Saying yes to everything: How customer obsession built Samsara | Kiren Sekar (CPO)

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:

• Cisco: https://www.cisco.com/
• Clay: https://www.clay.com/
• Cowgirl Creamery: https://cowgirlcreamery.com/
• IBM: https://www.ibm.com/
• Meraki: https://meraki.cisco.com/
• Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/
• Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/
• Samsara: https://www.samsara.com/
• Sanjit Biswas: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjitbiswas/
• Uber: https://www.uber.com/

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