Samsara

“That has worked for us across both companies and many, many products that we've built.”

“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 thing…”

“Well, at this point, Samsara, which is the current company, is at quite a bit of scale, so we're a public company now you know, the consensus numbers have us getting to over a billion in ARR, so we've really got something big going on.”

“I do think that there's something deep about founder led sales, which 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 perfec…”

“When you're speaking to a customer, they know you have the ability to shape the roadmap. It may be not, 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.”

“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.”

“Our mid-market teams will close deals within a quarter and that sales cycles inside of 90 days. Our field or your major account teams might take, you know, six months to a full year to close a deal.”

“Most of our customers today buy multiple products from us because they're trying to solve a bunch of different problems.”

“So what we found with Samsara is it's really important to have a kind of rinse and repeat recipe, something that's truly plug and play that was not plug and play.”

“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.”

“What I didn't appreciate is that's maybe, maybe five, 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 m…”

“The second is actually more challenging, which is when the product works and the customer is getting value from it, but it's not scalable. And that's happened to us a couple of times where Hey, this is a really cool product, but it requires a lot of handholdin…”

“We try to use like an eighty-twenty 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 You know, exotic or esoteric. That's where we ten…”

“I wish we could do more of it two days a week. You know, that's kind of the maximum time allocation that I can devote to something like that because there is a company to run.”

“And we've done things like driver rewards programs where people basically get, you know, Starbucks cards and things like that for being safe on the roads. That has transformed culture for frontline workforces.”

“Concentric circles matter. So if you can be solving a problem for the same customer, it's the same person you're talking to, and maybe they have two problems they need to solve. That's way better from a customer conversation perspective, because that, that sin…”

“I would say the intensity was something that we only were able to pull off cause it was the second time through company. Cause I think the ship would have blown apart had our team not been through it before.”

“And so the current job description, in my opinion, is to be building the company, not for today's scale, but actually for scale three to five years from now, which is more products, obviously more customers, just, you know, a lot more building.”

“But those conversations were happening when product one was maybe ten million in revenue.”

“We all, 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.”

“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 peopl…”

“So that's the kind of thing where I will actually say, you know, this year I'm going to drop the sitting in every QBR, right? A quarterly business review. And that's okay because I feel like our team's got it, but I do need to spend time helping write the five…”

“Like product two for us, safety is now our number number one revenue product.”

“We were able to kind of increase our talent TAM, like, so access to many, many more pools of talent. I'm talking about 10, 20, 30 X increase, not like a 20%, but like a 10 X kind of thing. And that has outweighed for us the sort of reduced bandwidth that you g…”

“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, …”

“So we have a kind of seventy-twenty-ten capital allocation strategy when it comes to R&D.”

“If we do this right, we will scale 10 X and then 10 X again.”

“So we can ramp within a few quarters, right? And it varies by, you know, 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 and the jargon, that sort of thing…”

“The CEO they are today and the way they operate is very different than, you know, 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.”

“As a public company, you can see it's in our S one, our sales productivity, as we were talking about earlier, got better and better over time.”

“But what I found works really well is 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, that that's really, it's not about book smarts or IQ test or someth…”

“We literally opted into it a second time as we began. So I'm sorry. And that's what the name is. I'm sorry. It means it's the cycle of reincarnation and rebirth.”

“We've had customers, by the way, that literally were planning The routes for thousands of trucks using giant maps on the walls, right?”

“I would say the deal size tends to be where we focus a little bit more.”

“Like, actually, this is something I learned from Samsara as well. Like, I remember my first 30 days were written out in excruciating detail. I think the first two weeks were completely scheduled out, like, to the minute for me.”

“The normal has changed. We used to think about, hey, you go, like when we did Samsara and you know, Gusto and some of these companies are like, yeah, triple, triple, there you go, triple, triple, triple, double, double, right? And you look at these companies a…”

“I lost a Series A of Stripe. I lost a Series A of Samsara. I lost a Series A of Snap. And the first one I won was a Series A of Gusto.”