Kiren Sekar is the CPO of Samsara, a company that brings real-time visibility, analytics, and AI to physical operations. Before Samsara, Kiren was an early leader at Meraki, which was acquired by Cisco for $1.2B.

In this episode, he walks us through Samsara’s origin story: from hardware hacking in a basement to scaling a cross-industry IoT platform. He shares how early customer feedback loops led to the company’s first product, why starting with the mid-market was a deliberate choice, and how Samsara kept a startup mindset even as it scaled.

In this episode, we discuss:

Lessons from Meraki’s acquisition by Cisco
How Kiren hires for intrinsic motivation
Why Samsara was built for operations industries
The early hardware prototype and the Cowgirl Creamery insight
Building broad vs. niche from day one
The shift from founder-selling to a scalable sales motion
Organizing product teams around revenue vs. experience
How Samsara uses LLMs and AI today
What Kiren learned from longtime co-founder Sanjit Biswas

Where to find Kiren:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kirensekar/

Where to find Brett:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson

References:

Timestamps:

(01:27) Meraki’s growth and acquisition by Cisco

(03:25) The "evaporating" exit strategy from Meraki

(04:42) Identifying the IoT market gaps

(07:38) The early keys to success at Samsara

(09:39) What does quality mean to Kiren?

(10:54) Building a customer-centric roadmap

(17:34) Early customer research and the failed fridge monitoring idea

(20:57) How a cheese producer helped create Samsara’s first prototype

(28:06) Balancing depth and breadth in customer profiles

(33:45) Developing customer trust to build feedback loops

(40:27) How “ease of use” became a growth secret

(44:23) Pricing strategies and market positioning

(51:51) How Meraki influenced Samsara’s GTM strategy

(57:19) Helping customers navigate change management

(1:00:48) How Samsara’s team evolved during rapid growth

(1:04:03) What AI means for an IoT giant

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