Learnings from Innovating in Underserved Markets with Samsara CPO Kiren Sekar

I'm Chief Product Officer at Samsara. I have run our product organization since founding and actually worked with our co-founders at our previous company called Meraki as well. So our team has been working together building companies for, for over a dozen years now. Excited to share some of the stories and lessons learned along the way. We'll start with a brief company overview for those of you who are less familiar with, uh, Samsara and what we do, and then actually rewind the clock, talk a bit about our previous company Meraki, uh, how our experience growing and building Meraki and then seeing it continue, uh, to, to grow as part of Cisco Systems has influenced how we shape Samsara. Then we'll dive into the Samsara story and share some of the lessons that we've learned growing the business to, to where we are today. A couple of key takeaways that I'm going to touch on throughout the course of the morning. First is how customer feedback loops guided us through unfamiliar markets.

When we open up our eyes and look at opportunities where maybe we aren't the target customer, where it's a use case that we're not familiar with, we open ourselves to some massive, massive opportunities to have a lot of impact and build great businesses. But it really requires an active feedback loop with customers to learn about what we need to build, how we need to sell the product, and how to make it really resonate in the market. And that's something that we've really refined over the years, both at Meraki and Samsara.

Second, how a little bit of hardware can unlock massive software opportunities. We are, you know, first and foremost a software company. That is primarily what we sell. What our users interact with day in and day out. But by integrating hardware with our solution, we make it possible to solve different types of problems than we could with software alone.

Third, how going multi-product early through adjacencies can make a really big impact on the trajectory and, and growth of the business. And then fourth, This is something that I find often is hard to see while you're thick in the middle of execution, but industry transformation really does take time, can take decades. So it's really important to think long-term.

So without further ado, quick Samsara introduction.

Samsara connects the world of physical operations to the cloud.

Samsara takes data from sensors, cameras, devices, that are used in physical operations like logistics, construction, energy, manufacturing, brings that data into our cloud where we can analyze it and then provide applications on top that our customers use to be safer and avoid accidents, to improve their efficiency and to be more sustainable. The company was founded back in, uh, 2015 by Sanjit Biswas and John Bickett, who also founded Meraki. And we took the company public just last December. We just reported our first, uh, first quarter as a public company a couple of weeks ago.

Closed the quarter at a little over $550 million in ARR, which was over 60% growth from a year before. And our revenue comes from 5 key applications on our platform that we're delivering to, uh, over 14,000 customers.

So most of you, I imagine, are not running, uh, logistics operations or construction companies.

So What does it mean? How do customers use our solution?

Let's take a look at a quick example.

Food Express.

Food Express is a food distribution company that supplies ingredients for food production. Food Express uses Samsara to manage their operations from the cloud.

They have our AI dash cameras in their facilities, distribution centers, so they can see what's going on, make sure their workers are safe. They use our solution to track the location of their, their trucks in real time so they can provide ETAs, optimize routes.

They use Samsara to track all of their equipment so they know where their trailers, their assets are.

They know if things are properly refrigerated and cooled and properly stored.

And they use our safety solution to use video in the cab, think connected AI dash cameras, to help coach their drivers, make sure they're safe out on the road, and reward their safest drivers.

And finally, they use our mobile apps to take all of the paper and manual processes that their workers used to do out in the field and move them to digital workflows.

So the end result is that their team is able to have visibility across their operations, From a cloud-based dashboard, they're able to find insights that they're able to use to improve their safety, their efficiency, and their sustainability. So how did we arrive at this solution that we're offering today?

Before we answer that question, I actually want to rewind the clock to before Samsara was founded into Meraki, our previous company, and some of the learnings from building Meraki that have influenced what we're doing here at Semstar.

Now, I'm actually gonna rewind the clock way, way back to the beginning of the days of Wi-Fi. Meraki started off as a Wi-Fi company where we build wireless networking systems for businesses, schools, retail stores, what have you.

And what was really kind of novel about the system was that all of the network was connected to the cloud. So an IT department could manage all of their entire network, all of their sites over the web.

And as Wi-Fi was really becoming mainstream, this really helped customers adopt the technology.

It helped Meraki grow as a company. But the history actually starts about 30 years before today, about 15 years before Meraki was started, when wireless technology, Wi-Fi technology, first emerged.

It was actually not called Wi-Fi back then. It was called Waveland. And in a bit of a history lesson, it was created by a company called NCR.

NCR stands for National Cash Register. This is a company that was founded back in the, in the mid to late 1800s.

They built, as the name implies, cash registers. And in the '90s and late '80s, they were starting to put more and more cash registers that were connected into PCs, connected into networks.

And they found that getting these cash registers cash registers at checkout counters or across department stores and actually running the Ethernet cables to connect them to the network was expensive and it was slowing deployment.

So they started building early implementations of Wi-Fi technology into their cash registers.

This was a way to connect them to the local network.

They were deployed at order of magnitude 10,000 units.

So 0.01 million devices back in the early '90s.

Now, fast forward 10 years, and the internet had emerged and was becoming mainstream, and laptops were becoming common, and people realized they could use Wi-Fi as a way to surf the web when you were away from your desk.

And we can see that in the, the 10 years that passed since these connected cash registers, the number of Wi-Fi devices actually grew by 100x, from 0.01 million devices to about a million devices.

And this was about when I and Meraki's founders were getting into networking. I was just about joining Apple as an engineer on the networking team working on discovery protocols. Sanjit and John were getting started at MIT where they were doing research on wireless routing, wireless routing protocols, building the foundation for what eventually became Meraki. Now fast forward another 10 years and we see that the number of devices 100x's again. So now we have laptops, we have iPads, we have smartphones, the internet has become mainstream and really the core for how businesses were operating.

And Wi-Fi was starting to become the primary way that many people access the internet. And it was this period that Meraki started going through really high growth as more and more businesses said, hey, we need to make Wi-Fi part of our networks.

Now, we found a screenshot here from a talk we were giving at Meraki back in 2011, so right around this time, and you can see we had 18,000 customer networks deployed on our solution at the time. And I remember being in the thick of it. You know, the company was doing great, we had really high growth, but I was kind of sweating bullets saying, are we going to run out of market? Are we going to run out of leads? I don't know how we're going to get enough leads for the next year. It was really a question of, hey, is this a big enough opportunity? And, you know, for me, one of the takeaways that really helped influence how we thought about Samsara was recognizing that this compound exponential growth is really hard to notice when you're actually in it executing day to day. But when you zoom out, the results are, are just dramatic. So 2011, we're worried about running out of leads, but we keep growing, we keep executing. Now, about 5, 6 years later, this is after we left the company, but it was continuing to operate as part of Cisco Systems. They had actually grown to a million networks, and then in 20 months doubled again to 2 million. And now let's bring us up to today. There are 10 billion Wi-Fi clients out there in the world. There are more Wi-Fi devices than there are people, and everything has Wi-Fi, even garage door openers. And this was something that was very hard for us to appreciate while operating day in, day out, but being able to look in hindsight and see what this type of industry transformation looks like and how technology companies can align with it was really, really powerful.

So transitioning from Meraki to Samsara, Meraki was acquired by Cisco for $1.2 billion in late 2012.

And we spent a few years getting Meraki established within Cisco, continuing to grow, do very well. We transitioned the business to the next generation of leaders and founded Samsara.

And it's actually been really fascinating to watch the experiment play out, see the, the seed that was planted continue to grow, uh, the things that worked well continuing to pay off over the long term as they grew to 2 million active networks. And, uh, over the last couple of years, they've reported that they've crossed over $2 billion in sales.

So really awesome to see the team continuing to execute. Also really cool to see some of the early decisions that we made play out and succeed over the long term, decisions that we were able to then be very deliberate about making when we were building Samsara. And the first is around a culture of customer feedback. You know, this is something that we did, I'd say, intuitively at, at Meraki to figure out what the product needed to do. As we saw it work, we figured out, hey, how do we make it really systematic and a core part of the DNA at Samsara. Second is the importance of company culture. If we think about all the ups and downs and transitions that we had to go through at Meraki, the different products that we had to build, the different phases of scale of the company, the culture was really what allowed the team to be resilient and continue to up their game as they continued to scale. And that importance of culture was really hit home. Third, growth mindset. It's helpful to see, hey, these things actually take multiple decades to, to scale. And the problems that you're solving in one day are entirely different than the problems might be solving months, quarters, years down the road. So instilling growth mindset into the culture, keeping the team resilient and willing to try new things, sometimes fail but constantly be learning is really critical given that the problems that we're solving just continue to evolve and change. So I'm going to get into some specific examples of how these traits really played out at Samsara. Um, but first question, how did we decide to start this business? Well, at Meraki, we had this really awesome experience of working with a wide variety of, of businesses who were looking to deploy networks. We worked with schools and offices and retail environments, but also factories, food and beverage distribution centers, warehouses.

And we found that when we got out of the world of IT and into the world of physical operations, the tools and the ability to use data were really limited.

And many of these businesses, if we think about, you know, construction firms or energy utilities or local government operations, they were kind of doing things largely the same way that they might have been in the '90s. We saw a lot of green screens and older systems. We'd see big paper maps on the wall with Post-its on them and a lot of manual processes, a lot of paper.

Found that they really just didn't have access to the kind of modern data and software that we all take for granted. And in a way, this makes sense, right? Their operations rely on physical assets, uh, things that are out in rugged environments moving around, and the technology simply wasn't available to really capture and act on data from them, you know, even a generation ago.

And You know, being technologists, we were really looking at some of the trends, the things that were becoming possible and emerging, and saw an opportunity to connect the dots here. First, better camera and sensor technology. The cameras and sensors were becoming really inexpensive, really high quality, really low power, so you can start to just put them on everything and get data from the broad swath of operations. Second, it was becoming much more practical to process, store, and aggregate all the data that these sensors can generate in the cloud. Third, you have high-bandwidth cellular networks that are becoming ubiquitous. So pretty much anywhere these operators are, are working, you can take data from these sensors and actually bring them over the internet into the cloud where you can analyze them. Fourth, just seeing more and more assets and devices connect to the internet. When you have this type of trend, it makes the technology more powerful, more affordable, more accessible, and that's something that clearly wasn't going to stop.

We looked at these foundational technologies, so there's an opportunity to really do something different, serve the world of operations.

We knew that the world of operations was really big.

It's over a third of the global GDP.

That's when we decided, to jump in and start some sorrow. We founded the company in 2015. And there were a couple of things that we really had conviction over, and many things we had no idea about, had to figure out from scratch.

So first, we knew that we wanted to build systems that were really easy for customers to use.

We'd seen other companies try to build IoT data systems where You have one company building sensors, another providing connectivity, another providing the infrastructure and storage, and someone else building the applications on top. And then you, you pay an integrator millions of dollars to glue it all together.

And, you know, that might work in a big power plant or very high-end deployment, but it was really out of the reach of mainstream operators that we wanted to serve.

So we said, we need something that works out of the box.

And that led us to integrate hardware and software together.

We found that if we were able to make the data available into the cloud in a really seamless way, it made it so much easier for the customers to deploy a solution and start using it.

We really wanted them to be able to get up and running in an afternoon. And so that meant really building the whole stack. That was on the product side.

On the company side, we were very deliberate about setting the culture from day one around customer feedback, around adopting a growth mindset, and around being long-term oriented. I think these are things that we really kind of did intuitively at Meraki, and we felt our way through it.

Having seen it work once, we knew that these were traits that really could apply to any business, and so we were very deliberate about setting them early on. And I think that really helped with the pace of growth and how quickly we were able to execute. So That's where we knew there was a lot we didn't know and had to figure out, starting with what were the most important customer problems for us to solve for our customers.

You know, we were not industrial operators, we were technologists.

We had to engage with the market to figure out where we can make the biggest impact.

So we started working with some of our friends and family, contacts from Meraki, early customers from different industries, and really had a prototype that we were able to get in in real users' hands in about 100 days. And one of our first ideas was temperature and refrigeration monitoring. We visited some companies, biotech, food and beverage, and saw that, you know, they had paper records to record temperature. You can see here a screenshot of a Windows system that they were using to pull temperature data from their refrigerators. And said, "Hey, we could make something that's modern, that's elegant. We can have wireless temperature sensors that pull their data and you can see it all on a smartphone." And the customers were really gracious with their time. They let us deploy our prototypes in their facilities. We were able to fix a lot of bugs, we were able to make it work reliably. But after a while they said, "Hey guys, you know these refrigerators don't really fail, right?" And we had no idea. It turned out that We weren't really resonating with a problem that, that could drive impact. But this is where the culture of customer feedback really came into play. We engage with a lot of different customers and really just listen, what problems do you have? And one of the first breakthroughs really came from a customer we were testing with called Cowgirl Creamery. Those of you in the West Coast might, might know them. They're a boutique cheese producer in Northern California, and their cheese is actually delicious. It is available in a bunch of stores here in California. It's a small business, a few sites, you know, craft production.

And I think we cold-called into them actually, and they said, oh, this sounds interesting, we'll help you out.

And sure enough, we were putting our temperature sensors in their refrigerators, and they told us You know, where we really have spoilage, we really have issues, it's not in our temperature, in our refrigerators, our facilities, it's in the trucks. It's really easy for a driver to not set the refrigeration unit in the back of the truck properly, or leave a door open on a hot day. And that can cause food to spoil, it can reduce shelf life, it can impact quality.

Can you help with that?

And so that really was what led us to, to trucks and fleets. So we quickly adapted the technology, we made it such that we could monitor the temperature in the back of the truck, but also see the truck's location, right, have a dot in the map, on a map that was real-time, that updated just like you could track, say, a Lyft or an Uber or DoorDash on your phone, and said, let's give, you know, temperature and location visibility into vehicles. And and see how that goes. And that really started to resonate with customers. They started saying, yes, this is valuable, we'll pay for it.

It's, it's incredibly helpful. It's solving a real problem. Oh, and by the way, there are more problems like this that Subsaurus technology could, could help us with.

So that was really the aha moment that started this rapid feedback loop.

Now, we decided early on that we wanted to build products that could apply to broad swaths of the operations economy, not just a single vertical or a single industry.

And so we wanted to make sure we didn't, you know, just focus on food and beverage, just focus on refrigeration. And so we started engaging with all different types of operators. And we quickly learned that they— almost all of them had fleets. And these fleets were everywhere, from logistics companies to energy companies to local governments, utilities, what have you. The world of operations, it turns out, use fleets to move people, to move equipment, and it was a really critical part of how they operated. And we were able to bring our solution to this broad variety of work verticals, run this feedback loop, and use it to really flesh out our initial product and then grow the portfolio.

This really comes down to the customer feedback loop that I think we really established at Meraki and then accelerated here at Sapsara.

Now, listening to customers is something that I think every, every startup does, and most startups do pretty well.

There are a couple of specific techniques that really worked well for us.

First is we actually put a button in every page of our dashboard.

It's called the feedback button.

It's on the bottom left side. And any user of the system can hit that button and give us a suggestion that basically captures the context of what they're doing in the app, as well as their notes.

And it goes to our entire product and engineering team in a Slack channel.

So at any point, you can log into that Slack channel and basically see a firehose of what users are asking for. And sure, sometimes they're talking about a bug or something that doesn't work quite right, but a lot of the times they're asking about the new functionality or even new products that they would find useful on, on the platform. And this really allowed us to get a really fast feedback loop of what to do next and how we could expand into new areas. Second was how we engaged with our sales and marketing teams to really hone this feedback loop and sort the list of things we could do. Our sales and sales engineering teams had mechanisms to very quickly and easily log feature requests in Salesforce, such that, you know, when customers start asking about something, we can really clearly see signal about how broadly it applies.

Is it just a specific customer or a specific vertical, or is it a broad use case?

And by focusing early on on having a very broad top of funnel, and integrating that not only into our sales funnel, but also into our product roadmap, we were able to get really good signal on what we could do next. Third was, you know, simply getting, getting our hands dirty, especially in this business. Couldn't all be done through Slack channels and Salesforce reports. We spent time getting out in the field. I remember one of my first customer visits on a Sunday, I tried playing tennis for the first time in 20 years and, you know, folded my ankle in half. Next Monday, I was on a plane hobbling through a refrigerated warehouse and distribution center that was about, you know, 35 degrees, forklifts zipping around everywhere, wearing a hard hat and steel-toed boots, worried I was going to get run over. Experiences like that were so valuable. They've gotten a lot safer now, but our customers were so generous with their time and our willingness to actually get in the car, get on a plane, engage, and learn about their environments.

Was so, so valuable as we were building products for these environments where we weren't already familiar with the operations.

We did a lot of feedback sessions and customer summits where we bring customers out to our offices. Now we do a lot of them virtually and really just open up the kimono and get their direct feedback on our roadmap.

These types of mechanisms, along with the really large-scale mechanisms like our feedback buttons and Salesforce reporting, really gave us great signal on what to do.

So this really translated into our ability to build multiple products on the platform, uh, in relatively short order. We now have 5 core applications on the product, on the platform today. You know, we started with, as I mentioned, you know, GPS tracking and temperature monitoring, but quickly customers started asking us about safety. They had accidents, they had safety incidents, they wanted to know what happened.

They asked us if if there was a way we could get some, some video or camera data into the system.

So we built a connected dashcam, a video safety product, and quickly the customer started seeing, okay, there's, there's an accident, there's a harsh event, I can see when my driver was not at fault and exonerate them with evidence, or I can see maybe when they were inattentive, how do I coach them?

And they were finding that distraction and smartphones were actually driving big fraction of their safety incidents.

And we realized, hey, AI and machine learning is getting to the point where we can start actually detecting this on the edge automatically using computer vision, and just give the driver a little alert in the cab, help keep them safe, right? So that type of feedback loop really was what led the product proliferation. We went from GPS tracking to video safety, equipment tracking, site visibility, and mobile apps to digitize all the paperwork and workflows that we found. And putting this all together, I think it just created a really awesome impact for customers. Couple examples of Brad Crane, you can see a photo of their operations on the left, these big giant crane and construction activities reduced accidents by 43%.

Unity Fiber Communications Company almost doubled their dispatch productivity. UFP Industries, a transportation logistics and lumber company, they are saving $600,000 a year just by digitizing their paper processes and streamlining their administration.

And something that's near and dear to my heart, Dorn Transfer, a mid-sized logistics company in the Midwest, they are taking 1,400 tons of CO2 out of the air every year and saving $500,000 a year in the process. By optimizing their, their fuel consumption.

So it's been really gratifying to see the customer feedback translate into these types of results for customers.

And we're really excited about what comes next. So through our customer feedback, we've really been able to expand from vehicle fleets and fleet operations into equipment and asset management, into sites.

And each of these areas allows us to continue running these feedback loops, expanding these product portfolios into, into adjacencies.

And we have a lot of new areas that we're excited to get into over, over the next decade.

This world is just, just massive. And there's so many areas where technology is, is still, you know, maybe antiquated or not what we would expect in 2022. And there's opportunity to do a lot more. Second, we're really just starting to tap the surface of what we can do with, with data.

You know, early on, we had to build products that could work really in, you know, units of one. We could deploy one unit to one customer, could it be useful?

Now with some scale, we have this massive amount of data coming into our platform, 4.68 trillion data points that we ingested last year.

85 billion minutes of video footage, running AI on that to detect almost 2.5 billion AI detections. We're processing billions of API calls as customers connect Samsara with other systems.

This is opening up really new doors in terms of what can be done for operations.

You know, some of the early areas that we've seen really great traction, one is helping customers use data to feed it to their insurance companies such that they can get insurance rate reductions with safe operations.

Looking at utilization and helping customers move to predictive maintenance to avoid unplanned downtime, to do benchmarking.

So an operator can say, hey, how do I compare to operators like me? Where am I doing well when it comes to safety or efficiency?

Where can I do better?

And helping them automate their workflow.

Flows. So it's an area where we're just scratching the surface that I think is going to be a big part of the next chapter for our business as well as the operations industry in general.

And, you know, finally, we just see a huge, huge opportunity in physical operations. This is an area that was, was new to us as we were building the company and getting into it.

The deeper we've got, the more and more excited we've got about the opportunity to reduce accidents and even deaths.

right, to improve efficiency, give people back millions of hours a day, and to improve sustainability really on a global scale.

We think about the fraction of fossil fuels and emissions that are consumed and produced through operations. There's so much opportunity to make a dent.

So I want to take plenty of time for questions, but again, to recap some of the main takeaways that that I've had reflecting on, on both Meraki and Samsara.

One is that these customer feedback loops, being very systematic and disciplined about them, can make it possible to execute really quickly in markets that might be unfamiliar, in use cases that are unfamiliar.

Two, we all love software.

Samsara is a software company at heart, but a little bit of hardware can unlock massive opportunities in what can be done with software. 3, going multi-product early through adjacencies pays dividends. We now have 2 products that are over $200 million in ARR each, both growing well.

This was made possible by going multi-product early and being able to run feedback loops across all of our product areas.

And number 4, industry transformation does take decades.

And we didn't appreciate this at Meraki. I think we went into, to samsara eyes wide open that really changing the way that operations works is something that will take multiple decades.

And it's important to move fast, deliver results early, but make sure that we're building for the long term.

So with that, I want to make a shameless plug. If anything we talked about sounds interesting, or you have friends, people you've worked with, you think might be excited about Samsara. We are hiring.

We have, I believe, over 400 open positions today.

The business is growing and we've got a lot to do. So check us out at samsara.com/careers. And with that, let's go ahead and open it to, uh, to Q&A. Um, I see a number of questions in the, in the chat window.

If you can, please go ahead and pop those into the Q&A, we'll be answering out of there, and start going through the, through the list.

All right, great, great question. So Samsara's products are in a fairly mature space overall. What are the initial 10x features that made Samsara accelerate so far ahead? So we would really seek out markets where there was an established industry where we didn't have to convince customers for the, the first time of the value of, of data or software or a particular solution, but then try to find areas where we saw an opportunity to deliver just a 10x better solution. And I think really the first example of that is simply in how we helped customers track their fleets.

You know, first it was in real time, so Customers are used to having a system that maybe updated a dot on the map every 10 minutes.

We said, hey, why should this be any different than, you know, tracking a Lyft or a DoorDash? We should be able to see a dot on the map move in real time.

So that's how we built the system.

And that kind of blew customers' minds, right? And then adding to that the ability to have a temperature sensor that was about the size of a matchbook, it was totally wireless, you could stick it in the back of the truck see temperature, get an alert on your phone if maybe the cargo is about to spoil. Those two things really opened customers' eyes. Now, there were so many features we didn't have in the early days, so many things we didn't do, but that got customers excited to partner with us, to give us feedback and help us develop the solution and round it out.

I'd say that the next big leap came when we added our video safety product, our dashcams. And this is where in customers' minds it became clear that this was not a single product solution, it was actually a multi-product platform.

And as customers were thinking about, hey, how do we get more and more data about our operations into software? They were saying, well, I can't have a different vendor for each area.

I need a solution, I need a system. And seeing that Samsara could solve multiple problems for them at once really solidified that and helped accelerate and differentiate from the competition.

All right. Great question.

Were there also any features that you thought were 10x features that in the end, customers didn't care that much about?

Yes, I can think of several.

I think there were two areas where we made mistakes, honestly, in prioritizing our roadmap. One is when we, we weren't disciplined about making sure we were looking for signal across a broad pipeline. We'd get into deal-chasing mode, build something that we thought was really cool, and actually a customer thought was really cool, but then the broad market didn't find it that useful.

I can think of a customer— a product that we made for local service industries that turned out was really, really niche. And in the end, we said, you know, it's actually better to partner with third-party software companies who specialize in that, integrate the systems rather than do it ourselves.

That's something that we, we built a V1 and made one customer really happy.

2 years later, still only one customer was really happy with that feature.

So we ended up winding it down.

Say the second area was where we weren't working through adjacencies. If we tried to build products or features that were for entirely different customers, as opposed to asking our customers, what more can we do for you?

And then using that to open up the door to new types of, new types of segments and verticals. All right.

So next question. We have an article on SaaS Turf on 5 interesting things other founders could take away from Samsara. The first is that multiple products and applications are key for scaling. Samsara has 2 distinct vehicle IoT apps that each do $200 million in ARR.

So without doubling your product footprint, Samsara would have been less than half the size today. As CPO, how do you decide where to double down in the multiple products? Follow-up, uh, And how do you do then get for multiple customers to expand with?

So, you know, it's a good question. I think, you know, first, each product category or each product that we're in is in a really big market. So it's a bit hard to predict the future of, or predict the alternate reality of what would the revenue scale have been if we had a different set of products or fewer.

But, you know, clearly it's been very helpful for us.

I think, you know, as, as CPO, the thing that I need to be really disciplined about is to work on new products when it feels unnatural or premature.

We started working on our video safety product, which was our, our second product, but actually is now, you know, over $200 million in scale.

We started working on that when our first product was growing incredibly quickly, and there were so many things it didn't do. It was going through hypergrowth. We had bugs, we had feature requests, we were trying to go upmarket into the enterprise and had to build out all the enterprise capabilities.

We were trying to sell it internationally and build new features to make it serve international markets. It would have been really easy to say, we have our hands full and we have plenty of growth ahead of us.

Let's just focus. We took a small team and said, we see an opportunity with video safety. Go work on safety. And that, you think, is organizationally very difficult.

The organization will naturally work on, on the area that is probably going to help more in the short term. But that discipline really, you know, helped us, you know, build new products over time and ultimately be able to reinvest more back into the company because the revenue ended up growing faster. So I think that's the area that requires the most discipline and focus, is when you see the opportunity being willing to carve out capacity to go after it.

All right, so, uh, next question. You mentioned hardware as a key differentiating factor for Samsara's growth.

Um, for our audience members who are considering a hardware component, what do they need to do to make sure they can maintain current software customers and expand into hardware? So You know, for both Meraki and Samsara, these were businesses where the hardware and the software were, you know, very tightly coupled. They were really complementary.

Like at Meraki, we could not have built the management experience for the network that we wanted to if we didn't control the hardware.

At Samsara, we couldn't build the software applications if we couldn't reliably get data into them, which required again, us building some hardware. So it wasn't so much about us expanding into hardware, it was saying, we're trying to solve a problem. It's primarily a software problem, but we need a little bit of hardware in order to be able to solve it.

So that's the way we thought about it.

And in fact, the way we sell our products today, we don't have a separate SKU. There's a question about whether we have a separate sales team for hardware, same sales team.

In fact, it's a single single license subscription.

You buy a license for, say, our telematics product or a safety product, and if you need hardware to get data in the system, we'll provide that hardware along with the subscription. So it's really tightly integrated. That's what's worked for our, for our industry. Obviously, other, other businesses have actually gone from pure software into hardware. See that a lot in big tech and other areas, and probably a bit of a different playbook there.

All right, so I'm gonna get through as many of these as, as I can. Next question is, about half of Samsara sales team, or Samsara's team is in sales.

How do you incorporate feedback from sales into product development?

So we're a direct sales company. Meraki was a channel sales company.

Samsara is a direct sales.

We have inside sales for mid-market, field sales for enterprise.

And so we need sales capacity in order to scale the business.

And about half the company is is in sales and marketing. You know, when the company was very small, it was really, really helpful, you know, to have product management effectively, you know, sitting next to sales and our ADR team, hearing what they're saying on the phone, hearing what questions they're getting asked, just being able to drop in on a call at any moment.

That really rapid organic feedback was, I think, instrumental in the first, first couple of years, but it quickly got to the point where that wouldn't scale.

So we have a couple of different mechanisms.

We talked about, we talked about the way we go direct to the customer through our feedback buttons, through our customer summits.

We also work a lot with our sales team, and the, the sales engineering team actually ends up being a really valuable tool in being able to aggregate the, the feedback from sales, especially around feature or product requests, be able to find the patterns and bring them to our product team. And we found that interaction model scales really, really well.

And then they're able to identify, hey, when do we need to bring the product team into a specific deal to engage with a specific customer or a specific rep? And that's allowed us to, to get signal be able to distill it, and also go core sample and deep dive when we need to.

All right. So great question.

How do you work with or expedite the procurement process for SaaS when selling into industrial or old-school industries? So big difference, I think, between how IT departments bought, which is what we were selling in Meraki, and how operations buy us, which is how we're selling it. At Samsara.

I think first and foremost, operations departments are really busy operating, you know, in IT, a lot of their project work is buying and deploying new technology, whereas in operations, it's, you know, running a warehouse or a factory or a truck yard. And so getting time is, is harder. And we have really focused on having a really strong inbound demand gen motion so that we're able to get in front of customers when when technology and projects are top of mind for them, and really focused on making the sales process really, really efficient for the customer, because they're busy. Now, when it comes to procurement, you know, there has been a bit more education sometimes in how to think about SaaS, how to think about subscription pricing.

It's changing quickly, and especially in our enterprise customers, it's becoming more and more common.

But it's an area where, you know, it's actually been an advantage for us. If we're able to help the customers navigate their own procurement process and be great partners with them and the product works well, they're more likely to want to buy their next product from, from Samsara because we know how to work with them, we know how to work with the team.

So it did require some, some time and investment, but something that certainly paid off.

All right, so next question is, which international markets are you active in to get to $500 million? We operate right in North America and Western Europe. We got our start here in, in the US, expanded into Canada and Mexico, and opened an office in London a couple of years ago and have expanded into Western Europe. We're still early days in international, A lot of our revenue is still coming from the US and North America. We see this as a global problem ultimately, and operations are everywhere and they need the same types of data and technology, but certainly want to make sure that we're not spread too thin.

So we've been phased about our international expansion, but very excited about what we can do overseas long-term as well. All right.

So next question, kind of following up on sales, what were the most effective sales techniques in selling it to industry?

Industrial clients?

What was the average sales cycle? Where did you find to be the typical roadblocks?

So I talked about some of the areas around, around procurement, uh, just sometimes requiring a bit more time and education when it came to SaaS.

Um, in terms of sales cycle, interestingly enough, it ends up looking very similar to many other SaaS products where, uh, a mid-market inside sales deal might be a 90-day sales cycle.

Small business might be a few weeks, and then an enterprise sale might be, you know, 9, 12 months.

So ends up looking like a lot of other, a lot of other, you know, businesses. The actual tactics of, you know, how we're doing demos, how we're running trials, how we're handling leads, some of those can be a little bit different just based on, you know, the fact that, you know, customers are not at their desk a lot of the day. You have to rely a lot more on texting and cell phones, you know, being able to do trials where you can give them a product, they can do an eval without having to get on the phone with you to have another coordination point. And some of those types of tactics were different, but I'd say the sales cycle was relatively similar to a lot of other businesses.

All right, great.

Next question, great question about multi-product. How do you remain focused on the previous product while developing a new one? Did funding help you scale resources so small teams could remain focused?

What about sales and marketing?

Yeah, so great, great questions there.

I think we really focused on making sure that teams were single-threaded. So if you were working on one product, you could be laser-focused on, on it. And then, you know, we were able to staff teams based on kind of on their needs.

We always want more capacity, you can always do more everywhere.

But, you know, this idea of splitting teams when you see something working and having small teams that were focused, it's been really, really effective.

On the sales and marketing side, you know, certainly, you know, going from product 3 to product 4, for example, is naturally harder, right?

Sales teams will want to sell the thing that is easy, that is easy for them, that is familiar, that's proven. And, you know, especially early on, it's harder to get sales mindshare in a brand new product where maybe the revenue impact or the ease of sale hasn't been fleshed out.

So, you know, a couple of things that have really helped there, you know, one is our goal is always for all of our sellers to be able to sell as many different products as possible.

But sometimes we want to start with a small focus team, even if it's a small ADR team, generate leads that are really laser-focused on a product to get the, get the physics of the new product down, to iron out the kinks, to build the playbooks, then to build champions, right?

Find the people in the sales team who are the President's Club winners, who are the most aggressive, who are most confident, who other sales team members will look up to. Get them excited, get them winning, and then it snowballs from there. Now we're a couple of minutes over time.

I'm going to stay on for just a few more minutes and answer a handful of more questions. I'll try to get through as many as we can here.

Great question from Vineet about how do you choose and prioritize the customization requests from customers, and when do you say yes or no?

We really try to not do any, any features or customizations that are going to be specific to one organization.

We really try to find the patterns, and when there's something that is one-off, we always say, hey, is there a way that we can build an API endpoint or build some flexibility into the platform that would allow their IT department or an integrator to do that for them. So that's what we try. And, you know, that really helps keep, keep, keep focus.

I think this is something that Salesforce actually did, did well in the kind of early days of SaaS and blazed the trail for that pattern, something that we've tried to emulate. All right.

Okay, so try to maybe take one final question here. All right. So I'll take this one as the last one.

It's a good one to end on. What is your plan with data?

You mentioned it as a big part of the strategy, giving for— going forward. Are you going to give customers a customized data feed or environment where they can analyze and add data from other systems? Awesome question. As I mentioned, I think we're, we're just scratching the surface of what we can do with data. And I think that I'd love to be back in front of you in 5 years and tell you all the ideas that we had that worked, what didn't, but also what new we learned along the way.

I think first and foremost, you know, we now have a scale of data that we can use ML and data science in ways that would have been impossible before to just create a lot of value through features, right? So if we look at Things from, you know, recommendations to training our AI models to have them be more accurate, to being able to find more types of behaviors that might lead to accidents or fuel waste, being able to surface those in the product are going to have a massive, massive impact. And that's something that just would have been unfeasible a couple of years from now.

Looking longer term, we're actually collecting more and more types of data.

And so that's going to allow us to build build products and features for parts of our customers' operations where maybe we're not using data today.

We think about our, our newest product family, our Connected Sites product.

We're getting data not just from, you know, trucks and equipment out in the field, but from facilities. We're going to have a whole new set of things we can do to help with operations as we get more and more data about what happens inside a facility, how the data from sensors, from cameras, being able to analyze and find insights. I think a third area that I'm really excited about is being able to compare data across customers. So we anonymize all the data that we can aggregate it, slice it and dice it, and actually give customers tools to say, you know, how are their operations stacking up against operators like them. And if we project out a handful of years, we should be able to do things like understand, hey, what equipment is potentially likely to fail? You know, what are the opportunities for reducing your carbon footprint, etc., you know, based on getting data and analyzing it across tens of thousands of customers?

So a lot, a lot more to come there, and looking forward to checking back with you in a few years and giving you an update.