Sanjit Biswas is the co-founder and CEO of Samsara. Speaking on 20VC, he explains why technical founders often succeed in enterprise sales despite lacking formal sales training.
“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 perfect sales process and that kind of thing. But you can be in a meeting and navigate in a very dynamic way, which is, oh, tell me more about that. Or is that something that's a big problem or a little problem? Like it's a very sort of interactive conversation. And I actually think that on the other side of the table, the prospect loves that because here they have someone who can solve their problem, perhaps solve more problems for them. And really wants to partner, right? That's something that is very rare that if you're a prospect, you don't get that conversation very often. So I think founder CEOs especially have an advantage there or just founders in general.”
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More from Sanjit Biswas
Disclosure
Biswas: Flexible remote hiring expanded Samsara's talent pool by 10x to 30x
“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…”
Sanjit BiswasDec 8, 2023▶ 34:36Sanjit Biswas: Samsara's $18BN Market Cap & $1BN in ARR in 8 Years | E1092 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Biswas: Single-location sales hiring at scale forces lowering the talent bar
“We'd probably start lowering our talent bar if you're trying to hire such a big direct sales force in one location.”
Sanjit BiswasDec 8, 2023▶ 35:57Sanjit Biswas: Samsara's $18BN Market Cap & $1BN in ARR in 8 Years | E1092 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Biswas: Samsara began developing its second product line at $10M ARR
“But those conversations were happening when product one was maybe ten million in revenue.”
Sanjit BiswasDec 8, 2023▶ 19:01Sanjit Biswas: Samsara's $18BN Market Cap & $1BN in ARR in 8 Years | E1092 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Biswas: Early startups take major risks hiring big-company executives
“If you're an early stage startup, it doesn't make sense to bring that person in quite yet, or you could, but you're taking real risk, right? Because that person's not going to have all the infrastructure they're used to. They're not going to have the brand beh…”
Sanjit BiswasDec 8, 2023▶ 38:25Sanjit Biswas: Samsara's $18BN Market Cap & $1BN in ARR in 8 Years | E1092 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Biswas: VCs Should Not Filter Out First-Time Founders
“There are a lot of first time founders who are phenomenal. Like I think, you know, you think about Jensen from Nvidia, he's been, I think that's his first startup. It's turned out quite good, right? So that's the sort of thing where you'd also don't want to so…”
Sanjit BiswasDec 8, 2023▶ 47:54Sanjit Biswas: Samsara's $18BN Market Cap & $1BN in ARR in 8 Years | E1092 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Biswas: Products requiring heavy manual installation operate as services, failing SaaS scaling
“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…”
Sanjit BiswasDec 8, 2023▶ 49:09Sanjit Biswas: Samsara's $18BN Market Cap & $1BN in ARR in 8 Years | E1092 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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