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Sanjit Biswas

lines on the record: 62
first: 2023-12-08
most recent: 2023-12-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So, I think we've got a lot of runway with Semsar because the world of physical operations that we serve is so broadened based. We're talking about 40% of world's GDP. So there are a lot more problems for us to work on and solve. And what we're doing is kind of building up a platform, like a system of record where all this data is in there and we can solve even more problems with it. So 10 years from now, I would love for us to have a dozen or dozens of applications on the platform. I think the world's going to be very different. I think there will be autonomous vehicles. There may be delivery drones. There probably be some robots. There will be a lot of AI. And I think that's going to be a really interesting space to be working in, which is like physical operation is going to be with us forever, right? It's the infrastructure, the planet. How will that transform as we kind of go through this digital journey?”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, it's actually just from a priorities perspective, when you're on the other side of kids, you just realize, hey, these are people that I'm going to be with for decades and decades and decades. And I really want to see how it turns out. So you are, you know, if you think about startups and building for the long term, your kids are like the ultimate startups. And it's really what you put into it and the relationship you build and that sort of thing. So I don't think I understood how special that is and how it's actually different. I have three kids. So each kid is different in their own way and they're young. And you can already see divergence in their personalities and their interests. So anyway, I think it's such a special thing. I don't know that I would have been able to explain it to myself.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot that people tell you about how your time allocation changes because every 90 days you're doing earnings and you're out as a public company reporting. What I didn't appreciate is that's maybe 5, 10% of my time allocation. But as a CEO, you're already quite busy, right? Your schedule's packed. So finding an extra 10%, you have to pull back on something else or carve out time. So it actually forced me to go find another 5, 10% of efficiency in my own calendar. No one told me that I would need to do that, but I found it somewhere.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So fastest adoption of EVs would probably be China. Norway is maybe technically the fastest. I think 80 something percent of all new vehicles sold there are EV, which is remarkable given the weather. There have been a lot of government subsidies, lots of initiatives there. China is pretty far along. I think that's also maybe driven by the government. Again, air quality is a significant issue for them. So EV and the energy transition there. And then slowest has been really in the US. And it actually varies by regions of the US. Some of that is because our geography is so broad, right? Like we've got a lot longer distances here to cover. And the very slowest has actually been heavy vehicles, what are called class eight. So these are the big semi-trucks that you see, or HGVs that you see in Europe. Those are the hardest to transition and they're starting to happen now because the technology hasn't quite been ready.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mark is a very different personality, as I think many people know. What I learned from Mark has been his information diet. So he's talked about this a little bit, but I think Mark spends time on X or Twitter, gets a lot of what's going on in the moment. And then he reads some really old, old books, right? Like stuff that's maybe out of print and hard to find, sort of the timeless sort of thought classics. That barbell of information is really fascinating because we all have a limited amount of bandwidth to take in. And so being able to kind of do the timeless stuff and then what's current is really interesting.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, with Doug, I would say it was really about being direct. Doug is a very clear communicator, it's very straightforward, and actually he's just a great guy. Like he looks very just straight with you. So I would say that's my biggest takeaway from Doug is just tell people what you're thinking, what you're feeling, and just be straightforward with them.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An interesting one. I would love to live in the shoes of Jensen from Nvidia just for a day because I think the work they're doing is so incredible. He's been at it for 30 years. So just understanding how he's laddered his time and his investments, if I could do a day with him, that would be incredible.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say looking pretty big. So I've lived now through the internet wave, which we talked about earlier, the mobile phone kind of disruption and wireless technology, and now AI. So I feel really fortunate. In my early 40s, so this is still kind of mid-career for me, but this one feels huge.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we're going to have frontline workers for a very long time because some of these jobs are difficult to automate. If you think about what's going on with AI, a lot of the sort of disruptive impact might be in the back office or the sort of white collar jobs. Frontline work transformed 150 years ago when agriculture got the combine harvester and diesel engines started showing up everywhere. What happened is a bunch of jobs transitioned, right? A bunch of jobs that weren't so fulfilling were hard work were actually quite dangerous kind of went.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I've been thinking about this one quite a bit. So I think on the large scale infrastructure side, if you look at who's won the hyperscaler wars, right? Like who runs the biggest clouds, it was actually some of the best capitalized companies, right? You've got Amazon and Microsoft and Google and now Oracle. So in that sense, AI infrastructure may be well suited for companies that can invest billions of dollars ahead of time in building big data centers. The applications, on the other hand, I think that sort of rapid feedback loop and kind of creativity is really well suited to startups. So again, I think AI is going to be transformative in many ways. And so it maybe isn't an either or. It's where do people play in the stack?”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe not most first time through startups. Eventually, they figured out. Like, I would say Facebook is the prime example of it's a first-time founder who's done phenomenally well. Now they're absolutely building for the long term. But I think everyone goes through this period of you're trying to stay alive and kind of put one foot in front of the other.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me kind of go back to the idea of long term building. I have seen this now through with two startups. If you can build for the long term, you're so much better off than you are building kind of a year at a time.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, my kids are young. They're all under 10 at this point. So, first, we spend time. Like when I'm in town, I try to be home by dinner and bedtime and all that kind of stuff. I think that interaction is really important. So it's not an intellectual or academic exercise. It's actually just like hard time face to face with the kids. And we try to emphasize things like building, things that you actually can't bias with money. Even if it's like building a Lego construction, it's something that just takes a little bit of trial and error and effort. So it's not like you can just maybe you could find someone to build a Lego for you, but that's really silly. Kids love things like that, right? It's things like writing stories and being inquisitive and that sort of stuff. Money doesn't pave the way there. So we try to find those kinds of timeless things. Money makes a lot of things easier, right? Like my kids, you know, we have a nanny at home. So they actually have a lot of FaceTime with people. They're not watching the TV, et cetera. But the stuff that's truly, I think, enduring, the problem solving ability, creative function, being able to sit.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, how much time do we have? We're entering the next phase of growth for Semsara, which is really scale growth, right? And the way that you continue to cheap scale, you mentioned you've interviewed people like Mark Bennyoff and others. They've seen tremendous scale. The CEO, they are today, the way they operate, it's very different than early stage startup CEO. You're getting a lot more leverage. You're thinking a lot more strategically. You're thinking like three, five, seven years out. So for me, that's where I'm constantly pushing myself of, hey, as much as I love being involved in the details, am I spending enough time on the long term? And that's a question of time allocation, which is you really have to carve it out.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would say it's probably a few years into Maraki. There was a moment where I realized that my salary was allocated under GNA, not R&D. So it's a very in the weeds sort of view. I was like, wow, I guess I'm overhead. But for me, that was actually an important milestone, which is like, this is an important job, right? The leader of the company. We talked about capital allocation as a founder, CEO, you're the soul of the company as well. So I think those kinds of things make it feel natural over time, which is, hey, this is the job, right? It's not being an engineer. It's not being the chief salesperson. It's actually being the leader of the whole business. And so that probably for me happened maybe as Meraki became 100 people or something like that.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, driven off of the business that you're building, it's not an end to itself, it's actually a side effect. Does that make sense?”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me actually talk about in the company sense first because we were talking about capital allocation and something that's really interesting that people sometimes lose sight of is companies reinvest their sales, right? It makes intuitive sense. Like you get revenue, it has a gross margin. You can reinvest that back in the company. I don't know the numbers exactly for Samsar, but it's in the billions in terms of what we've reinvested in the business so far. That is mind-blowing in terms of our ability to build, right? And you see this with some of the biggest best companies that are out there, whether it's Amazon or Microsoft. You look at them over long periods of time. Think about how much capital has been reinvested into an Apple or an Amazon or any of these huge companies. It's absolutely mind-blowing. So money is important for that reason, which is it makes it a sustainable model. And then you can do more. You can make more bets. You can build more products, that sort of thing. That's the core of why I think money is important. The side effects of that, if you're an equity owner in the company, you share in that upside.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're right. Your financial profile absolutely changes. As you get to the point where you have a family and you're trying to think about a house and all that kind of stuff, it helps.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On people, that's way more challenging because you have to really be honest with yourself. You know, the keeper test essentially, which is if someone was leaving, would you try to find a way to convince them to stay or would you sort of be like, I'm kind of glad that they're moving on? I've applied that test. I've seen that elsewhere in the organization where someone's really not a fit. And it doesn't mean they're bad at their job or they're worthless or something. It's just not a fit for the orc. You have to call it. And sometimes the person is with you or they're already there. They're feeling it that this wasn't a fit and they're looking for a way out. So it's again a very practical reality when you have thousands of people that's going to happen.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mentioned some of these products that we've tried out. Sometimes you again become really deeply enamored with the product or the technology. You really want it to work. You really want to believe in it. Machine vision, which was that product line I mentioned earlier, there were signs probably a quarter to it that it wasn't going to be scalable because of the manual installation required for it. I think we were like, okay, let's see if we can just like power past those, right? At some point, you need to call it and reallocate. We should have made that call a little bit earlier, but it was single digit millions. It's not like a huge downside.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think you actually get an interesting selection bias of people who opt into it again. So, you know, I think there are many founders who will say having been through it once, I probably wouldn't get back on the roller coaster. Like one ride was enough. For us, we literally opted into it a second time as we began Simsara. And that's what the name Samsar means. It's the cycle of reincarnation and rebirth. So we very much said, okay, we're going to do this. So there probably are a bunch of second-time founders who are maybe reluctant or unsure or want to do it in a sort of lighthearted way. We were fully committed to this business. So if you can find founders like that, I think it's really powerful. That being said, there are a lot of first-time founders who are phenomenal. Jensen from NVIDIA, I think that's his first startup. That's the sort of thing where you'd also don't want to sort of filter out first-timers because some first timers just go and go and go. Toby, you mentioned, there's a long, long list, right? So you wouldn't want to miss a Mark Zuckerberg or a Toby or a Jensen.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I absolutely think so because for us it was a pattern matching sort of thing of like, I mentioned product market fit. We weren't questioning it. We just knew what it felt like. And then when it came time to build a sales team, to start scaling up, we had people that we'd also worked with that we enjoyed working with that came and joined us again. And that enabled us to move so, so fast. So I think the pattern matching, but also the people matching where we had kind of role fits for them.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We took a lot of risks. So I wouldn't say there's this list of things that I wish we tried, and this company grew very, very fast. So Samsara is about an eight year old business. You can see the numbers were public. So it's grown very fast. So we took quite a lot of risk and it paid off well. I would say the intensity was something that we only were able to pull off because it was a second time through company. Because I think the ship would have blown apart had our team not been through it before.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because if you build for the long term, you're going to be glad you did them three years out. So products two and three, I'm super glad we have them now. Like product two for us, safety is now our number one revenue product. Very glad we did that. And along the way, we tried a couple of other products, products three, four, five, that maybe won't have the same trajectory, but you won't know until you try.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll answer the question in a little bit of a meta way, which is I'm glad we took risk period, right? So we were talking about multiple products earlier and how we went from GPS tracking to safety cameras. That was, again, early in the company's trajectory. We were doing 10 or maybe 15 million in ARR. A lot of people might have said, just stay focused. You know, there's still bugs in the product or still new feature asks like just allocate all the capital there. We said, hey, we're going to fix those and we're going to invest, but we're also going to try this new thing. It didn't cost us a tremendous amount of money to build that first prototype of the product and then V1 and V2, but it took time and you needed to plant those seeds so you could harvest them years out. So I'm glad we did that. It's really important to again have a sort of ladder of risk where you're saying, hey, this is low risk, but we're going to try a couple of high-risk, high reward things as well.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were talking earlier about what are some of the differences between Meraki and Samsara. With Meraki, we were kind of glad to see another year. This was a company that survived the global financial crisis. Like we didn't raise a lot of venture capital because the markets got tight and so on. In some ways, we didn't build for the long term because we were just, again, trying to get to the next revenue milestone. Like, how do we double? How do we double again kind of thing? With Samsara, we said, if we do this right, we will scale 10x and then 10x again and 10x after that. So we need to be building for the long term, which means you're allocating capital for the long term. That means allocating engineering budget, for example, to scale the products that are already in the market, but also planting seeds for stuff you're going to ship one to three years and then three plus years out. So we have a kind of 70, 20, 10 capital allocation strategy when it comes to R&D. That's worked really well for us. We basically built our products organically by having money set aside to invest in teams to go build those next products and try things.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The CEO is the chief capital allocator of the company, and that's essentially where the company is spending its time. It's where the people time is going and you're paying their salaries. So that tends to be for a software company where most of the money is spent. We have always kind of had a capital allocation strategy and happy to talk more about it. But I think somebody has to make that call and be the editor-in-chief.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's also about talent fit, right? Now, I will say we have some people who are extraordinary technical architects, and they would say, I'm not a people manager, I'm not a big people person, I don't like big meetings. And that's totally fine. We don't want a lot of big meetings anyway. So there, what we say is, hey, you help build the next product, right? And then we will bring in product managers and we'll have engineering managers and so on that will help get the thing made, but we need someone to architect it. There are some personality types and some roles where it is a little bit more of kind of individual brilliance, but you want those people to have the ability to work with the other people in the company, right? Otherwise, it really isn't going to be productive.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You want hardworking people that work well in a team. So those two, maybe number two and number three, I rank very highly. And then smarts, I think, again, it's not about book smarts or IQ test or something like that. It's a little bit more street smarts, right? If you're in front of a customer, are you listening to them? Are you solving their problem?”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The ones that come to mind, or when it wasn't a stage fit. For example, there may be someone who's been very successful at a bigger company. Maybe they grew a business from X hundred millions to Y billions, right? If you're an early stage startup, it doesn't make sense to bring that person in quite yet, or you could, but you're taking real risk, right? Because that person is not going to have all the infrastructure they're used to. They're not going to have the brand behind them. They won't have a huge number of reference customers. Those sorts of things happen over time because you get, wow, you're like, oh my gosh, this person is so amazing on paper, but are they appropriate for this stage? So that's one. And then two is sometimes I would say when we move really fast on a higher and not done the references, it can backfire on you because someone, again, may look great on paper and then you realize, wow, they're really a terror to work with behind the scenes. Like they're not cooperative. You want people that work well in a team. And that's something you find out via references because the individuals achieve.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who are spread all over, and not just in the US, but Mexico, Canada, et cetera. So we were able to get closer to the customer. We were able to increase our talent TAM, like so access to many, many more pools of talent. And I'm talking about 10, 20, 30x increase, not like a 20%, but like a 10x kind of thing. You don't want to be talent TAM lim limited. We're a couple of thousand people now. We'd probably start lowering our talent bar if you're trying to hire such a big direct sales force in one location.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, I think it's hard to find a one size fits all policy. As a small startup, we benefited tremendously from being literally in the same room together because you just overhear conversation. So the cycle time is super fast. The difference that we saw when we went to FlexWork in the pandemic was access to talent. So we were about 1,000-ish employees, maybe a little bit more. And we're in the Bay Area. That's where our headquarters is. And so there's quite a lot of tech talent and sales talent out here. But what was interesting is a lot of our salespeople were moving. They're moving to San Diego or Austin, Texas. Then we said, well, if we've got teams out there, we didn't know how long this remote work thing was going to last. We said, let's do an experiment and hire people from this kind of broader talent tom. And what was fascinating is I would say our talent quality went up, right? Because now we were able to find that fantastic salesperson who wanted to live in Austin, right? Who didn't want to live in San Francisco for a variety of reasons? They also happen to be time zone aligned with our customers.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As I mentioned earlier, we're a direct sales company primarily. So for us to be in front of more customers, we need more people on the sales team. And the rest is working. So we're continuously adding capacity. I wouldn't say it was a moment in time where we said like, let's press the button and hire a bunch of salespeople. It's been a continuous build for us and it will continue to be.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question. I would say the deal size tends to be where we focus a little bit more. Are you used to transactional selling of a few KACB and just really moved through things really, really fast? Or are you a consultative seller where you sit down with the customer? Maybe you go visit them, figure out the kind of business value proposition, and come back to them with that. That takes longer. You could have been selling HR software or CRM. You know, these are all kind of similar conversations because it's business value. But that's a different way of selling than just picking up the phone and closing deals really fast.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It varies. So, part of it is getting a few of those sales cycles under your belt. So we can ramp within a few quarters, right? And it varies by, it's not that we hire people that have sold this kind of product before. So typically speaking, people have to understand the industries, the vocabulary, the jargon, that sort of thing. So there's like a bit of just a initial period. And then you just have to get in there and try it. I think we can make enablement even better. But to answer your question, it's a couple of quarters.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'd say two things. One is we have a direct sales force, so they become more productive the longer they're in seat. And we've been growing so much as a business. We're adding capacity on a continuous basis. So you need to give them time to ramp. The sales reps are financially inefficient and you know all of this, right? Like they're still kind of coming up to speed and still learning the product, learning the customer base, building a pipe. Once they have that, the cruising altitude has always been very efficient. And so it's kind of just seeing that through. That's maybe area number one. Area number two is we have developed just a clearer sense of process of what needs to happen next and customers actually want to move quickly because they don't want to spend time in a sales process. They want to kind of get the product and get going. So we found that aligning more closely with how the customer likes to buy has really unlocked a tailwind of growth.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say it's pretty typical enterprise sales cycle. So we have a few different teams in the company. Our mid-market teams will close deals within a quarter, and that sales cycle is inside of 90 days, our field or your major account teams might take six months to a full year to close a deal. But that's pretty similar to other kinds of enterprise software. And you think about quotas and cycles and things like that. And we benchmark pretty well there. So I think that's maybe a misperception. You do have to sell. So we have what's called a C tri-buy motion. So you see the product with the Zoom screen share. You can do a trial. So plug and play and see it in your environment. And at that point, the ROI becomes very clear. And then we work out commercials and negotiate and close. That process is pretty similar to, I think, how a lot of software companies do things.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's sort of like Instagram, right? Like a picture can be really powerful and describe a lot. And our customers are the world behind the curtain, right? They're the infrastructure of the planet. So if you think about, we have customers that are some of the largest chemicals distribution companies in the world or the largest crane rental companies in the world. You don't get to peak.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Getting that FaceTime with the customers so valuable, it's so high bandwidth as travel opened back up, I realized hey, it's worth it to get out on site. And that's when I started actually bringing others with me. So we travel in pairs or sometimes a trio. And that's really fun because I brought our president who runs all of go to market for us. But I also will bring folks like our chief people officer who's like, you know, runs HR. He doesn't typically get out in the field, but he has a lot to sort of see what their customers. And when we talk about talent brand and why people come to Samsara, it's around real world impact. And so he connected immediately. I wish we could do more of it two days a week. That's kind of the maximum time allocation that I can devote to something like that because there is a company to run.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you think that there's something deep about founder led sales? Is you have this amazing advantage of you actually know how the things are built, right? You may not actually be the best or most classically trained salesperson in terms of running a perfect sales process and that kind of thing, but you can be in a meeting and navigate in a very dynamic way, which is, oh, tell me more about that, or is that something that's a big problem or a little problem? Like, it's a very sort of interactive conversation. And I actually think that on the other side of the table, the prospect loves that because here they have someone who can solve their problem, perhaps solve more problems for them, and really wants to partner. That's something that is very rare, that if you're a prospect, you don't get that conversation very often. So I think founder, CEOs especially have an advantage there. When you're speaking to a customer, they know you have the ability to shape the roadmap. It's not going to change what you do next quarter, but it's going to change what happens two to three years from now.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We try to use an 80 20 rule. So if 80% of our customers would benefit from something, we want to bring it onto the platform. Now, there's a bunch of stuff that we get asked for by customers that are exotic or esoteric. So there we partner. But if you hear something like the dash cameras we heard about apps from our customers, we heard about tracking equipment, those kinds of things. You say, oh, I'm hearing this all over the place. And I'm hearing in multiple geographies, multiple market segments. We should build something there. That's kind of what we tend to do.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We think of them as independent products. So we have customers that will transact with either one. They could maybe just buy the safety product or just buy telematics. They do make each other better. There's additional context there. So most of our customers today buy multiple products from us because they're trying to solve a bunch of different problems. But it helps when they fit together. I will say, though, what we learned is concentric circles matter. So if you can be solving a problem for the same customer, it's the same person you're talking to. Maybe they have two problems they need to solve. That's way better from a customer conversation perspective because that single lead that you have can lead to two pretty productive sales conversations.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was maybe 10 million in revenue. So it was really happening very early for us. And so we organically built product line number two because the customers wanted more. And this idea of a platform became very clear that folks wanted to be in one system.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just the Samsara anecdote is fascinating. So, our first product that really kind of got us going was real time GPS tracking. So think about all the work trucks that are out there as part of different fleets, not just in supply chain businesses, but construction, field services, all these different kinds of businesses. What we found, even in 2015, is people didn't have real-time visibility of their operations. So they wanted GPS tracking, they wanted a nice interface, they wanted reporting and alerts and that sort of thing. So that was our first product. What was interesting is that got our foot in the door and we started talking to these operations users. What quickly happened is they loved the GPS tracking product and then they started asking us, hey, is there a dash camera that you all recommend that works well with your system? You hear that five, maybe 10 times and then we said, well, if we built a dash camera, would you use it? And they say, oh, yeah, absolutely. I prefer that the dash camera is in the same system. So that's how we built our second product, which was basically what's now our safety product. Those conversations were happening when product one”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think some of it has to do with the fundraising process, and you see probably a lot more of this as a VC than I do, but it's because people want to go to investors and show I've achieved product market fit. Now, imagine that you didn't have to tell anybody about it. You just had to feel it. Then you maybe would be a little more honest with yourself about like, is this product just getting pulled by the market, right? Like that's what you're looking for. It's almost unmistakable. You'd have to be blind not to see it. I've had customers or beta testers call me the next day after going on site and they'll say, hey, was that thing for sale? Like, can we place an order for that?”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so, and this is something I've learned in the world of B2B, which is companies pay to have their problem solved. And so when we talk about things like revenue and revenue growth, for me, it's actually impact and problem solving growth. That means that we are solving a lot of problems for a lot of customers. And that, I think, is an important connection. It's not just dollars or revenue for revenue's sake. It's actually impact. And that's why people are paying money.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think product market fit is something you don't want to force. And the way that I've always kind of gone about it is just to get out there with customers, with beta testers and listen for the wow, where you're showing them something. What we've done in the past is kind of what we call an allergy test. So we'll bring them a few different ideas that we're playing with. And sometimes they'll kind of nod their head or they'll be very polite and that sort of thing. But then you show them something that's truly useful to them and they will quite literally stop you right there and say like,”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And play. That was not plug and play. So that was a mistake that we made at Meraki as well. We built some exotic networking products that didn't quite get off the ground. And you would have thought we would have learned the lesson. And we kind of did, but you find yourself reverting to those kinds of problems. Even if you're aware that I shouldn't make the same mistake twice, you find yourself doing it because it's a natural tendency that some of us have.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I talked about being market first versus technology first. There have been a couple of times where even in the course of this company, you tend to get really enamored with a cool idea or cool technology. So for us, it was like AI and computer vision a couple of years ago. We thought it was going to be transformative, and it has been for our business, but we found ourselves in this kind of techie engineering habit of we've got this cool new hammer tool. This is like 2018, 2019. Where can we apply it? And so for Samsar, we serve the world of physical operations. the supply chains and the factories and so on so we thought maybe we could build a camera that would inspect products on an assembly line we called it machine vision that turned out not to be a great business for us not because the technology didn't work but it actually didn't fit our business model like the way that it gets installed on the line is highly custom lots of custom lighting you need to know the product and so on so what we found with samsara is it's really important to have a rinse and repeat recipe something that's truly”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Door because word spread that this group of MIT students was out there building routers and doing some interesting things.”
2023-12-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source