YouSaid · the spoken record

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 we got to close to a million dollars in revenue. And by the way, with Meraki, there was a hardware component. So we were building these routers. And what that means is you need cash up front to get the product manufactured. And so that was a big challenge, which is essentially having working capital for that. The other piece was we were bootstrapped, but we were kind of, I guess, raw and profitable would be like the YC or Paul Gram phase. And we had all been graduate students. So we were used to living below the poverty line. That was all good with us. We just enjoyed the work. When you went and tried to hire people, you realize they needed to make a lot more than a graduate student did, right? So we realized, okay, well, we're profitable, it's not going to really be scalable unless we get a little bit of additional money. Now, we could have taken a bit longer and just gone with taking our time. But actually, the venture capitalists started knocking on our door quite literally. They found our dingy office space, which is like, I think a sublease of a sublease in the warehouse district people with very nice cars would pull up and quite literally knock on the door.”
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
“To sell enough product to get off the ground. So that was a feedback loop we're like, well, people seem to like what we're doing, they want to pay for it. And then revenue doubled and doubled. It was during the global financial crisis that we realized, whoa, you know, you actually need to have a clear ROI and a value proposition. Like the fundamentals matter. And so that transition was actually very challenging and something we did differently at Simsar. We started market first with this company. We said, who's the customer? What are the problems we can solve in a kind of scalable way? And let's work backwards from that, which is to find the commonality. So that was maybe a big 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
“Like you said, we make a ton of mistakes. We try a ton of things. Let me give you maybe two examples. The first is when we start a Meraki, it was more of a technology first company. Like we had a cool technology, which we were kind of bringing with us from MIT conceptually. We had a new idea of how people could build very large networks. We thought that might be useful for community Wi-Fi, like free Wi-Fi in the town square kind of thing, which in the mid-2000s was an exciting idea. I think Google and a bunch of others were announcing projects like that. Now, the problem with free Wi-Fi is there's no business model attached to it. And at the time, Wi-Fi was still quite expensive, like bandwidth was expensive, the hardware was expensive. And I do remember at Sequoia, like a bunch of the partners were like, what's the business? And I would just explain the technology and they said, well, that's not a business, right? And I think we've kind of figured out the hardware. The funny part, though, was our not a business business actually doubled in rep, we bootstrapped the company the first year, which I can talk about. We didn't actually have venture 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
“You have that even as a grad student when you're doing research. Like, how am I going to further the state of the art? So you kind of get used to this idea of being uncomfortable, but it's very different because there's a shelf of business books. You go to a bookstore and there's like all of these management books and so on. You read through a couple of them. They're actually kind of hard to relate to. And I ended up just kind of putting them all down at the beginning and saying, look, this is actually just a big project, right? So let me do what I know how to do, which is lead a project and kind of get it to the next stage. And that's where some of these kind of operating principles kind of working backwards from winning essentially like what does the next stage goal look like? And then let's reverse engineer that. That's where that came from.”
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 have been quite a few along the way. You mentioned Doug Leone, who was our partner from Sequoia Capital in Meraki, which is a company before this. That was incredibly challenging to become the CEO of a startup company. And I didn't start out wanting to be a CEO. I was a graduate student along with my co-founder, John, at MIT. We were academic researchers. We wanted to go be professors at some point. So that initial transition from project to startup to actually raising venture money. And that was a big transition because I'd never managed anyone before. I never went to like a management training course, had no idea what I was doing. So it was a lot of trial and error and a lot of listening to make sure that what I was doing was useful to people because otherwise, again, like I'm kind of getting in the way. I'm not helping.”
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, at this point, Samsara, the consensus numbers have us getting to over a billion in ARR. And so the current job description, in my opinion, is to be building the company not for today's scale, but actually for.”
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 go through a process which I call rehiring myself. And it's a little bit like I actually write a job description of what do I think the job needs in the next year or the next couple of years. And I check, like, does my time and sort of how I'm doing things match what the company needs from me and the organization needs for me? The other thing is people will tell you if you listen, right? They're very polite about it, but they might kind of give you a hint or two. And so you have to have these really big years and listen.”
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 absolutely right. And at some point, you need to stop because you're kind of getting in the way, you're slowing things down, in other words. So the hardest thing is giving something up that you love doing. Like, I actually loved installing antennas in grad school and I loved doing many of the early sales of Meraki and Samsara because, and I still love spending time with customers. But again, sort of making it a scalable process is the key unlock at the next stage, which is how do you 10x and then 10x again?”
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
“Retrospect, that project was a bit like a startup, right? Like we were trying to do something, we had very scarce resources, we had no money. It was just like spare parts in the computer lab kind of thing. And the brute force was one of the ingredients to that, which is like privacy questions, like, are we allowed to give this kid list of names from the roster kind of thing? So I said, well, the yearbook's not private. I'll just use that. So it was just finding a way, I guess. This actually happened over and over if we kind of fast forward the first research project that my co-founder, John, and I worked on at MIT was called RoofNet. We built the network by literally installing antennas on people's roofs. We got like a 40 foot ladder. And like, again, in retrospect, that was kind of crazy. It definitely wasn't research, but it was just what was needed to build the platform up. So over and over, it's been an unlock just being willing to kind of roll up your sleeves and go for it.”
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 web instead of having to set it at a command line, which is kind of how things work back then, we brought our high school newspaper online. So it was really a kind of fun time. And everyone got into it. And by the way, I was a new student, and I've just moved from Texas. Probably what my friends didn't tell you is I was scrawny. I was like a 12-year-old freshman, by the way. So I'd skipped a grade or two along the way, just moved from a different state, which is practically a different country. And it was a great way to meet people. So I got to meet everyone in the school quite literally from, you know, the high school football team captain to like the newspaper editor, really fun experience, taught me a lot about how diverse people are, like lots of different things that they wanted to do online, things that they were curious about, but also how fun technology can be, because it really blew people's minds. Like this is like, you're going from disconnected, like there's no smartphones, there's no internet to, oh my God, like, look at all this stuff online.”
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 funny. It's the kind of Wayback machine test. So that's probably a 30 year old story at this point. We're talking like the early, the mid-90s. And the project that I had was to try to bring my high school online. And this is like right at the beginning of the web browser. So I'm kind of dating myself here, but probably before you were born, but the World Wide Web was brand new. And I thought it'd be cool to bring 1,600 high school kids online and kind of see what happens. And I was a techie. And so I'd been kind of online even at a young age and wanted to find a way to make it accessible. Back then was very kind of elaborate to get online. You needed to download a bunch of software, FTP, and all kinds of crazy stuff. And I thought, you know, the typical student isn't going to figure that out. How do we make it just work out of the box? So sat there, typed in 1,600 names from the high school yearbook because I couldn't get the roster from the administration. So just kind of brute forced it. We set up a web browsers and web servers so you could actually check your email using.”
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 product market fit is something you don't want to force when they call someone out into their office or in from the hallway and say, hey, so-and-so, you need to see this, right? That's when you know you have something that's a true solution to a big problem. 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.”
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