uh, building this network called RoofNet as part of our PhD research.
And the, the very creative name was because we were installing, uh, antennas on roofs. And so building a network. And we essentially blanketed Cambridge with, uh, free Wi Fi. And this is, I don't know what, like, two years ago. Almost 20 years ago, right, um, that we were doing this. So it was, Wi Fi was a brand new technology. We felt like that was going to be the future of how networks were built. Um, and so what we want to do is take that technology, put it in a box. And we figured out how to take our research prototype, shrink it from a 3, 000 per node, you know, set up. It was pretty big. down to a single circuit board and get the cost down into the, you know, 50 range. So that's what we started with. Uh, on the commercialization part, we didn't know the right way to commercialize it. And, um, so we tried a bunch of things and we basically put it on our website and it started to sell. [00:52:00] So what was interesting about Meraki is there was pull and I wouldn't say it was product led growth, but, um, it was more hobbyist type people who were trying this stuff out. And in that first year of selling that I said, we got to about a million dollars. These customers took the products to the far reaches of the world. We had, um, customer in like Southern Chile, like a village in Southern Chile, and they connected their whole town and their school. Uh, we had another customer in, uh, an island called Nauru, which we had to go look up.
It's like one of the smallest countries recognized by the UN. Um, so that was like their connectivity. And that was really interesting because we got essentially exposure to a global market within the first year. That was the power of the internet. And we wouldn't have known how to do that. Um, and then from there we were able to iterate.
So the way we found the business was actually through this kind of trial and error process. Um, I think if you talk to Doug at Sequoia, he would call those first couple of years really are walk in the woods because we kept getting pulled in all these interesting directions. And again, that Being academics, we were drawn to the novelty of these things. Um, and so we did those projects. We were working with Google on wifi here in San Francisco. Um, we came up with an ad supported wifi model. So we were doing all kinds of stuff. And the crucible moment for us was actually the 2008 financial crisis. So 2008, 2009, um, we basically realized we couldn't be doing these science projects. all the time because the funding for those was drying up. We had doubled revenue every single year, by the way. So it wasn't that there was a problem with our P and L. It was more of like, this can't last very long. You know, people won't be deploying free wifi and fishing villages in Chile if there's a financial crisis.
And that's actually exactly what happened. That kind of fell off a cliff. The way we figured out the real commercial strategy was in 2009 when we took the technology and started selling it to the enterprise. So we actually had to raise prices From, I think our initial products were like between 50 and 200, the enterprise products were about a thousand dollars, uh, a device and, and up. And that was a big [00:54:00] shift for us. Um, but once we figured that out, unlock the rest of the business, cause now we could really reinvest. Like we weren't scrapping together little tiny margins. We had a real gross margin and that let us go hire way more engineers and scale sales and do a bunch of other things.
Logan: Interesting contrast to the early days of Samsara, how purposeful in the market and determining like what, you know, the end market was going to be versus
Sanjit: Yeah. I'm hoping we learned something
Logan: It seems, it seems like you took the different approach to it and, and on the sales side. So, so you ramped into an outbound, was an outbound enterprise sale along the way there.
Sanjit: Yeah.
Sanjit: So Meraki was, uh, a channels business because computer networking, especially enterprise networking is sold through
value added resellers. And,
that was an ecosystem that had been established by Cisco over like two or three decades. So we were really fortunate. There was an existing channel we could sell into them and they had relationships with end customers.
So that accelerated growth. Uh, when we started Samsara, we went looking for the reseller channel because he said, they must, they must. Be just like networking. And we discovered that there isn't a networking like VAR channel to this customer. Um, so we developed basically direct Salesforce and it's worked really well for us.
Logan: and how much of your team is now in some sales related function?
Sanjit: Uh, roughly speaking, half
our company is go to, market and yeah, a lot of those are direct quota carrying sales
Logan: Which is, which is a long way from just putting it on the website. And uh,
Sanjit: The polar
Logan: what have you, what have you learned about like the enterprise sales motion or what were some of the counterintuitive lessons of building a company that has a ton of quota carrying sales reps out
Sanjit: Yeah.
So many, I think as an engineer and a technology person, You tend to think, Oh, I can just find stuff online. I'll discover it. I'll buy it with my credit card. I don't want to talk to anyone, right? Like, you know, that sounds painful. Um, our buyer, on the other hand, they're an operations buyer. They're a business person.
They're trying to solve problems. They need someone to talk to who can demo a product for them and be more consultative, like actually explain like ROI. And this is what you should expect. And this is what's worked for other people. [00:56:00] So it's not a pure technical sales, actually a business problem. They need solved. And actually a lot of our customers have told me over the last couple of years, huge reason they went with Samsara is because of that sales experience. They said, you all really showed us what the product can do, but actually help us solve problems. And then you keep that up even after the sale. That means we're a technology partner. Um, that's actually what our go to market team is all about. As opposed to just like, You know, uh, dial for dollars or something like that. That makes it much more purposeful. Because you say, well, these folks are basically consultants to the customer and they are selling the product. They have quotas and you know, they're trying to make their numbers. But the way they do that is by solving problems for the customer. So that was a big breakthrough for me. Um, and then the other thing is just, that sales is simple, right? Like you don't want to overcomplicate it. It needs to be repeatable if you're selling into a big market opportunity with a product, not a service.
So, um, for us, we're a product company. It needs to be roughly the same product being sold to every customer. You can only do that if it's super repeatable. So anyway, those are maybe the biggest insights.
Logan: hiring. Uh. Sales leadership, you brought people over from Meraki, uh, that had been more maybe used to the channel driven sales. Was that, um, I mean, it seems like it worked out. You've had people that have ramped with you for a really long time. Was there learning that motion, but for sales leadership, was it mostly similar or was it a big change of going to indirect versus direct?
Sanjit: It was a gearshift. But I would say the sales folks that joined us from Meraki, they were just really talented and they were smart. And so what they wanted to know is, do we have a repeatable recipe? And that's really what we spent the first couple of years doing is, um, I would actually cold call along with, you know, like pretty much everyone at the company to learn what is that repeatable motion. And once we had that down, the sales leaders were able to come in. They joined us maybe a year or two later. They, they stayed at Meraki until they said, wow, these, these folks are really onto something again. Um, and then they said, [00:58:00] okay, well, there's no channel. That's okay. How does it work? How do I put calories in and get opportunities out?
Logan: In the early days of Meraki, I'd heard stories of you actually like installing on the roof of potential customers. Uh, was that in retrospect, was that the, uh, doing things that don't scale kind of adage of, I don't know, Y Combinator and Airbnb and all of that. And it was actually, um, an effective means of seeding the market or was that to keep your own sanity as you guys were trying to find product market fit and some use cases,
Sanjit: yeah, you know, um, I think it was more practical than anything else. Um, at that point in time, we didn't have. a huge team. So we didn't have, like, even sales engineers, right, were kind of a rarity for us. So we would just essentially fill in the gaps and do the installs. You learn a lot by going hands on and so we still do it at Samsara.
Um, I actually installed, uh, some of our products on cement mixers, uh, a couple of months ago. And it was funny because I don't think they knew there was the CEO of the company, They just thought it was like a tech. Um, and I think they were really surprised, but in that process, I got to know the folks on that site. I got to see all the other paperwork that they have going on in their, their world. And it was just a really good reminder of, of like what it's like on that front line.
Logan: the opportunity to help me, how many What products do you guys have today?
Sanjit: We have like four or five product families. These are the applications that are licensed a little bit
Logan: Does that number stay there or do you keep, I mean, do you end up with dozens, uh, in your
Sanjit: We're building a bunch more products
right now. And the idea is to have these all sit on the same platform. So the data that flows between the applications is really pretty powerful. And that's context, it's customer context, like location and all the kind of data histories, the AI models. So for us, it's about standing up more and more applications on them.
Logan: I heard Doug Leone say that he had once told you to blow five million dollars.
Sanjit: did. Yeah.
Logan: what, what was the, I don't know if that was meant, uh, tongue in [01:00:00] cheek or if it was actually a serious, uh, request that you go blow five million dollars. But what, do you remember the story of that and, uh, like what the purpose behind it was other than, uh, Sequoia trying to invest more money or something?
Sanjit: don't think it was that. I actually think it was Doug pushing us to go do outbound marketing. And this is something that must have been in 2011. I can't remember exactly which year, but I do remember the board meeting. And again, we'd just come out of the global financial crisis. Um, Meraki was built with, I think we burned less than 40 million dollars of capital, maybe even less than that, maybe 20, I can't remember. But we were very frugal because we just survived what felt like the beginnings of potentially the Great Depression,
right? Like, we were really, um, quite cost conscious. And so I think what Doug sensed was that we weren't, you hitting the gas as hard as we could, um, because we were always trying to make sure that there was an immediate return, you know, in terms of how we were building and how we were selling.
Logan: Did you do that? Was, was marketing where it went or, uh,
Sanjit: Yes, but I don't think we got quite to
5
Logan: message
Sanjit: message received. And we, we started trying a bunch of interesting things and just, this is a sort of funny aside, you know, we'd never done any advertising. We never did the billboard on one on one or any of that kind of stuff. Uh, but because this was, again, in this sort of shadow of the financial crisis, Ads were pretty cheap and we discovered that you could go get ads at the San Francisco airport that, you know, that you see at the terminal. Um, and it was relatively inexpensive, like 30, 000 campaign. So we tried it for like a month. We want to like, let's see what happens. And then we saw the ads would stay up for a couple of months because they didn't have enough advertisers. Didn't want to show empty billboards. So we actually were able to stretch our dollars massively by just trying things.
And so anyway, that's always been a lesson is sometimes you just need to try it. You don't know until you
Logan: Experiments around it. When you sold Meraki, you wrote a long letter to employees about the inputs and the process that went into it. I guess reading a little bit back to you, but this was an [01:02:00] unexpected event for Meraki. When we started out six years ago, we were three guys at MIT wondering where our bootstrap venture would take us over the next few years.
Then you go on to say, when Cisco approached us with an acquisition offer, our, our, um, initial reaction was politely say, no thanks. But when we took our time to think through the implications, first, we decided to break it down into two major components. And so you went about being a public company and studying what that would require versus this.
I guess what in writing that, what were you trying to convey to the team? How'd you go about thinking? I, I, I'm sure it's happened. I don't know of any examples off the top of my head of a CEO sending a note like that to the, to the company. And so what was the inspiration and the purpose?
Sanjit: Well it's funny, I haven't read that note in many years and I still remember writing it. So you took me back to like, I was like writing that on my phone, I think.
Logan: Where were you?
Sanjit: Uh, we were here in San Francisco and a little bit of the context here, um, you This was a deal that happened very quickly. Uh, and it was because the conditions were right for all the reasons that you just brought up.
So I think we met Cisco in October, um, maybe around October 20th, if I remember correctly, and then we announced the deal the following month around right before Thanksgiving, it was like November 19th or 20th. And then the deal actually closed December 20th. So it was like very, very fast timeline wise. Um, so we were, we were basically scheduled to announce it to the company. Um, And somehow the blog post on the Cisco blog site went live a day early. And, you know, these things happen. That got picked up by some people on Twitter, which then made its way onto like maybe TechCrunch or one of the blogs back then. And we were like, whoa, this is not how we want to do this. Our team to find out about this thing. Um, so anyway, that that's actually, it was the most scale way for me to get a note out to everybody because we were 300 plus people, but we actually spent that Sunday afternoon calling everyone. So the three of us, uh, myself, John and Hans, who's our third founder. We just like kind of split up the list of employees and we just called every single person. And at first people were like surprised that they hadn't read about it. Or [01:04:00] if they had, they were like glad that we were explaining what was up. Um, they'd all seen the email, but then they actually, A, understood where we were coming from and B, were really excited about the future.
So I think it's set. The whole thing off in the right direction. It was kind of serendipity. I think our real plan had been the next morning we do like an all hands and kind of do it on stage. But I think the email actually gave people an opportunity to process. So it was that that's a backstory behind that.
Logan: You and John, uh, studied together, uh, at MIT. How'd you get looped in with Hans originally? We've
Sanjit: I'm trying to remember. Um, I remember we met Hans like the first year of grad school. He was a couple of years older than us. He had gone to MIT for his undergrad. Um, I was a undergrad at Stanford and I actually knew his sister, um, sort of through social circles. And oddly enough, I think Hans was out here in the Bay Area, maybe working at VMware. He would go do CS classes on the side. I, I'm not even sure why. Um, and we had ended up in the same CS class in California and so I, I, I had familiarity with him when I moved to Boston and we reconnected. So, uh, kind of a small world phenomenon, if you will. And, um, this was like 2000, two or three, many years before we started Meraki, so we just kind of became friends.
Logan: done a podcast with Philip from Verkata and it's amazing. Hans is now the exec chairman of Verkata and it seems to spend, uh, exec chairman can mean a bunch of different things, but it seems that he, he's a very active exec chairman, I get the feeling he, uh, he, they, they split up a lot of responsibility of doing the, uh, the, the traditional CEO responsibilities between the two of them.
Uh, it's amazing, I guess. The, the three of you have splintered to start two very impressive, fast growing integrated hardware software businesses, uh, that seem to be doing really well. It's impressive.
Sanjit: no. And, uh, Verkada is an impressive business and that's a entirely different space, like
Logan: Totally.
Sanjit: Uh, but I think this idea of building products in the integrated way is really powerful and profound, and it's not [01:06:00] limited to just these two companies. I think a lot of people can do it.
Logan: Yeah. No, that's fascinating. Um, you, you all use artificial intelligence for especially your, your cameras and detection around that. What's your perspective? Uh, I guess you, as we alluded to earlier, you were doing it before it was cool and talking about imprints. Five years ago or six years ago or whatever it was, um, what's your perspective on.
The types of opportunity that AI presents for Samsara going forward
Sanjit: Yeah, um, well, I think You know, one of the key unlocks to great AI is great data. And so we have a, we're fortunate that we have all of this great, pretty structured data about operations. And now we're thinking about not just, um, you know, AI based vision inference at the edge, which is what the, the dash camera products are able to do, but thinking about LLMs, right?
Like, okay, we have all of this great data to train over, Can we predict what's going to happen next or what should happen next? Can we look at what the computer thought should happen versus what actually happened, point out the anomaly and, and help a customer? Can you fill out a form automatically with as much stuff as the computer knows before someone else has to like type it in manually?
So there are all these really practical use cases that we're finding, uh, generative AI and all these brand new AI models can be used for, and it's all enabled by the data.
Logan: as you, uh, reflect in the Meraki journey and, and Samsara, I assume will be your last, uh, your last company, but I, I guess don't presuppose anything. But as you, as you look at building this company for the longterm, are there things, obviously how you went about discovering the, um, market opportunity, uh, was different.
But are there things you reflect on from the Meraki journey that you did particularly different in Samsara that you would reflect and want to impart to future founders that are kind of thinking about mistakes and avoiding them?
Sanjit: I think of it less as avoiding mistakes and more about, um, working on the right challenges and focusing on it. We [01:08:00] talked a bit about a few different things, but if you think about sales, you could have gotten paralyzed saying I've never built a direct sales motion before. Or you could just pick up the phone and try it.
Right. And so I think having that beginner's mind of just trying things, same thing with the market, like we'd never seen commercial trucking before, uh, or worked in a warehouse. We just kind of got out there. That's something that not a lot of second time founders are willing to try because they have experienced success and they're kind of like arm's length about things. Every startup is hard. And, um, I just think as long as you remember that, you'll just dive right in. Um, if you try to do a startup in easy mode, you're probably not going to succeed. You, you all know, like the odds of making it through the funnel are pretty low. So you have to stack the deck as much as possible.
So that was probably the biggest learning is don't let the Meraki win. Kind of, you know, taint the way that, you know, you approach the second one. Um, and if anything, use it for pattern matching recognition. Like once we had product market fit at Samsara, we knew what it looked and felt like. Um, we didn't have to ask anyone.
We didn't have to wait for a board meeting. We just went for it. And we've been able to do that over and over. And that I think has been the benefit of the experience is the pattern matching ability.
Logan: From an accidental entrepreneur to a, uh, multi time entrepreneur with two big successes at your, at your back, did you? At any point, um, think about doing anything else going to finish the, the, the, uh, dissertation or whatever it was at MIT, uh, and going back or was once you got this bug, was it an insatiable thing that you wanted to pursue?
Sanjit: no, it was much more, uh, we did think about doing other things. So, um, You know, we talked about the Meraki timeline. We left Meraki at the very beginning of 2015. And I think up until that point, we hadn't really taken vacations. Like we were just like kind of all in and pretty intense. So the first kind of order of business was take some time off.
Um, uh, my wife and I, we just had our first kids. We had a baby at home. think John's, uh, they were expecting their first kid. So it was sort of like, okay, let's just take a breather. [01:10:00] And, um, I actually did think about going back and finishing the PhD. And we wrote, uh, an academic research paper based on some of the data from Rocky. And, uh, amazingly it got into the top conference. What was funny about it though, is we wrote that paper, we submitted it, and it takes a long time to get peer reviews and all that stuff. Um, and, uh, And we found out about the acceptance like after we'd left, or maybe right around that time. And it had been like many months. And that for me was a reminder of like, Whoa, the feedback loops in academic research are really long compared to, you know, when you're selling products,
right. And you kind of know immediately. Um, So anyway, uh, thought about going back to academia. Um, I dunno, developed some kind of esoteric hobbies for I was like tracking satellites out of my backyard and doing all kinds of things. And then I realized I missed building products. I missed working with great teams, um, and just kind of being out there. So, uh, that was, that was my journey. My co founder, John. Uh, he went and played video games for a long time because it was like waking up from a deep sleep or a cryogenic stasis. Like he was just like, went through like eight years of video games and I don't know, three months. And then also it was like, we got to get, we got to go build some things. So yeah, for us it was more of a desire to get back to building products.
Logan: I'm sure you get asked to mentor or, uh, give advice to, to founders, I guess, as you, um, As you look at founders that have been successful, both People maybe you look up to as well as people that you look at and think that they have really high potential. Are there commonalities or through lines or consistencies that you see in the the most successful ones that you enjoy working with or anything that stands out?
Sanjit: Yeah, I think founders come in all different varieties. Um, and everybody is a different person. Obviously a couple of the things I've seen that are really unique with great founders are their ability to think about the big picture and like a decades long strategy and then get into the details. Right. Um, it, it's really remarkable. And then the persistence, like [01:12:00] it takes a lot of grit to, to do this. And, um, that's something that as we were thinking about starting the second company, we knew that there was a high activation energy because it's a big commit, right? You're going to. You know, if it works, it takes a decade to see it through. Um, and then you want to keep going, right? We're in a mode where we see we've got like two decades of roadmap ahead of us. Like we want to do a lot that takes a lot of bandwidth, takes a lot of sort of mental focus, and I've seen just great founders have that, right? Um, so then anyway, that's a characteristic. Um, and then I think. just some passion. Like you have to be really into doing this because it's not the easiest job. It's like, you know, way easier jobs out there. Uh, it's a super fun job, but you have to be into it.
Logan: Yeah. I heard that, um, hardcover books were your indulgence, uh, post, uh, success of, of Meraki. Uh, is that, how did that come to be? And, uh, I, I too have a, uh, many bookshelves of hardcover books that I, uh, my wife doesn't love how they're stacking up in our apartment right now, but I'm curious, has that always been something that you've, uh, appreciated?
Sanjit: Uh, no, it was actually, it was, I mentioned we were grad students. So when we were in grad school, we had no money and, uh, we were living in Cambridge and there were all these bookstores, right. Cause it's like a super, um, uh, intellectual town. And there would be, there's the Harvard bookstore has like a used section.
And so that was my go to is I would go and like, you know, buy a used book for 4 or something. And so it felt like the biggest luxury after we gotten our exit at Meraki to like on Amazon, like, you know, you get into buying paperback books on Amazon or whatever, but then you see like the 27 one and you're like, that's ridiculous. And like, that felt like something, well, like, I guess we can do this now. So
that
Logan: splurge of, uh.
Sanjit: splurge. Um, you know, it's, it's small things like that, but it, it actually, it, it still feels like a luxury. It's, it's totally ridiculous,
but it still feels pretty amazing that you can do that.
Logan: Yeah. It's, it's, um, it's [01:14:00] an interesting, uh, tangible item that has such, uh, substance to it, but is, is also feel, I feel like your kids aren't going to be spoiled because of the, their dad having hardcover books around, right? It feels like, it feels like a reasonable splurge to
Sanjit: probably have no books because they're like, I grew up surrounded by books. I can't stand those
Logan: That's right.
Exactly. You will have traumatized them a little too much.
Logan: Um, now one of the things I guess, as you think about building Samsara for a, uh, for the long haul, what are things that you may be differently? We talked about the 70, 20, 10, I assume thinking about the 10 would be one thing, but, uh, are there other things that sort of stand out, uh, in, in building a company to endure?
Sanjit: Yeah, absolutely. So I think, um, with Meraki, that company also wasn't built to exit in the, in the acquisition sort of sense. It was something that happened for practical reasons, because what we realized as we got to scale, we got to about a hundred million dollars in revenue scale. And we realized there was a market giant ahead of us.
It was Cisco. They were 800 pound Gorilla. They had all these channel partners and it was going to be a slog and there was probably a glass ceiling there. Um, and so, you know, that's why that acquisition made sense. We've never had that feeling at SIMSAR because our market. It's a really big one. You know, you've got operations companies all over the world, but there's no single company that's the dominant market player. So with this company, we've always believed we're going to build and build and build. Um, with that in mind, it means that there's no specific horizon where it's like, we're just trying to build to that point and just needs to stay together that long. And that can fall apart. This is, we're going to have to live with our decisions into the future, whether it's technology platform or who we hire or company culture. And that has made all of us on the management team, much more deliberate. Transcribed And we kind of sit on our hands before we make a really big decision. We do experiments, but before we like really commit to something, we want to make sure that we can see it all the way through.
Logan: As you're, as you're building this [01:16:00] company to endure and thinking about the, the longevity of the, of the business and the different, um, milestones that you hit along the way? Are there ones you look back on that are particularly, um, gratifying? Because I assume that it wasn't built to be sold. It wasn't built to go public.
It wasn't built to get to a hundred million in ARR nor a billion in ARR, right? Are there ones that stand out that maybe are counterintuitive? I'm sure the IPO was IPO virtual or was it, uh,
Sanjit: were, no, we were
Logan: You're in person. So I'm sure that probably stands out as a fun milestone. But anything that's counterintuitive, because one of the things we talk about a lot when talking to founders is like enjoying the process and enjoying the milestones along the way, because it's, it's insatiable, the different hills you can climb and you will, there will always be another hill.
There will always be someone else to look to. And so as you reflect on the, the, uh, The process and the beauty of like the journey. Are there things that sort of stand out to you that were particularly impactful?
Sanjit: Um, this is kind of like my memory is real for Samsara, but there, there are definitely some milestone moments like that. I'll give you some on the sales side and some on the product side. On the sales side, uh, in the early days of the company, We were out involved in every single deal, right? And this is a founder led sales, right?
Like you're trying to make sure you've got the right product, but you're figuring out pricing and doing all that kind of stuff. Um, it's pretty fun when you start seeing the first deals close that you didn't even know about until you see the, the, the virtual bell is what we call it. It's like a salesforce notification and they weren't necessarily huge, but you're like, wow. This means that like it worked, right? Like the, the whole like system that we set up worked and that was early. Um, and then along the way, this company grew very, very quickly. Um, we went from doing. 10k to 50k deals to our first million dollar plus deals within the first year and a half or two years. Um, which is like a big undertaking for any company because you have to deliver for that customer.
You have to scale the platform and, and do all that stuff. And I remember we had [01:18:00] a big, uh, energy utility was one of our first customers. They actually prepaid, uh, their contract, uh, because, you know, it was just how they were set up and all that kind of stuff. But it was a huge responsibility. So it was a big milestone that we got, I think it was a 15 million deal, uh, and very young company at that time, but it, it put the responsibility on us.
We had to deliver. So I was really proud that the company, the entire company, engineering, sales, everybody stepped up support to make that customer successful. And they're, they've expanded with us a ton. They've added a bunch of products. They've told us, uh, told a lot of their peers in the industry about Samsara. Um, but that's a milestone moment for us was the first really big enterprise customer. Who's always sort of before you're ready for it, right? That's what it means to be first. Um, so anyway, those are a couple on the sales side. On the product side, um, I, I still remember we worked on the, um, AI distracted driving models.
John and I worked on it over, um, like a, a winter holiday. And this is one of those things where it's like, again, AI inference back in 2018 was like pretty new stuff. The models barely ran. It And it, it helped me connect back to those sort of grad school roots of like hacking, uh, reading, we actually like read papers about it, uh, wrote up some code, tried it, and we got it to the point where it worked, but then being able to connect the dots of like, this can help detect distracted driving was an aha.
Um, and it was nice to know we still had it like that. We could still connect those dots that fast. And we got that product feature out really, really quickly after that. So that was another sort of like, pivotal moment for us as a company that then, you know, safety is now our number one product line, um, which is pretty exciting.
It's, you know, way up there in terms of revenue. So that was one. And then the most recent one, uh, and this is a product that we're going to release, uh, in June. So it hasn't been announced. But it was an idea that actually came from our team. And this is again, the sort of not involved thing where it bubbled up from the inside. [01:20:00] It's a really exciting idea. And we're going to launch at the customer conference, but the engineering teams kind of prototyped it. They ran with it. And the first time we saw it was when we got a demo in our senior team meeting, that felt really good because it's the opposite of having to drive, read the paper and drive the idea through. This was, these folks came up with a better idea than we would have had. And then Executed on it, saw it through, validated with customers, and then. At the point we saw it was pretty clear it was going to work. So anyway, that's maybe a
two totally different
Logan: super helpful. It makes me think of, I mean, you have to be one of, if not the fastest companies to a billion in recurring revenue, certainly doing it in the capital efficiency you've done along the way. Um, In growing that fast as, as someone that sits on boards and observes sometimes hyper growth, uh, you always sit in fear that growing that quickly is going to lead to things breaking along the way.
Were there things that in looking back, um, on the journey you feel like you particularly got right that kept it from breaking along the way from a cultural standpoint, from an operational standpoint, anything that stands out?
Sanjit: Yeah, well, so I, I share that same concern and fear and it, it never ends because we, as a company are growing headcount to keep up with all this demand. Um, all these new people, they don't know the Samsara culture yet, right? They're learning it along the way. And so you need to make sure you don't dilute the culture. And, um, one of the things that we've worked on over the last couple of years is really articulating. What are those cultural values and what are those operating principles? Like, how do we work? Um, and so this idea of like sampling the customer experience, it's really important to how we work. Not all companies operate that way. Um, especially in sort of more abstract enterprise software, but for us, we're solving real world problems. So we try to really make sure everyone knows that not just in sales or engineering, but like even our finance teams, they have an appreciation for what the customer is doing. is experiencing from us. Something like that is something that has to be taught and has to be taught a couple of times. You don't [01:22:00] just, it's not like just an onboarding, like on the side for two seconds. We actually talk about it a lot. We talk about it at town halls and that kind of thing. So figuring out how to get everyone to run off the same mental code base. is a big challenge and that's what setting culture is. So that's, I think the solution for this kind of anxiety that comes with scale. And then keeping that quality bar high on the hiring front, we'd rather hire for quality over quantity and we will miss our hiring plan if we feel like we're, we're lowering the bar somehow.
Logan: Pieces, conventional Silicon Valley wisdom that you agree with or something or disagree with something that's, uh, maybe a, a counterintuitive operational philosophy, um, anything come to mind?
Sanjit: No, so I think maybe the most counterintuitive thing we did was to pick the market segment we did,
right? So, um, I have a feeling a lot of the reasons we got term sheets in the series A was because John and I had seen success
abroad. Like, I think there was some real skepticism. Are you going to sell what to who?
Logan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Sanjit: and, uh, you know, I, I think that sometimes you have to be truly kind of contrarian in that sense and try to do something that not everyone agrees with
Logan: Would you recommend people seek markets, uh, more than product market fit?
Sanjit: Well, I, I, I don't think those are exclusive. Like, you know, you can kind of start with the market first, finding product market fit. If you, if you have no idea what you're doing can take a long
Logan: The bottoms up approach, I guess, uh, versus the top down start landing on industry and determining the product that meets the industry's needs versus the opposite approach.
Sanjit: worked for us. I think the reason it
Logan: Both ways work for
Sanjit: both ways worked. I think the reason the second way worked where we started market first was because it was so underserved. There were problems lying around all over the place. Right.
Logan: Probably still are given the new products you guys are
Sanjit: Yeah, exactly. And, um, The customers were more than willing to tell us about it. Like, even when we were talking about, um, learning about how fleets operate. I remember one of the fleet managers showed me the big printed out map on their wall. I was like, so how do you plan around? They're like, well, maybe [01:24:00] from here to what this is crazy. So, um, it's a target rich environment
when it's an underserved
Logan: Interesting. Interesting. Thank you for doing
Sanjit: Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Sanjit: This was fun.
Logan: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Logan Bartlett show with co founder and Biswas. If you enjoyed this episode, I'd really appreciate it if you shared with anyone else that you think might find it interesting. If you could also subscribe on whatever platform you're listening on, we really appreciate it. You'll hear another fascinating conversation next week right here on the Logan Bartlett show. Thank you.