🎧🍌 Inside Samsara’s Journey to $26B Public Company | Sanjit Biswas, Co-founder and CEO
Lessons building two unicorns, AI in the physical world, thinking customer-first instead of product-first, mastering sales as a technical founder and what most people get wrong about building hardware
Samsara's platform digitizes physical transportation and safety operations, and this latest podcast episode with Co-founder and CEO Sanjit Biswas unpacks building it from zero to run rating revenue at over $1.6 billion and a $26 billion public company in ten years.
We get into how AI is impacting the physical world, how Samsara uses AI internally, and how their products prevent over 200,000 car crashes / deaths per year.
Sanjit has built two unicorns, and he shares everything he’s learned along the way, including what most founders and investors get wrong about hardware, thinking customer-first instead of product-first, how to know when you have product market fit, mastering sales as a technical founder, and how to spend more time with your customers.
We also talk about getting his high school online in the 90’s, and the research project that turned into Sanjit’s first company, Meraki, and its $1.2 billion dollar sale to Cisco in 2012.
Thanks alana goyal and Aditi Verasamy for help brainstorming topics for Sanjit, let me know what you think after listening / reading through!
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Timestamps to jump in:
4:26 Samsara: Helping the world of physical operations
8:44 Preventing 200,000 deaths per year
11:19 AI opportunities in transportation
14:43 Samsara’s internal AI tools
16:58 What people get wrong when building hardware
19:04 Starting Samsara customer-first instead of product-first
22:23 Find adjacent products for your customers
26:28 How to know you have product market fit
34:52 Spending more time with customers and building feedback loops
43:00 70-20-10 framework for allocating capital
45:07 Importance of selling new products to existing customers
49:15 Revisiting the product roadmap based on new technology
50:38 Why Sanjit credits focus to hitting $1B revenue in nine years
53:41 Learning to love sales as a technical founder
57:06 Getting his high school online in the 90’s
1:01:46 The PhD research that turned into Sanjit’s first company, Meraki
1:04:01 Importance of asymmetric risk when starting a company
1:05:41 Early days of Meraki taking off
1:09:19 Surviving and doubling during the financial crisis
1:16:00 Cisco acquiring Meraki for $1.2B
1:18:15 Meraki’s post-acquisition integration
1:20:48 Differences between 1st and 2nd company
1:24:19 Almost starting an renewable energy company
1:25:52 The power of small teams
1:28:49 One-shotting Bill Gates’ biography at 10-years old
Referenced:
Find Sanjit on LinkedIn
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Transcript
Find transcripts of all prior episodes here.
Turner Novak:
Sanjit, welcome to the show.
Sanjit Biswas:
Thanks for having me.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, thanks for coming on. It should be pretty fun. We were just at your kind of customer demo AI and autonomy. I know we're going to talk about that a little bit, but I'm just curious real quick for people who aren't familiar, what is Samsara?
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, so we help with the world of physical operations. So a lot of companies, whether they're construction companies or utilities or logistics companies, they're looking to digitize. The way they do that is by putting sensors on their trucks and their other assets. They need software to help manage their operations. So we provide all of that. And we also help them go through that digital transformation journey, so figure out how do you actually do it practically, especially if you have tens of thousands of frontline workers.
Turner Novak:
So what does the products look like to do that?
Sanjit Biswas:
So we have a few different products. Most of our customers adopt multiple of them together. We started out with GPS tracking, so understanding where your trucks and your people are in real time. We added safety cameras, so cameras that run AI models in them at the edge. And the idea there is when you're out on the road, sometimes you develop a bad habit, you take a look at your mobile phone, or you have a tailgating habit, or you speed. We can help break those habits by having the AI give you a quick warning or a nudge, and it has amazing outcomes. So that has become now our number one product line. And then on top of that, we also help track equipment, do workflows, kind of everything else that is related to operations.
Turner Novak:
And so who is a customer and a user for this kind of a product? Because it's maybe a little bit abstract for the average tech audience.
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah. So maybe to help visualize it, I would think about a company like a DHL, right? Those yellow parcel delivery vans, there's thousands of them crisscrossing all over North America. We work with them to help improve their safety and their efficiency. So the cameras help keep their drivers safe on the roads. They're driving thousands or even millions of miles of their scale. We help them understand are they able to hit their route stops on time, should they replan their route because the traffic or the weather's a little crazy? So we do all of that and then the people that use our system are everyone from the frontline workers, so the drivers to the dispatchers, the safety managers, the mechanics, kind of everyone involved in the frontline operation.
Turner Novak:
And so the way that they actually implement the products, how does that usually play out? Because when I think about a truck or a car, there's a touchscreen and it's connected to the internet. Why do you need all these different devices attached to the vehicles?
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, a lot of it is around consistency of collection of data at scale. So what we have is a little black box that plugs in, that's the GPS tracker, and that makes sure that you're getting high quality data across your entire fleet. It doesn't matter the make or the manufacturer, what year it was built or any of that kind of stuff. The cameras are all consistent as well. So they have a consistent driver safety scoring and all that kind of stuff. So the whole idea here is it's plug and play, they're up and running within minutes, and then they can start collecting data about their operations. But more importantly, they can manage it at scale. So if you think about a company that has thousands or tens of thousands of trucks, they need something that just works out of the box.
Turner Novak:
And a lot of the trucks, they're from 20, 30 years old, right? They might not have some of these features already built in. Is that right?
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, that's right. I would say a 20, 30-year-old truck is pretty unusual. Most of our customers have vehicles for five to 10 years, because they're running them every single day. But again, the feature set varies among these different trucks and the consistency of the data really matters.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. Okay. And one thing I wanted to ask, so the name, Samsara, what's the significance of that?
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, so maybe a little backstory. My co-founder, John, and I, we've been working together for over 20 years now. So we met as grad students at MIT. We were both part of the same PhD program. We ended up in the same lab working on a project together, so we worked on that together. That was back in the early 2000s. It was related to Wi-Fi. That became a startup company called Meraki that we worked on for many years, and that's now part of Cisco Systems. And then we started Samsara together. So Samsara is a Sanskrit word. It means the cycle of reincarnation and rebirth. So we thought it kind of fit. And along the way we met a lot of great people and they now work with us at Samsara too, so it kind of has been a reflection of the team, if you will.
Turner Novak:
Okay. I know I want to ask you more about Meraki, but I know we want to talk about Samsara first. One really interesting stat that I saw was the Samsara product has prevented over 200,000 car crashes, I think last year or whatever. That's an insane stat.
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
How do you even track that and what are you kind of preventing?
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, and it's one that we're super proud of. So like I said, a lot of the times people develop bad habits that lead to risk out on the roads. You can kind of see a before and after effect. So there's like a baselining that you're able to do. Imagine you have someone with a GPS tracker, but no camera. You can get a sense for, okay, per thousand or per million miles, how many of these incidents happen? And unfortunately, it's just statistical, right? There's a number of crashes that happen in the US every single year. So we're able to baseline versus that. And then you can see what happens once you turn the coaching on. So once you have AI coaching at the edge happening within a second or two, it really makes a very big difference. It can be anywhere from 20 to 80% reduction in the number of accidents, and that's simply by changing behaviors. And a lot of the times the will and the intent is there, it's just bad habits form. And so if you can get to the source of it, it changed the outcome.
Turner Novak:
So when you say AI coaching, I might hear that and think, is it a thing that lives ... I don't know if you guys saw that recent demo of the glasses live in your view and the glasses giving you coaching and advice. Is it the same kind of a concept with a driver in a vehicle or how does that play out?
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah. Maybe less literally in your face than that. It might be something as simple as a reminder to put your seatbelt on. A lot of folks don't know this, but in the United States it's still the case about somewhere between eight and 10% of folks don't wear seatbelts. It's one of the biggest things you can do to prevent accident or injury really.
Turner Novak:
Interesting.
Sanjit Biswas:
So that's an example of something that's a slight nudge, and that's again like a form of AI coaching. There's also this idea of a safety score. So the reality is most drivers do a really good job on the road, and we see a lot of customers where they want to do recognition and rewards programs for folks that are doing a great job. So the cameras are able to provide that composite score that could lead to an employee of the month, or you can do contests and things like that. So these are all different forms of gamifying safety.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. Yeah, because you think safety, pretty boring, and why would you-
Sanjit Biswas:
It's pretty dry. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
At the other end, you do want to be safe because you're working in a hazardous environment with heavy equipment. You want to be safe.
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
So then what ... are there other ways that you're using AI to impact the customers and the frontline users and workers in the product?
Sanjit Biswas:
So once we started using AI and we introduced AI coaching probably five, six years ago, you started to see it was really useful for helping sift through tons and tons of data. So if you think about safety coaching, most of the time nothing's going on and it wouldn't make sense for a person to be watching those videos. It's just not practical. But the AI model is able to run continuously and find those patterns.
We started applying those ideas to other concepts within operations. So could you replan your routes because you just keep missing the stops? Maybe it's not practical to run a certain route in a certain timeframe. So we can run AI to help identify things like that. Fuel coaching is another one. So if you think about these fleets, they drive millions of miles, there's certain miles per gallon. You can affect that by how you drive. And so a lot of our customers will run little contests on who's the most fuel efficient or managing vehicle idling, things like that. That cuts down both emissions and fuel consumption. So all of these are use cases for AI because of the amount of data.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I was going to say, it sounds like these are things where you probably could not just start a company initially, and this is the product and how it works. You'd kind of need all this unstructured data that just kind of exists in the wild that you're now capturing because of the product.
Sanjit Biswas:
Right. Yeah, and kind of going back to why do you need to install the hardware? Once you capture the data, you find the patterns in it. If you were just looking for one sort of attribute, you might miss all of this extra context, and then we can actually tie all this stuff together as well. So what behaviors related to driving actually result in less risk and things like that. You can figure out which vehicles do you need to maintain. So we can see the fault codes on the engines, we can see how many miles are driven, how hard you are driving on those miles, that kind of thing, and help you come up with a better maintenance schedule.
Turner Novak:
Hmm. And is there any, I don't know, in your world, like more physical transportation? I know if you're working in software or consumers, there's tons of hype in AI right now. Is it the same in the physical world, like in transportation?
Sanjit Biswas:
I wouldn't say it's the same kind of hype. There's a curiosity. I think everyone's interested in AI and people are using ChatGPT and wondering, "What else could you do with it?" For our customers, they're really about just solving real-world problems. So if you think about a construction company, for example, safety is a big deal for them, right? It's something where they don't want anyone getting hurt on the job in the first place. It also affects their revenue. So if you're known as a safe company, you tend to get more work. And the safety scores and things like that that get published. So they want to use AI to help improve safety for that reason. So it's a very kind of pragmatic viewpoint.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, it truly just hits the bottom line immediately.
Sanjit Biswas:
It does. And these are, I would say, asset-heavy, labor-intensive industries. So we were talking about a food services distributor earlier. They do a lot of hard work, but most of their revenue ends up going right back into the operation, whether that's running the trucks or the warehouses or all that kind of stuff. So for them, these little things actually add up to a lot.
Turner Novak:
Internally at Samsara, are you guys taking advantage, like anything in cool new tools, or where you've changed or operating due to some new stuff that you've built or started using?
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, absolutely. So we've been kind of early adopters of AI and large language models, partly because we saw how useful it was in the product, but also our background is we're tech folks, so we're always kind of curious and trying new things out.
A couple examples. One is for our sales team, we have something internally we call SamsaraGPT. And we were early adopters of OpenAI's enterprise licensing. So we were basically using the enterprise version of ChatGPT. We tied that together with all of our case studies, and we started basically crawling all of the internal data we have. And it's super useful if you're a salesperson and you're talking to someone in a certain industry or a certain geography, we can now pull up a relevant reference for you really quickly. You can do it while you're on the phone with them. And it's just a little Slack bot that we built.
We started with that, and then that project has snowballed. It's really heavily used internally. And from there you start getting other ideas of, well, could we put other information in here? Could we make it available to our customer? All that kind of stuff.
Turner Novak:
So that one was sort of like a sales assist or enabling tool to just give them more ammo to work with when they're-
Sanjit Biswas:
Relevant information. Exactly. Because you have so many customers, it's hard to remember all the stories in your head, or maybe you're new to the company and you're still learning. It's really helpful to be able to just ask about really quickly.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, interesting. Okay. You've started two companies, two hardware companies. Well, there's a hardware component. Obviously, Samsara's very much software-focused. What do you think most people get wrong? I feel like as an early stage investor, the first thought with hardware typically is, "Oh, it's too hard. We don't investing in those companies, they don't scale well." I feel like over the past couple of years we've kind of gotten past that and people realize that they can be really good businesses and-
Sanjit Biswas:
They can.
Turner Novak:
... sometimes better businesses. Just what have you learned or anything you think that most people get wrong when they kind of approach starting a hardware company?
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah. Well, I would say either folks underestimate the complexity of building hardware or they just say, "I'm going to avoid it altogether because it's hard." I think if you have a background in engineering, it's a little bit easier to wrap your head around it. So for myself, I studied computer systems engineering as an undergrad. Our research project at MIT had a hardware component, so we were pretty familiar with it and we understood the sort of quirks and nuances of it. You also understand the cost of it when you work with it that closely.
And we saw a pathway to actually building a product that would be a sustainable sort of product line to offer over the long term. So a lot of it is just knowing the details, but it is extra complexity. I think the upside of it is it is a bit harder to compete with hardware businesses, right?
Turner Novak:
To compete against them?
Sanjit Biswas:
In terms of the ecosystem and who your competitors are ultimately.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Sanjit Biswas:
So for example, our previous company, Meraki, was doing WiFi access points when we started. We eventually did switches and routers and other kinds of things. There weren't a lot of companies doing that out in the market. And it's because you needed to figure out how to make the boards, write the firmware, ship stuff at scale, versus a pure software product, someone can put it together really quickly in their dorm room and you might have a hundred competitors out there. So very different market dynamic.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. And specifically today, you've probably seen those text-to-code, like-
Sanjit Biswas:
You just vibe code it, right.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, just, "Make me a whatever I need," and it's just there.
Sanjit Biswas:
And that's a little harder to do with an access point or a GPS tracker or a camera or something.
Turner Novak:
Do you think that we're going to get to a point where it's easier to make hardware? I feel like it has gotten easier over the years.
Sanjit Biswas:
I think so. And I think Arduino and Raspberry Pi kind of became really great gateways and pretty good prototyping platforms. There's a lot you can do on a Raspberry Pi and kind of prove out an idea, and then at that point you go figure out how do I make something custom?
Turner Novak:
So talking about Samsara specifically, how did you first come up with the idea? How did it all come about?
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, there's the initial idea and then there's what the company ultimately focuses on product-wise. We kind of started customer-first with this company as opposed to product-first. So maybe a quick backstory with Meraki, a lot of what was going on was we had these ideas from our PhD research, we want to put them in a box, make it easy for anyone to build a big WiFi network. So that was product or technology-first.
Along that Meraki journey, we actually got to engage in a ton of different industries. Excuse me. We got to engage in a ton of different industries. So we got to see education. We also got to see retail. We got to see healthcare. And some of the most interesting customers we got to spend time with were industrials or manufacturing companies, people in operations, because really you don't tend to get to see behind the curtain that often. How does a warehouse run or how does manufacturing facility run? But they all needed WiFi. So we got to see those up close.
And it had always struck us that it was like stepping in a time machine. This is back in 2015-ish. At that point, smartphones had happened, the cloud wave had already happened, but you'd kind of walk through the door of a warehouse and you'd see, wow, there's pen and paper clipboards everywhere. There are maps on the wall for people planning their routes. It just didn't feel modern. And so that's where we said, "There's an opportunity here to have impact," because that's what we wanted to kind of think about next was how can you be useful in the world?
Turner Novak:
So how'd you figure out how to be useful?
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, it was basically that, okay, there's this underserved market, let's go spend time with them. And our initial hypothesis was that maybe they need sensors, like temperature sensors for their cold storage warehouses or for those sorts of facilities. So that's what we started with. We built that. It was the simplest kind of product we could get or get built, and the whole idea was to get close to the customer. We knew that it was probably not going to be the product, but it was essentially an excuse for us to talk to real people. It became very clear to us that their warehouses were not having refrigeration failures that often. It was 2015. That stuff had gotten really good. But the weakest link for them was actually understanding their operations. So they had no idea where their drivers were. They had no idea if stuff was kept cold that whole time, et cetera. And when they showed us the tools they were using, I remember vividly one of the customers had an interface and it was running on MapQuest. And it's like a throwback to the '90s, but that was happening in 2015.
Turner Novak:
So how would they run on MapQuest? How would that even work?
Sanjit Biswas:
So MapQuest had an API of some kind, and there were what they called breadcrumbs. So you get an update on the map every somewhere between five to 15 minutes. And just think about how far your DoorDash order moves in 15 minutes. Right?
Turner Novak:
You can go from waiting to pick up to it's here.
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, exactly. And that was the customer experience. So when we saw that, we said, "Okay, what's the more modern way to do this?" And so we started with real-time GPS tracking. It kind of felt obvious to us that would be something useful for the customer, but we knew that once we did that, we'd be able to kind of piggyback off that use case and find some other adjacencies.
Turner Novak:
So how did you know that?
Sanjit Biswas:
In terms of there were other adjacencies?
Turner Novak:
Yeah, you were just like, "Oh, I know there's more opportunities here"? Was there something you were picking up on that you just kind of knew, "Okay, maybe this isn't the thing or maybe the second or third product, but this is, there's a huge opportunity"?
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, so it started with GPS tracking and that was just the dot on the map. Can we show them in real-time where the driver is? Then route stop arrivals were another one. And no one had done the integration of, like, well, you have a planned set of route stops and arrival times. If you upload those into the system, you'd mash them up with the GPS, you can kind of see did someone arrive on time. That was a very manual process. So that was the immediate adjacency.
After that, we started learning a lot about the efficiency of the operation in general and things like engine idling. So people with delivery vans will often just leave them running because it keeps their air conditioning running. Turns out if you turn the engine off, that could save you two to 3%. We have customers that have $40 million fuel bills, so if you save them two or 3%, that's like a million dollar savings.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, that's insane.
Sanjit Biswas:
So all of a sudden the customers started coming to us with ideas saying, "Is this something you could help with?" Or, "We've been trying to figure this one out. Is this something that technology can do?"
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Was there specifically in terms of adding more products, how did you figure out what to do in what order? Was it a customer pull thing or were you just trying and they took certain things and didn't take certain things? How'd you figure it out?
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, for us, because we were outsiders to the world of operations, we were always... We call it big eyes and big ears. We were always looking to learn how does that operation run or what's on your mind, or what's that binder for this thing on your wall? What are you tracking?
And one of the areas that we started getting a lot of pull on was around safety. And it wasn't even articulated that way. We actually started getting asked from our customers, the early customers, "We love your GPS tracking system. Is there a dash camera that you recommend that integrates well with Samsara?" And what was going on was at the time people were buying consumer dash cams, like the stuff you'd get at Best Buy, or maybe you've seen an Uber, right?
Turner Novak:
Yep.
Sanjit Biswas:
And it would record video to an SD card. So it's basically a GoPro, right-
Turner Novak:
Yep.
Sanjit Biswas:
... that you'd stick in the dash.
Turner Novak:
That would record the driver.
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, it was actually about recording what was going on outside. And what was going on really was in the US, at least, if you're a large corporation and you're making a delivery and there's an accident, typically, it gets blamed on the company, right? Because deep pockets, insurance claims, all that kind of stuff. So they were using it to exonerate themselves and say, "No, this is really what happened." That happens way more often than you might realize, that companies are sort of wrongfully accused. So they're buying-
Turner Novak:
And they just settle because it's just easier. It's just-
Sanjit Biswas:
They would settle or there was no eyewitness or something like that. So they were buying dash cameras for that reason. They were a bear to deal with, you'd have to pull the SD card, maybe it wasn't plugged in, maybe that operation's like 400 miles away and someone's got to FedEx you the card. It just wasn't really practical.
So, what ended up becoming our second big product family was basically from customer asks of, is there someone you recommend? And you hear that three or four or five times and you say, "Well, if we built one, would that be interesting to you?" And they were all willing to try it out. And so, our very first dash camera was a prototype. It was basically, a webcam that we bought off Amazon, plugged into the USB port. I think my co-founder John, hacked some software together over the weekend, and we took it back to a customer the following Monday. And they said, "This is amazing." Because now, we don't need to pull the SD card, right?
Turner Novak:
Mm-hmm.
Sanjit Biswas:
We can pull the footage remotely. So, it was an idea like that that has now become an over half billion dollar product line.
Turner Novak:
Oh, wow. So, was there a moment then when you knew that you had product-market fit and you knew that this could be a company worth... It was your second company, I'm assuming you knew what you were doing, made a little more experience, you knew you could be a little bit picky, you knew this was the big opportunity.
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, for us, we didn't want to rush things because that sort of process of finding product-market fit, it's really hard to do in a strategy session or whiteboard. You just need to make contact with the market. And like I said, the first product, the beta product we built was the temperature sensor, that was not taking off in the sense of engagement on the product. People weren't using a lot of the graphs and things like that. What was taking off was the GPS tracking. So people wanted to know where that truck was with the temperature sensor.
And then we started getting asked the question like, "Hey, this beta product, is it a secret or can we tell other people about it?" We're like, "Oh, yeah."
Turner Novak:
What? Yeah.
Sanjit Biswas:
"No, tell other folks about it. What do you want to tell them about?" It was the GPS tracking part of it. So when you hear that, that's the first sign, then you need to see, okay, is this going to be a good business for us? Can we make this margins stable and really fund the entire company over the long term? And once we started doing the math on that, we said, "Yeah, this could definitely work."
Turner Novak:
How would you recommend that part of it, like the commercial? Is this a good commercial idea? Because I feel there's a lot of times where you might build a cool product, but when you really do the math, it might be tough to make a business here.
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah. And I think this is where it being the second time through company made a big difference because we had an idea of what should a gross margin look like. I think at first, especially in our first company, we underpriced the product massively because we didn't understand how much it would cost to fund the rest of the business. You know how much the hardware costs, and you know how much maybe the software, the cloud service costs to run. But you don't think about sales commissions and support costs and all the other stuff that needs to go into making something sustainable and scalable over the long term.
Turner Novak:
So if I were to come to tell you I have this idea and here's the idea, what in your mind? I think this probably is going to change over time, but if I'm first starting something, what is probably a good gross margin to think about? And then, some of the other pieces like expenses that go into those initial unit economics, what would you tell me is probably, I don't know, good or benchmark to clear? Like okay, you can probably-
Sanjit Biswas:
Sure.
Turner Novak:
... use something with this.
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, it depends on whether the product needs to be sold or not. For us, we knew that in operations at least people were going to want to have a conversation about it. They were not shopping for technology, they weren't going to download it. I feel like with a lot of open-source software, you have people just doing product led growth where they discover it, your cost of sale might be very different. This was a little bit more of, "Hey, we're going to need to call people up, do things like free trials so they can check it out." And so if you had a business like that, I would say, you need to have a gross margin that's north of 60% because your cost of sale might be 40% or something like that. And you can figure this out by looking at public companies that are in these industries. Maybe not at all the same technology, but you have a rough idea of, "Okay, what does it take to serve this kind of customer?"
Turner Novak:
Yeah. So something that's always fun for me is I just Google name of the company and investor relations, and public companies, they share a lot of information.
Sanjit Biswas:
They did.
Turner Novak:
If you want to learn about them, just go to the page. They'll have nice presentations, they might have hundreds of pages each quarter. They put out earnings that you can go read. For a lot of people, the first time you discovered that, you're like, "Holy cow. It's like this company's sharing all their secrets." With startups, it's hard to get information on these, but public companies, it's all out there.
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah. It's out there. And I think you can also learn a lot about an industry in terms of like, okay, why did they choose to focus on enterprise customers, or why did they do SMB? So there's a lot of information like you said, on those IR portals. The investor days are often really good as well. And then for us, the key was, okay, is this an underserved market? Because you don't want to enter a market that's already got a lot of competition. Customers are pretty happy with what they have. So, I would say, there's the gross margin side of things which is, could you make it sustainable? It's really hard to change the gross margin profile of a business massively over time. But then more importantly, can you be 10x better at something? And that's something that doesn't show up in the gross margin.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, that's fair. There's probably companies like Amazon doesn't have the highest gross margins on the Amazon e-commerce product, but there's extreme competitive advantages. So just being the lowest cost provider, no one can compete with you.
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, exactly. And that's why I think it differs industry to industry, product to product.
Turner Novak:
So one question I had, I was just talking to someone who works with you right now, they told me to ask, what percentage of Samsara do you think was skill vs luck?
Sanjit Biswas:
I think it's hard to put a percentage on a sort of thought experiment like that. I would say, it was really both. We had to be lucky enough to come across an industry that was underserved, that is this important, right?
Turner Novak:
Mm-hmm.
Sanjit Biswas:
This large and massive. But then to have the skill to execute on the hardware, the software, the sales, the support, there's a lot that goes into serving these customers. So maybe a hundred percent, a hundred percent you need both.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I've heard people say, a good way to define or maximize the opportunity for luck is surface area, shots on goal, volume.
Sanjit Biswas:
Yes.
Turner Novak:
I mean, startups in any company is just a series of experiments. So if you're constantly trying and doing something... If you take one shot and you miss, you're out of the game. But if you have a hundred shots, a thousand shots, eventually the 999th one, it might finally hit. And you got lucky, but you were disciplined enough or skilled enough to take enough shots to get lucky.
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah. And that's also why it's hard to say, we're just going to start scaling the company. You have to go find that product-market fit. Usually, that's a feedback loop process. Unless you've been in that industry or you're like a technical expert and just know. But what we found, again, with Samsara, we had not spent a lot of time in physical operations. We were admirers of it and curious nerds. We were reading all these books and stuff, but you really had to just go get involved. And once you do that, that's when you start taking those shots. And it's just a bunch of conversations, or at least that's what it was for us.
Turner Novak:
I know the early days you had initially, there's a new regulation that came out and they give you guys a really big boost in the first year of selling a product. What was that and how did that play out?
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, so maybe for a little context, there was something called the ELD Mandate, and that basically meant for folks driving long haul or heavy trucks that there were a certain number of hours they were able to drive per day before they had to clock out or stop. And that was basically to help manage fatigue on the roads. In the US, that had been done by pen and paper for decades.
Turner Novak:
Really?
Sanjit Biswas:
And ELD was electronic logging device. So it was basically, let's digitize that because it was easy for people to lose their logs, the paper would get lost, all that kind of stuff.
Turner Novak:
You could probably fudge the numbers a little bit. Yeah.
Sanjit Biswas:
You could probably fudge the numbers. And I would say, the majority of the industry was compliant, but it was real pain to deal with all that paper, especially if you've got thousands of drivers and having to hang on to a piece of paper. So that was a mandate that had come up a few times and then not gotten passed. It ultimately did get passed in 2017, so it was technically the second year of the company that we were selling product.
We actually didn't know about it when we started. We didn't know about it for the first year. And then customers were asking like, "Hey, are you guys going to build an ELD?"
Turner Novak:
Like, what is this?
Sanjit Biswas:
So this was repeating story, but for us just being customer led in that sense, we said, "Well help us understand how does this affect you, et cetera." And they were saying, "Well, we need to comply with it, but it also means we're going to need to put devices in the cab, which meant there would need to be an app." And that felt like something that we could do a really good job with, which is building modern software that would be part of that frontline driver experience.
Turner Novak:
So you have this concept of customer feedback loops. Is that an example of it or how does that usually play out?
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, very much. Because this worked for us so well in the early days of the company, we made it fundamental to how we operate. We run feedback loops in sort of formal and informal ways. So the formal way would be, we have a big customer conference every year. It's called Samsara Beyond. So we'll have a lot of customers come in person, we'll take a whole day where we're sitting around in groups like workshopping ideas, showing them prototypes, things like that.
That's something we're able to do now at our scale. But in the early days, we were actually just bringing those prototypes with us to a customer meeting or demoing it on the screen. So, we still try to do that throughout the year. And what's great is as your customer base grows, the amount of feedback you can get grows too. So if we want to learn about the construction industry or the waste management industry or something a little more esoteric, it's really easy for us to get feedback in those areas now because we have tens of thousands of customers.
Turner Novak:
Is there a good way to sense out the quality of the feedback or what's worth listening to versus not?
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah. Well, you want to look for patterns. So, it's like an 80 20, is this going to be relevant to the majority of our customers at least in this market segment? And if it is, then it's kind of worth investing in or it's worth building. If it's in the 20, it's not that it's a bad idea, it might be more of we should integrate with somebody or we should help you write software against the open API to do that.
Turner Novak:
Another thing that came up when I was talking with some people at Samsara, they said that out of any CEO they've ever worked with, you spend the most time talking to customers. Which it's funny that maybe some CEOs are known for not talking to customers. How do you think you're able to do that so well? Or if I'm somebody who's like, "I want to spend more time with customers," but then also not lose focus the rest of the process of running a company, how do you do it?
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, I think you have to make time to spend time with the customer. For me, I'm always curious, right? And one of the most fun parts of my job is getting to go on site with customers, because they'll give you a tour, they'll show you the operation, and you can see everything from... We were talking about autonomy and robots. You see warehouse robots moving around to you see how a big waste management facility works, like serving an entire city. It’s all really fascinating.
Turner Novak:
What's that one? That sounds crazy. What is that?
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah. Well, this was just a couple of weeks ago. I was out in the UK and we got to visit... We're in London and it's obviously a very, very big city. We got to visit one of the regional waste processing facilities. And you see the garbage trucks coming in, conveyor belts, all the sorting happening, all the recycling.
Turner Novak:
All automatic?
Sanjit Biswas:
Both a mix of manual and automatic.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Sanjit Biswas:
A lot more automation than you might realize because they're using things like computer vision to go figure out, "Okay, this is recyclable or this is not," and a little arm pops out and the little can over. So things like that you don't get to see. And then at the end of the process, a lot of the stuff gets compacted and it's like Wally, if you remember that movie from Pixar, and just huge stacks all the way to the ceiling, you wouldn't get to see that or... You could maybe find it on YouTube if you really dug for it, but that's the stuff that I love about the customer visit. And in that process you get to learn a lot about, well, how often do garbage trucks break, right? It turns out pretty often because they're lifting tons and tons of material hundreds of times a day, right?
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Sanjit Biswas:
So that's the stuff where it's real world problems, they just become really apparent once you set foot on site.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. And I'll have my garbage, I'll be pushing it out to the curb and I'm like, this thing is a hundred pounds, and the arm has to be designed to at that weird angle, pick it up and tilt it into and just do it over and over and over again.
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, exactly. So there's all of that. And then, I learned about a lot of other interesting challenges like, every once in a while someone will say, "You skipped my stop," right?
Turner Novak:
Mm-hmm.
Sanjit Biswas:
And so that'll be a pretty common customer complaint, but they're having to make thousands of stops on that daily service route. So statistically, that means 10 people will say, "You need to come back out and pick up my bins." So things like that make a big difference just to hear the stories.
Turner Novak:
Is there, if I'm someone who wants to talk to customers more and I think I might not have the time, or... How would you recommend getting myself in front of them more often if I'm a product leader or founder?
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, first just remember, you can just do things, right?
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Sanjit Biswas:
Pick up the phone or jump on that Zoom call, or even better go on site if you can. I think it's a really good use of time and it's worth prioritizing. So, one of the things I've realized is in the same way that people budget money, you need to budget time, especially as a founder or a CEO, and be deliberate about where is this time investment going? And I think understanding your customers, there's nothing like it, right? You have to go spend the time. You can't do it by proxy, whereas you could probably always spend more time in some of these other functions. So you have to just be deliberate about the allocation.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Any other interesting customer visits that you've done recently? Oh, so many. What's been maybe one of the most interesting, or you went somewhere, and the thing just blew your mind or you learned a new fact or statistic where you just changed the way you thought about something?
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, last year we have some customers in the airline industry. So they take you on the behind the scenes tour of how these airlines operate.
Turner Novak:
Oh, that'd be cool.
Sanjit Biswas:
We were out at Dallas Fort Worth airport and they took us out onto the ramp or the tarmac, and you get down there and you realize, "Whoa, this place is huge." And so we asked, how big is this? They said, "Well, DFW airport is larger than the island of Manhattan." Things are big in Texas, like this is really, really big. And it was also a reminder of the conditions like, it is really hot out there. And there's the Texas heat, but there's no air conditioning. It's like, all reflecting off the ground, and these folks are working 8, 10, 12 hour days, right?
So just getting to see that up close. There's no way they let you just run around the airfield, but then we got to see the equipment they're operating, and we learned all about how the carts that carry the baggage, they actually end up migrating to one side of the airport over the course of the day. Flights come in and it's shopping carts or something, they just move around. And you can't actually service the plane unless you've got the baggage carts ready to go. They would spend hours searching or hunting them down, making phone calls, trying to find them.
Turner Novak:
Oh, wow.
Sanjit Biswas:
So stuff like that you don't find out unless you go on site.
Turner Novak:
Interesting, yeah. I think the craziest airport statistic was, I believe it's the Denver airport. If you just overlay it on a map over top of San Francisco, it's bigger than greater San Francisco. Like the 7-square mile city.
Sanjit Biswas:
Airport's bigger than the cities, it's a new thing. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. That's crazy. But, I guess, when you really think about airports and flying, just like the aviation industry, it's a modern marvel of the world. Is like we've just got hundreds or thousands of planes every minute or two flying in and taking off around the world-
Sanjit Biswas:
That's right.
Turner Novak:
... it's pretty crazy.
Sanjit Biswas:
And it's just this huge complex operation. So this is going back to, if you're curious, you can just spend all day asking questions and be like, "How much does that tire cost?" It's like, "Well, $5,000." That's expensive, right?
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Sanjit Biswas:
So those are the things that I think bring us a lot of energy, which is just like, how do we help solve more real world problems?
Turner Novak:
And you have this framework that's called the 7 20 10 framework for allocating capital.
Sanjit Biswas:
70 20 10, yeah.
Turner Novak:
Is that what I said?
Sanjit Biswas:
I think you said 7 20 10.
Turner Novak:
Oh, 70 20 10. Hopefully not 7.
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah. You need that 63.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, you need that, that extra 63. So, what is the 70 20 10 framework?
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah. That's related to time horizons. So if you think about one of the jobs of founder or CEO is capital allocation. What are we investing in and what are we investing for? On one hand, you could invest entirely for the long term, and place all of your bets on things that are speculative and way out there, but then you're probably not fixing the bugs in your products for your customers or making enhancements and things like that. So, one of the things we noticed as we got larger was we had to come up with a split, right?
Turner Novak:
Mm-hmm.
Sanjit Biswas:
Because we wanted to work on interesting new long-term ideas, and now it's experimental ideas related to AI and things that are moving really quickly. But at the same time, you probably have a pretty big customer base that you want to make enhancements for and bug fixes and that sort of thing. So, what we found is 70 20 10 fits, if you say, what's happening on the roadmap for the coming year or coming two years, like near-term roadmap? Then what do we want to allocate to for the medium-term roadmap? And that might be new geographies or new market segments or strata. And then what are some ideas that are high risk but also high reward? If this cracks open, this could be a really big product line, and that would be in the 10 category.
Turner Novak:
And this is 10% of capital time. Like, what do those numbers mean exactly?
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, it would be more related to operating budgets, so CapEx.
Turner Novak:
And is that team spend and the cost of team or...
Sanjit Biswas:
That would be specifically related to R&D spend. So if you just look at the R&D budget and where does it go, that's how we think about it. If you look at the company, there are other teams, there are sales and support and finance and all that stuff. So those are less time horizon based. It's really R&D that we're talking about.
Turner Novak:
Okay. And talking about R&D, so you have this theory of innovation in concentric circles. How does that relate or relate to all of this?
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, so we were talking about customer feedback loops earlier. What we discovered over the years was once you have that foothold, once you're talking to the customer about something specific, they tend to open up about the other problems that they're dealing with, right? These may be other projects on their plate or other expenses or costs they're trying to fight. And those become obvious from the pattern perspective, the 80 20, those are almost always immediately adjacent to what you're working on because you're talking to the same user or same buyer.
And if you were to write them out on a whiteboard, you could almost just draw circles around them. You're like, "Okay, this is an idea that's really close to what we're doing today. This is the next layer of ideas, and these are immediately adjacent," and then you can draw them further and further out. So, we found that strategy works a lot better than, let's build this product for this customer here and build this entirely different product for different industry or different user. You don't get the same leverage of the relationships and your sales team and all that kind of stuff.
Turner Novak:
And maybe this is a rhetorical question, but getting you to keep talking, why is that important that they're close?
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, it really is about getting leverage, right? So most of our customers, for example, they don't just buy one product. They actually license many different products on the platform, dependent on their operations. So if you're an airline customer, you might have a lot of equipment that you're trying to track alongside your trucks and things like that, and it's the same sale, right? So when you're having the conversation, you're like, "This is what we would recommend to solve all of these problems." So the effect compounds. If you have a bunch of disparate products that are either completely unrelated or even sold to different customers, you're now acquiring entirely new customers each time, having entirely different conversations. And maybe you can operate as a holding company, but it's not as efficient as if you're already there and having the conversation.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Talking about margins and being profitable earlier, like it's related. Yeah.
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah. And that's ultimately, I think what makes companies sustainable, by the way, is you got to think through the margins but you have to think about the operating costs, and then can this thing run on its own? It sounds like common sense for a business, but with venture, I think there is often a tendency to just focus on the ideas and we'll figure it out later. You have to have some way to figure it out because later eventually happens if you're lucky.
Turner Novak:
When you say later, is there a cutoff where you feel too far in the future? And maybe what you do too with Samsara, like how far ahead do you plan, like is 10 years in the future just we can't allocate to that yet? When you're thinking about that time horizon where there's an era of importance and when you can or can't do something, how do you usually think about that?
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, I think on the financial and margin side, we have to see a pathway where it makes sense on a whiteboard or a piece of paper of like, "Okay, this kind of pencils out. There's a way here." You may not be there on day one or year one, and that might be you're going to get some benefits to scale. Or when it comes to AI, for example, we know that model costs are getting more affordable. Cost per token is coming down, so you can say, "Okay, there's a trend line here, and so we're going to intersect with that." That's more kind of through a financial lens. On the technology side of things, it's pretty hard to predict 10 years out. I don't know if you saw a ChatGPT coming 10 years ago, but that was really hard to predict.
Turner Novak:
I didn't see it. I didn't see it coming three years ago.
Sanjit Biswas:
Exactly, and so those are the kinds of things where you want to be dynamic. We'll look for long-term technology trends. That kind of goes back to like, okay, Moore's Law kind of cost curve or the cost of bandwidth is coming down. Those things you can kind of bet on and see around the corner, but every once in a while you get a big tectonic shift, and that was like mobile phones back in the 2000s or LLMs now. That's where you just have to hit refresh and start hitting refresh pretty often.
Turner Novak:
How do you know? Maybe that's obvious with ChatGPT. Everyone describes it as the ChatGPT moment, but how do you know if there's a moment that's worth refreshing on or taking a step back and maybe we should change something? Or...
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, I think this is more art than science, but ChatGPT came out in like November of '23. It was like Thanksgiving if I remember correctly, and at first, it seemed like a really cool novelty, but it's when you know something's going to be useful. If you remember those early models, they hallucinated a lot. They weren't super up-to-date and things like that.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, there was a cutoff, right?
Sanjit Biswas:
There was a knowledge cutoff, and it's not actually clear that those models were able to reason either the way that the newer ones do, but you could kind of see the potential. This is where actually being a tinkerer helps. You kind of use it and you see, "Okay, this is how it could be really useful." I wouldn't say that we upended our roadmap at that point, but it was like, "Okay, we need to start playing with this." That's like I said earlier, we were a very early enterprise adopter of OpenAIs. We started working with them. It was because of that intuition that we developed from being kind of in the details.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, so again, a really interesting thing I wanted to, I guess, get your thoughts on or opinion on, I read that Samsara is the, that I know of, the only company that's doing over a billion in ARR, that's growing over 30% a year, that also has positive free cashflow. I mean, that's pretty impressive. You think of the universe of companies that exist that could do that. How did you get so good at just focusing on growing quickly, doing sales, being profitable? Any specific lessons or takeaways?
Sanjit Biswas:
A lot of lessons and takeaways over the years. I think the most important thing for us was focus, really staying focused on our customer and understanding what other problems we can solve for them. A lot of that growth rate has come from being multi-product and then also being focused on certain customer segments. We realized in operations, at least, that large enterprise customers have the most complex operations. Like we were talking about an airline earlier-
Turner Novak:
Very, yeah.
Sanjit Biswas:
... like, yeah, you can't imagine something more complex. That doesn't mean that you neglect the mid-market customers or the smaller customers, but you can use that to get clarity and focus on, what are the problems that need solving? If you improve the fuel consumption or fuel efficiency of a very large customer, those same tactics may be relevant to a smaller mid-sized customer.
Kind of figuring out what the sort of leading factors are versus the lagging, and so for us, leading would be around, what are we doing to use to focus our product roadmap? Or where are we going to focus our sales team? Those kinds of things have really helped with us. Then, other decisions around focus are like we don't take on every geography all at once. It's actually hard to sell in every market around the world and do a great job unless you are, A, really talented, and B, have a lot of money in terms of investment capital. That focus and that clarity, I think, has really helped us, and the output or byproduct of that, I think, is the growth rate and the profitability that you see.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, that's right. It's also funny where you're looking at the spreadsheet and what the numbers show, but it's like that is the output of-
Sanjit Biswas:
That's right.
Turner Novak:
... a lot of different inputs, and they're probably going to change in the future based on the current inputs today.
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, that's right. It's also funny where you are looking at the spreadsheet and what the numbers show, but it's like that is the output of a lot of different inputs and they're probably going to change in the future based on the current inputs today.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, yeah.
Sanjit Biswas:
That idea of sustainability, I think we learned it actually in our past lives with Meraki because that was a business that actually grew through the 2008 global financial crisis and downturn. Back then, we learned that sometimes capital markets can freeze up. Venture capital may not be available to you, and you experience something like that and you say, "Well, it's really important that we have a sustainable business model." I know we're kind of going back to margins a couple of times. It's, I think, something that often gets overlooked in tech companies because there's so much excitement around the technology. That's great, but you need a sustainable model because ultimately the way to innovate at scale is to be self-funding as to reinvest the revenue back in. That's what we're proud of being able to do now.
Turner Novak:
Speaking of revenue, so you're very technical. We'll maybe talk about you're at MIT doing PhD research, but you're very focused on enterprise sales. What was the biggest thing that kind of unlocked for you as somebody who maybe you did or maybe you didn't grow up thinking like, "Oh, sales, that's not for me," or, "That sounds kind of yucky." How did you just get into more of being really good at enterprise sales?
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, I wouldn't even say I'm good at enterprise sales. I think we figured it out along the way, and I was very much in the category, totally technical. I went to grad school because I thought I wanted to be a professor or research scientist or something like that. What happened was with Meraki, when we were starting that company, we didn't have any outside funding, so this is like 2006 that we were getting started. Like I said, it was kind of an outgrowth of our PhD research, and we basically wanted to see if we could get our technology out in the world. The way we thought we'd do that is by embedding it on a small router or something like that, getting that into the hands of people that wanted to deploy big Wi-Fi networks. In order to get the hardware manufactured, we needed capital. You have to pay for the chips and the circuit boards and all that kind of stuff. We didn't have any money of our own. We were grad students. We were hanging out in Boston. There was no Y Combinator back then, or was starting right around the same time as-
Turner Novak:
It actually started in the summer-
Sanjit Biswas:
... there was-
Turner Novak:
.... didn't it?
Sanjit Biswas:
... the summer... yeah, summer 2005 or something.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Sanjit Biswas:
We were starting in '06, and it was really like there wasn't an angel ecosystem and all that kind of stuff. Anyway, the way we got Meraki off the ground is we basically were able to pre-sell the first couple of thousand routers, and that's how we bootstrapped the company. That was literally the first time I think I'd ever sold anything in my life. I'd never wanted to sell the candy bars at school. I just didn't want to do any of that stuff. I still remember the first time we got an order. It was like, "Oh, we'd love to cut you a PO." I was like, "That sounds great. What's a PO?" It was like, "Oh, a purchase order." Then, I remember getting it, I was like, "How do you cash this thing?" It was like a check. I was like, "What do you..." They're like, "You go down to accounts payable." We figured it out kind of that way, but I think that's actually what kind of got us started on the importance of sales was we weren't able to get the technology out there any other way.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, it forces you, too, like whatever your constraint is. Whether your constraint is capital or a certain availability of technology or whatever it is, the constraints definitely mold how something happens.
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, and something we learned in grad school 20-plus years ago was the importance of problem selection. What's the problem you want to work on? I think of the selling process is actually helping a lot with what are the problems that are the most important for the customers because they're willing to actually spend money on it. For me, again, it's really clarifying to have that sort of focus where like, "Okay, this is the one we should work on because this seems to matter to a lot of people."
Turner Novak:
Yeah, and you were talking about PhDs, MIT, I actually heard that back before even university and high school, you did your high school online, but I don't think the internet had existed yet, or it was like before the internet. How do you do that? How do you do high school online before the internet?
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, this is kind of going in the way back machine. Yeah, back in the mid-'90s, I don't remember how this even kind of got going, but I went to high school in Silicon Valley in the South Bay. Before that, I grew up in Texas, and my parents moved here in the mid-'90s. Back when I was in Texas, somehow I came across the beginnings of what's now Linux. It was like something you could download for free, and I was like, I don't know, probably 10, 11 years old.
Downloaded it, started playing around with it, and so then when I moved to California, that was how I kind of learned about the internet, dial-up, BBSes, and that sort of thing. When we moved to California, there was this idea that you could get a circuit, like you could actually get a dedicated connection to the internet, and that seemed really exciting because it was like way faster than dial-up modem.
Turner Novak:
Wait, how was it faster?
Sanjit Biswas:
Oh, so this is we're talking about fractional T1 lines. These are really slow by comparisons today. It was faster because it was like a digital line that came straight from the phone company.
Turner Novak:
You didn't have to dial in and like-
Sanjit Biswas:
There was no dial, it's like-
Turner Novak:
... take the phone line?
Sanjit Biswas:
... yeah, exactly-
Turner Novak:
Oh, interesting. Okay.
Sanjit Biswas:
... and so the high school that I was part of had accesses from the school district or something like that, so-
Turner Novak:
That's pretty impressive for a high school in the '90s to have that.
Sanjit Biswas:
It was in the '90s, but it was like pre-web.
Turner Novak:
Right, so-
Sanjit Biswas:
It's funny because Marc Andreessen's on our board now. I still remember downloading Mosaic, which was a software to browse the internet. This is one of those right place, right time, and I just happened to be downloading stuff and trying it out. Anyway, that was kind of a exploratory process for me to figure out, "Okay, this is pretty cool stuff." Then, once you kind of discover the web and discover email and things like that, I just thought this was super useful. I wanted everyone in my school to have it, and so that's kind of what got us started down this idea of like, "What if we made it possible for all of them to have an email address? What if we made it possible for all of them to have a webpage?"
Turner Novak:
This was like pre-GeoCities, probably pre-Hotmail-ish?
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah. It was pre... yeah, I'm old, but no, this was like 1994, '95, something like that. This was all happening around that time, and we figured out how to set up a Linux server, and this is me and a couple other friends in high school. We called it the Web Team or something like that.
Turner Novak:
The Web Team.
Sanjit Biswas:
The Web Team is so creative-
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Sanjit Biswas:
... but yeah, we basically set up an email server, we created a web server, and it was very much... I think Paul Graham talks about do things that don't scale for startup companies. We couldn't get the roster of everyone's name because... I don't remember why. The school wouldn't make it available or something like that. We got the yearbook, and I remember typing out everybody's name one by one and creating email addresses, so sometimes-
Turner Novak:
Oh, wow.
Sanjit Biswas:
... you just got to brute force it. Then, when we got it to people, we gave them the logins, they got super excited. Anyway, that was kind of the long backstory-
Turner Novak:
Interesting. Okay.
Sanjit Biswas:
... behind that. It was really cool because we were probably one of the first high schools online in the country or in the world at that scale where all the students had an email an address.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, it reminds me of, I don't know, I was probably in sixth, seventh grade using AOL Instant Messenger for the first time, and it's pretty cool.
Sanjit Biswas:
It's cool stuff.
Turner Novak:
You'd send your friend from math class a message and they respond back. It kind of blows your mind.
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, yeah. Totally.
Turner Novak:
It was like an early ChatGPT, just the idea that somebody else at the other end sending it back. It's pretty cool.
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, and so for us, in order to get people online, we knew that they weren't going to log in with the text interface and all that stuff, so we ended up building a web-based email client, which is like a really-
Turner Novak:
Oh, wow.
Sanjit Biswas:
... kind of basic version of Hotmail. Same thing with editing webpages. At the time, you'd need to know it's like SSH now or Telnet back then. You need to get the text interface in there. We didn't think that was very practical, so we build a little web-based editor for stuff like that. This is the whole process of problem-solving. I think it started a very kind of early stage for me, at least.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, and then we talked a little bit about Meraki, but when you first started it, I think there was this moment your advisor was going on a trip to Africa, and he's like, "I'm going to be gone for six months."
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
That kind of started the company. What's the story there?
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, I think maybe the context on the research project, John and I had been working on this research project called Roofnet, which was basically using what's now Wi-Fi technology to connect people. We were doing routing protocol research, so figuring out, how would you route packets through a network like that?
Turner Novak:
This was like 2005, '06-ish?
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, we started that project in 2002, I think, 2002 or 2003, so by '05 or '06, we were like four years into it. We'd actually built a pretty big network. We published a bunch of papers. That's when we were thinking about, "Could you make this easy for other people to run?" We actually open-sourced everything. It was on our website. You could download it, but we were seeing like other than a few academic researchers, it's not like folks were going and building these networks themselves. That idea had always been on our minds.
Then, our PhD advisor, Robert, he was basically up for a sabbatical, and I think he wife was doing some work in South Africa, so he said, "Hey, I'm going to be gone over the summer. It might extend into the fall." We're like, "Okay, what do we do?" We're like, "We need a summer project." He's like, "You guys could do an internship or something like that." At the time, we said, "Well, could we go try this idea? We want to try to sell these routers and see if we can get other people to build networks." He is like, "Yeah, you can go for it." That's when we went and got letter for a leave of absence.
We really thought it was a summer project because we had no idea how it was going to work out. That was the sort of backstory there. It's really fortunate because I think had he not gone on sabbatical, we were pretty risk-averse, We would have probably just said like, "We're about a year from finishing our graduate degrees, we should just stick in there," but yeah, it was kind of a matter of timing.
Turner Novak:
What would you recommend to somebody maybe in a similar situation making the jump to starting a company or start like... To your point, it sometimes can seem really risky, especially maybe to other people in your life, where it's like, "How do you recommend people approaching that if they have this idea and they think they might want to start something?"
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, for us, it was about asymmetric risk because we always had this fallback. If we could go back to grad school, I think MIT gave us 20 years to come back. We're like, "Well-
Turner Novak:
Oh, wow.
Sanjit Biswas:
... "if we can't make it work in 20 years," which I guess is expiring now, so-
Turner Novak:
Yeah, you’re almost there-
Sanjit Biswas:
... my time's up.
Yeah, but for us, it was actually about, "Okay, there is a fallback," and for most talented engineers, you can always get a job at a company if you've got these skills.
Turner Novak:
Isn't there this like, "What if you fail, though?" People think you weren't successful. Is your life over because you failed at your startup or is there-
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah. Maybe it was the sort of research background. In research, you try a lot of ideas that don't work out, so the failure wasn't as concerning for us as, would we derail? Or when you're doing academic research, your publications go stale, so if it takes you like five years to try something, we probably wouldn't be able to get teaching positions and things like that. Those were the stakes. They weren't the highest stakes, but for us, we said, "Okay, this worth trying, at least for the summer." Then, we kind of re-upped at the end of that summer. I can't remember, we probably did a couple hundred K in revenue just from our website.
Turner Novak:
Oh, wow. Yeah.
Sanjit Biswas:
We said, "Wow, there seems to be real interest and demand for this stuff." We kind of took it in stages, but I don't think it was a big thing on our mind that, "Okay, what happens if we fail?" It was more of, "Okay, is this the idea that's worth pursuing? Do we think that this is something we can work on for a while?
Turner Novak:
Was there a moment, then, when you realized maybe there's something here?
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, I think it's when the product started flying off the shelf. We didn't advertise it. People just heard about it word of mouth.
Turner Novak:
Really?
Sanjit Biswas:
I remember we were shipping to over a hundred companies. I remember we got an order from the Island of Nauru, which is a tiny island in the South Pacific, and they needed Wi-Fi and we're like, "Okay, this is pretty cool." We're like, "Does USP ship there?" Right, so-
Turner Novak:
It's like you'd charter a boat to-
Sanjit Biswas:
... yeah.
Turner Novak:
... to take you down.
Sanjit Biswas:
Those were the kinds of moments where you're like, "Okay, this is something the world wants. Let's see where it goes."
Turner Novak:
You mentioned that it was essentially like a router product, and then was it did you have something related to helping people create a Wi-Fi network? Or-
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, so there was the hardware side of it, which was basically a router, so kind of relatively small devices like the size of a deck of cards. We could run-
Turner Novak:
Oh, that's pretty small.
Sanjit Biswas:
... it was pretty small. We could run our software on there, basically the firmware on the device, and the part that made it easy is we made it plug and play. Part of the Roofnet research was kind of self-configuring and self-healing mesh network. That was very different than how Wi-Fi worked back in 2006. You kind of needed a graduate degree to configure all the settings and make it secure and all that.
Turner Novak:
Really?
Sanjit Biswas:
What we did was we came up with, "Well, how can you build a network that always kind of lands on its feet that can serve dozens or hundreds of people and make it a good experience for everyone?" At the time, if one person downloaded a big file, it hosed a network for everyone else.
Turner Novak:
Oh, really?
Sanjit Biswas:
We had technology in there to basically make it kind of equal and fair across the different users or shape the traffic, things like that.
Turner Novak:
Is that what was different versus like a Cisco product or-
Sanjit Biswas:
Among other things. I would say the self-configuration was pretty different. Then, the idea that you managed it all over web interface was pretty different, Cisco's Command Line back then.
Turner Novak:
Oh, really?
Sanjit Biswas:
They had a web interface, but people pretty quickly went down to the Command Line. Then, around that time was when laptops were getting a lot cheaper, so there was this whole kind of guest Wi-Fi concept of a vendor shows up, or you have a guest at your hotel. You want to provide Wi-Fi to them, well, how do you do that in a secure way that doesn't expose all the network to that new user?
Turner Novak:
Oh yeah.
Sanjit Biswas:
Those are features that we kind of built in, and they were very different than what Cisco offered. We didn't realize how different they were until we got close to it, and then we said, "Wow, this is what's making it possible for people to build big networks."
Turner Novak:
At the time, you were just like, "What should we make to make this more easy for students?" I think you built it across between like the MIT and Harvard campus-
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, so-
Turner Novak:
... or something like that.
Sanjit Biswas:
... we basically covered Cambridge, which is the town that MIT and Harvard are in, with free Wi-Fi and free broadband, which back in the 2000s was expensive, so students were pretty excited. We were basically serving undergrad students as an ISP. Because we had so many users, it's like we had staff to do this. We were building hardware, writing research papers, writing the software, getting it out into those students' hands. That's where a lot of the automation and the kind of technology came from.
Turner Novak:
It was basically you operated this free network for students to use, and then you started selling the actual router products.
Sanjit Biswas:
We basically just said like, "How do we make it possible for anyone to build a RoofTop?" That was kind of the idea and, "How do we put it in a box?"
Turner Novak:
Then, what happened in 2008?
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, so we as a company had pretty good traction with the product. We did raise venture capital at that point, so Sequoia Capital was our series A investor.
Turner Novak:
Oh, I didn’t know that.
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, it was great. We were exploring all kinds of interesting ideas. How could you blanket all of San Francisco with free Wi-Fi? We were trying ideas like that.
Turner Novak:
That'll get the VCs, especially back in 2008, I'm assuming-
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah. Well, and-
Turner Novak:
... back in that time, yeah.
Sanjit Biswas:
... Google was an early customer of ours, and they were partners, so there was a lot of exciting stuff going on, but then 2008 hit, and frankly, we didn't know what was going on because we had not spent time studying economics and understanding banking and all that stuff. You start reading the headlines and people are getting pretty concerned. We were well-capitalized in terms of I think at that point had raised a series B as well. I'd have to go look back, but what was concerning is all of those free Wi-Fi projects, whether it's the City of San Francisco or like these kind of town squares that want to do free Wi-Fi, kind of hit the brakes.
Everyone's like, "We don't have money to do this kind of community or science project. We have to really focus on sort of our core." That's what the customers were saying, and then I think Sequoia had this meeting where I remember the slide was like, "RIP Good Times." Has like a tombstone on it.
Turner Novak:
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
Sanjit Biswas:
I'm sure you could find it.
Turner Novak:
A legendary presentation.
Sanjit Biswas:
It's like a legendary presentation, but it has a lot of graphs that kind of go down and to the right, and there was one with like kind of skull and crossbones. I'm sure you can go find these slides online somewhere.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, we'll throw it in the description to the episode. I'll find it and I'll put it in there.
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, yeah, and it's interesting because it just made it so clear, and I think that was the whole point of the meeting was like, "Look, you have to. This is not like easy times anymore. It's about to change. It's about to change really quickly." They were exactly right. What we went through was, "Okay, there was this kind of business we'd been pursuing with free Wi-Fi and inexpensive routers and things like that.
Going back to the margins point, our margins were relatively low because we were like, "Oh, we'll figure it out later, or we don't want to overcharge, et cetera," to, "Okay, wow, we need to actually have a sustainable business. Otherwise, all of our friends that we're working on this project with will be out of work." That was a real crucible moment for us where we had to figure it out. At that point, we pivoted to the enterprise with Meraki, and we said, "This technology, as useful as it is for kind of free Wi-Fi in public venues, you could use it on a university campus, you could use it in your law firm, but we need to add a couple more features. So that's how we ended up making the pivot up to the enterprise. The price point did change as a side effect of that. We put slightly higher end hardware in. We wrote a lot more software and we basically said, "We need to charge a competitive rate for this, otherwise A, we won't get taken seriously as an alternative." And Cisco was a competition.
Turner Novak:
Oh, like you would be too cheap?
Sanjit Biswas:
We'd be too cheap.
Turner Novak:
And they would say, "They must not be good."
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah. And if we didn't raise a price, we wouldn't have enough money to fund a sales team.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, fair.
Sanjit Biswas:
So those two things were crucial moments for us.
Turner Novak:
It's interesting how you framed one of the reasons that you needed to figure out was that all your friends wouldn't have jobs anymore. That was a big reason.
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, we basically hired a bunch of our friends from grad school, and by the way, I think Meraki... I don't remember the exact numbers anymore, but we probably did roughly $1,000,000 in that first year, that kind of bootstrap-ish year. And then we were more than doubling revenue every year. And I, again, can't remember the exact revenue ramp, but it was clear that there was something here. And so we didn't want to see a die in any way. And then everyone that we were working with, they had convinced everyone around them that they were going to work on this thing with us. So we cared a lot about their livelihoods.
Turner Novak:
And then so it sounds like you did figure out a new customer segment to go after. It was like a company that wanted to offer Wi-Fi, basically. Instead of buying a harder to use Cisco router, yours was just more approachable and was maybe cheaper still?
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah. So it was a little bit cheaper, maybe 20% cheaper. It was way easier to set up. And then the other interesting thing that happened was the iPhone launch in 2007.
Turner Novak:
Oh, so everybody wanted Wi-Fi.
Sanjit Biswas:
So everyone was bringing their own device into work. And so now all of a sudden the customers are like, "I need to offer guest Wi-Fi. I need you to be secure. And I'm not getting any headcount like Cisco certified, whatever headcount to set this up. So I need something that's going to just work." And so, again, right place, the right time. But it was technology that we'd been working on for a very long time up to that point.
Turner Novak:
And you added other products too?
Sanjit Biswas:
Mm-hmm.
Turner Novak:
And what did you add? Because I'm not familiar with... What did you add and how did you decide where to go?
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah. So with Meraki, what we started with was Wi-Fi, right? And that really took off for us in terms of folks wanting that ease of use and that ease of management. Those same customers started saying, "It would be great if I could see this for the wired side of my network. This is all wireless. I have a lot of stuff connected to my Ethernet, and I'm pretty sure I've got some bandwidth hogs, and I got some security issues and things like that."
The second product line we introduced was basically a router. It would sit at the top of the network and you could see all the traffic, same technology stack that was running on the Wi-Fi, but for Ethernet. And then those same customers started asking us, I remember one of our salespeople deemed it like a power strip for the network, which is basically an ethernet switch, so many different ethernet ports. These are the building blocks of every campus network. So at that point, we had that full stack, and that was hugely differentiated because at the time it was like you'd buy Wi-Fi from one technology company and you buy switches from another, or even if they were all Cisco, they actually ran different software, so you'd have to configure them separately.
Turner Novak:
Because Cisco at that point, had started acquiring some companies and it was sort of different pieces all stitched together kind of?
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, that's right. So Cisco had started out in routing and switching, and so that was their existing product line. It was called Cisco Catalyst. And then they acquired a company called Aironet, and then another company called Airspace. Those are their Wi-Fi products. Totally different code bases, totally different types of hardware, so you had to get certified for them separately.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. And speaking of Cisco, they ended up acquiring you.
Sanjit Biswas:
They did.
Turner Novak:
What's the story there?
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, they bought Meraki in 2012. We were about six years old as a company. And like I said, the revenue had been doubling. Even through the financial crisis and stuff, we found a way to keep the growth rate up there. So they made an offer on the company. We were probably... I can't remember exactly, I think we were doing... We were on track to do about $100,000,000, a kind of run rate in terms of bookings. And-
Turner Novak:
I think you were getting ready to IPO.
Sanjit Biswas:
We were getting ready to IPO, exactly. So we just hired a CFO who had been a public company CFO. We were reading S1s, we were kind of starting the whole drafting process, and at that point Cisco basically showed up and said, "Look, we've been competing in the market. We hear great things about your product. We also know that you're planning to go public. So this is the last point in time where we can make an offer before it gets really complicated." Public to public offers are a bit more complex. And it was funny because when they approached us, when we'd kind of just said, "No, we're not interested." And so they really had to make a blind offer on the company.
Turner Novak:
What do you mean, blind offer?
Sanjit Biswas:
Blind offer, meaning we didn't share all of our financials with them or any of that kind of stuff. They had to get our attention, in other words. And what basically happened was we had raised a series D round of financing sometime that summer, I believe. And Cisco's initial offer was well over two x that, and that was within six months kind of thing. This is back when valuations were different than where they are now.
Turner Novak:
One times revenue or 10 times EBITDA or whatever.
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, and I think back then five x multiple was considered really good.
Turner Novak:
This is five x revenue?
Sanjit Biswas:
Five x revenue. And so these guys basically got our attention and it was very clear that they were serious about. So I think that was really the crux of it was they came up with a really generous offer. They gave us credit for years of growth, way higher than the valuation we've got in the public market at the time. And they offered to do the deal in such a way that we would maintain our independence from a product perspective. So you could now do the thought experiment of, what if you could take the Meraki product and put the Cisco logo on it? Would it sell faster? And that was very interesting to us from an impact perspective, like, "Wow, that would be really cool." Because they had this massive brand, massive sales channel, and so on.
Turner Novak:
So is that what happened? You basically just give it to their sales team and their sales team just juiced everything because they just have so many-
Sanjit Biswas:
That was the theory. It wasn't quite that simple because that sales team was actually selling a competing product, which, if you remember, the Aironet and Aerospace products. They were talking about, those are the Cisco legacy products that had been selling quite well. They were selling billions of dollars of them. So the concept was you put the Meraki logo, or sorry, the Cisco logo on the Meraki product and sells through the channel. The reality was, we actually had to do our own selling still, and we had our own sales team who basically would help make those deals happen. And over time what happened is it became clear to the Cisco team that, "Hey, this is actually a great product." But it wasn't just given to us mainly because they had something to sell already. Does that make sense?
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Would you have structured it or done anything different? Because it sounds like it probably would've been helpful if that didn't happen. Or would you change anything if you could go back or suggest differently to someone?
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, I don't know how you would structure it differently because they already had a product that did a lot of the same things. It was way more complex in terms of setup and things like that. So that positioning, I think it was just, it had to happen in terms of that work. What did work well is we maintained our own office up here in San Francisco. Cisco was in San Jose, that's where the headquarters was. They had offices everywhere, but development was really happening down there. So the separation helped us maintain the product quality and the feature set and the innovation velocity. And then over the next, call it two years, we went from 100 or 200,000,000 to 500,000,000 and more. At some point, it got everyone's attention inside the company that, "Hey, this is a solid product." And now I think there's billions of dollars of Meraki product being sold.
Turner Novak:
How does it make you feel?
Sanjit Biswas:
Pretty good.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, it's fun. It's actually really fun for me now to visit customers, and I have a habit of looking at the ceiling and seeing what access point they're on.
Turner Novak:
See what they have.
Sanjit Biswas:
But it's fun. I get a coffee at Starbucks and you see the Meraki product up there, and even my kid's school has it, and it's just fun to see how far it's spread.
Turner Novak:
What have been the biggest differences between Meraki and Samsara? Maybe things that you've learned or things you approach differently?
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, there's a lot. The first is really at Meraki, we knew that technology inside and out. We were almost our own customer because we came from the world of IT, and we came really from networking. With Samsara, we were outsiders for operations, never worked in a warehouse or driven a commercial truck or something like that. So in some ways that was really good because had we gone back into IT, I think we would've been tempted to pursue ideas we'd already had and we might've been overconfident. Whereas with Samsara, we were just really earnest in our interest in learning. We just wanted to see how this whole thing worked. So the learning or takeaway from Meraki was the customer feedback loops. We did a lot of that stuff back there, but we were able to do it a lot more in our heads because our intuition was so tuned to what the buyer might want, whereas with Samsara, we had to adapt it. So while there was a learning there around feedback loops, the adaptation I think was unique to Samsara.
Turner Novak:
Did you do anything different on the team side? It sounds like you actually hired a lot of the same people.
Sanjit Biswas:
We did, yeah. We liked working with them, so it was a really good fit. And I'm trying to remember the exact timeline, but basically when we left Cisco, we actually didn't have plans to start another company. And so it was kind of going back to square one of, "Okay, well, this is like a project. Let's see where it goes."
Turner Novak:
What were you planning on doing? Did you have a plan?
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, I would say John and I had slightly different plans, but they're kind of related. I had this silly idea that I was going to go back and finish the graduate degree.
Turner Novak:
Oh, nice. Okay. So you still got... Your right of that window.
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, I still had the window open. We wrote a paper based on some of the Meraki work as academic research paper, and it was funny, because we wrote it towards the later time that we were at Cisco. We submitted it for Academic Research Conference, and then we kind of forgot about it because it takes six months to find out if it got in or not. And that cycle reminded us of how long the feedback loops are for research versus practical industry startup.
Turner Novak:
Okay. Is that why you decided to just start another company? Because it's like, this is way more fun?
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, I think we want it to be useful. We had a lot of energy. John and I were both still in our early 30s. There was still a lot that we wanted to build and do, and the question was, "Well, how do you go and have an impact? How can you be useful to the world?"
I had thought, "Okay, maybe academic research would be the way to do it." That maybe wasn't it. I think John is way smarter than me. He's like, "That's not going to work." He was playing video games during that time while he waited for me to come to my senses, and then we got back into building together and tinkering.
And we didn't want to jumpstart and force our way into another company because we know how much of a commitment it is and how much effort's required, so I'm really glad we had that gap there. And in that time we got curious about operations. We had that experience being on site, but I started reading a lot of books about the electrical grid and the infrastructure of the planet and how all these companies worked. And I think that process is what led us very naturally back to solving some really important problems.
Turner Novak:
What's interesting about the electrical grid right now? What do you remember about those times or what are you still thinking about?
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, again, this is like 10 years ago, renewables had not yet taken off. And I love curves and trend lines and stuff, so I remember plotting cost per watt and-
Turner Novak:
And it's come down pretty significantly since the last 10 years.
Sanjit Biswas:
Oh, yeah, absolutely. So cost per watt was still in... It was like four or $5 and it was coming down to $1, and it was like how low could this go, kind of thing. So that was really interesting.
And then how would it interconnect back into the grid? Would the grid be able to handle the peaks and valleys of photovoltaic? So that stuff was interesting.
And then you realize, "Why is the electrical grid so old?" It's like, well, it's hard to maintain, it's hard to build, all that kind of stuff. So those threads were the kinds of things we started pulling on.
I was also really curious about what drives emissions. So I was looking at, I think it was eia.gov is the Department of Energy had pie charts of where emissions come from, and there's basically residential, which is like a third, there's industrial power generation and stuff like that, and then there are these commercial use cases of which vehicles were a big chunk, turns out.
So stuff like that was what we were doing research on, not research, reading about or curious about. And now when you think about, it makes sense how we found our way into what we do now at Samsara.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. And then starting the company, so I know you're really passionate about small teams, probably got to reset. "We're not no longer at a big corporation. We're starting a company again." Why are you so passionate about small teams?
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, I think a lot of it is about creativity and innovation. It's really hard when you have a big organization, you have to convince hundreds of people of something. There are a couple of things that happen. One is you have to communicate to hundreds of people, which means you're going around meeting with tons of people. It's very easy for people to say, "That's not going to work," or whatever. And at some point that gets in your head and it kind of becomes, "What's the safest, lowest common denominator idea to pursue?"
Turner Novak:
That's bad if you want to take risks and try new things.
Sanjit Biswas:
That's bad if you want to go try new things. And so if you think about innovation, sometimes it's about having an idea that other people aren't pursuing. And so with Samsara, for example, we knew a lot of people working on consumer at the time. This is like the age of Instagram and apps and-
Turner Novak:
VR probably was a thing.
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, exactly. Oculus was happening. So we knew a lot of people working on cool stuff in consumer. We knew people who had worked on enterprise technologies because we'd been part of that world. We didn't know anyone working on industrials or operations, and that was really appealing to us because it meant that there was a problem space that was uncharted, but it was actually really hard to convince people to work on it.
Turner Novak:
Because it just wasn't a sexy-
Sanjit Biswas:
It wasn't cool, yeah.
Turner Novak:
So how did you convince people?
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, we kind of didn't. We just built. And then people were like, "What are you guys building and why?" And so in that sense, we didn't need to recruit a massive team. We just needed a couple of folks that were really excited about it. And some of the people who are here with us at Samsara, Kieran, Ben, others, they love building together. They thought this is a really interesting problem area, and they were up for another journey like this. So I think basically the small team was important because we could move really fast, but it was also more happenstance of, "Well, I don't think we knew 500 people that wanted to work on this at that time."
Turner Novak:
Yeah, that's fair. How do you keep a small team as you scale up? I mean, you're a public company now. I don't know what the current employee count is, but I'm assuming it's slightly challenging to keep things small. How do you do that?
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, I don't think the idea is to keep things small forever either because we're able to impact a lot more scale through more customers, bigger customers, more products and so on. I think the key is to maintain a lot of the same concepts that you have around feedback loops and iterating and moving quickly, which do tend to work well in smaller teams. So we have basically smaller product teams that will then compound and then work together across the infrastructure that we built. And that's how we try out ideas.
Turner Novak:
So I have one more question. Do you have a favorite founder, CEO, or maybe company or something from history that you maybe learned a lot from or gotten inspiration from?
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, it's such an interesting topic because if you were to look at my bookshelves at home, I literally have shelves and shelves of books about founders because it's some of the most interesting stories. And there's some great podcasts we were talking about earlier where you can hear these stories and the details are often fantastic. And I remember as a kid, at some point, my mom got me... I think a biography of Bill Gates had come out, it's called Hard Drive. This is like 1992. And I still remember, she brought her home from the library and she's like, "You might find this interesting." I just read it cover to cover. And this is like, I was 10 years old and it was a multi hundred-page book. So I read for four or five hours.
Turner Novak:
Oh, just in one sitting.
Sanjit Biswas:
In one sitting.
Turner Novak:
You just one shotted it.
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, basically. And I still do that to this day of when you come across a really good book. And recently, Michael Dell has his book that came out, which is just a fantastic story. It's both current day and how he got started. So these stories are just awesome. And I think for any founder, you really appreciate all the details that they put in there. Bill Gates did an autobiography recently, and so it was actually fun to think back and a lot of these stories stick with you. So I'm reading his autobiography that came out this year and I can remember stuff from 30 years ago. Anyway, hard to pick a single founder. There's so many amazing stories, but love that this information's out there.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Do you have a favorite podcast?
Sanjit Biswas:
Do I have to say The Peel?
Turner Novak:
Well, obviously that's the first, but what about second favorite?
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah. I have to pick right now, I've been listening to a lot of No Priors, this is Elad Gil's podcast. And especially if you're curious about what's going on in AI, he knows so many fantastic people and happens to be a friend of mine. I go on walks with him, but you get a lot of depth from an hour-long podcast.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, there's always really interesting topics, good guests. Listened to a bunch of those ones. Yeah. Well, awesome. This was a lot of fun. Thanks for taking the time.
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Turner Novak:
Cool. Cut it right there. Awesome.
Sanjit Biswas:
Great.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, thanks for doing this.
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, this was fun.
Turner Novak:
Hopefully that was good, yeah.
Sanjit Biswas:
Hopefully there was something in there, yeah.
Turner:
Yeah, we'll get at least a couple usable minutes out of all that.
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