Sanjit Biswas is the Co-founder and CEO of Samsara, the fleet management and safety platform.
At the time of publication, Samsara is a public company worth over $26 billion, and we unpack how exactly they went from zero to run rating at over $1.5 billion in revenue in ten years.
We get into using AI to impact the physical world, how Samsara uses AI internally, and how their products prevent over 200,000 deaths per year.
Sanjit has built two unicorns, and he shares everything he’s learned along the way, including what most founders and investors get wrong about hardware, thinking customer-first instead of product-first, how to know when you have product market fit, mastering sales as a technical founder, and how to spend more time with your customers.
We also talk about getting his high school online in the 90’s, and the research project that turned into Sanjit’s first company, Meraki, and its $1.2 billion dollar sale to Cisco in 2012.
Thanks to Bolt for supporting this episode. Help them break a world record for the largest hackathon (up to $1m in prizes): https://bit.ly/ThePeelBoltHackathon
Timestamps:
(4:26) Samsara: Helping the world of physical operations
(8:44) Preventing 200,000 deaths per year
(11:19) AI opportunities in transportation
(14:43) Samsara’s internal AI tools
(16:58) What people get wrong when building hardware
(19:04) Starting Samsara customer-first instead of product-first
(22:23) Find adjacent products for your customers
(26:28) How to know you have product market fit
(34:52) How to spend more time with customers and build feedback loops
(43:00) 70-20-10 framework for allocating capital
(45:07) Importance of selling new products to existing customers
(49:15) Revisiting the product roadmap based on new technology
(50:38) Why Sanjit credits focus to hitting $1B revenue in nine years
(53:41) Learning to love sales as a technical founder
(57:06) Getting his high school online in the 90’s
(1:01:46) The research project that turned into Sanjit’s first company, Meraki
(1:04:01) Importance of asymmetric risk when starting a company
(1:05:41) Early days of Meraki taking off
(1:09:19) Surviving and doubling during the financial crisis
(1:16:00) Cisco acquiring Meraki for $1.2B
(1:18:15) Meraki’s post-acquisition integration
(1:20:48) Differences between 1st and 2nd company
(1:24:19) Almost starting an renewable energy company
(1:25:52) The power of small teams
(1:28:49) One-shotting Bill Gates’ biography at 10-years old
Referenced
Samsara: https://samsara.com/
Meraki: https://meraki.cisco.com/
Arduino: https://www.arduino.cc/
Raspberry Pi: https://www.raspberrypi.com/
Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire: https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Drive-Making-Microsoft-Empire/dp/0887306292
No Priors Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@NoPriorsPodcast
Follow Sanjit
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjitbiswas/
Follow Turner
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak
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