Kiren Sekar
Chief Product Officer, Samsara. On 2 shows, 1 appearance, plus 1 compilation re-air not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executiveoperatorLinkedIn ↗
Kiren Sekar leads global product and engineering at Samsara, having directed product strategy from its founding through its IPO and later serving as Chief Strategy Officer before resuming the CPO role. Earlier, he served as Vice President of Marketing at Meraki prior to its acquisition by Cisco.
2shows
1appearances
48statements
4resolved
4supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
2said about them ↓ Everything Kiren Sekar said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Sekar: Saying yes to customers creates more outsized impact than rigid focus
“There's a lot of people who say, You need to say no to as many things as possible and focus. Not saying you should never focus, but also you should say, well, for a customer, how could I say, say yes to as much as possible? And sometimes that feels unnatural, …”
Sekar: Selling to discretionary IT budgets creates false product-market fit signals
“There were some customers who would buy something because they thought it was neat, and the IT department had discretionary budgets. They're technologists. They thought that something was cool, and it's actually really dangerous because as a startup, you think…”
Sekar: Broad market strategy enables cross-pollination of product features across industries
“If you hyper optimize there, there's a risk that actually you build something that is, is so narrow that it ends up not really providing leverage in other, other industries. Whereas if you take the other approach and say, I want to actually engage with a broad…”
Sekar: Samsara hired its first SDR before having a finished product
“And in fact, we hired our first ADR or SDR before we had a product to sell. And their job was to book demos. So myself and one of our product managers could basically do Live demos of what we were building and get people to say, hey, I will try this out once i…”
Sekar: Overcoming Frontline Tech Pushback Requires Leadership Examples and Incentive Sharing
“Oh, you know, what we did was we started by first putting it in the VP of safety's own car so they can see that we're doing it ourselves. And then we start by putting it on the five safest drivers cars, the absolute best ones. And invariably there is an accide…”
Expanding Multi-Product Early via Adjacencies Accelerates Business Growth
“How going multi-product early through adjacencies can make a really big impact on the trajectory and growth of the business.”
Seed New Multi-Product Rollouts With Top Sales Performers First
“Start with a small focused team, even if it's a small ADR team, generate leads that are really laser focused on a product to get the physics of the new product down, to iron out the kinks, to build the playbooks, then to build champions, right? Find the people…”
Sekar: Customer centricity only counts when it costs something
“It only counts when it costs you something, right?”
Sekar: Mid-market customers buy like simplified enterprise users, easing upmarket expansion
“Yeah, I think that, that we found that mid-market customers Use the products and buy the products like a simple enterprise user. Whereas in some cases, the SMB customers, they're actually closer to a consumer, and it was more of a fundamental difference. Where…”
Sekar: Legacy operations tech point solutions lacked scale to fund R&D
“Most of the technology providers, again, weren't Silicon Valley companies. They weren't even big tech companies like the Microsofts of the world. There were a lot of these point solutions that were building technology for a very specific problem in a very spec…”
Sekar: Samsara scaled ARR from $1M to $17M to $70M in consecutive years
“By just running that feedback loop across a wide set of customers, we went from a million in ARR to 17, and then 70 the year after that.”
Sekar: Single-Industry Feedback Would Have Confined Samsara to Compliance Apps
“Had we just focused on feedback from one industry, we would have ended up with a compliance app. Now we've got this, you know, really broad set of tools for frontline workers.”
Sekar: Plug-and-play afternoon setup drove Meraki's core product-market fit
“We said, we're gonna make a network that's simple, that's plug and play. That's still usable by a business that has security and management, but you can actually get it up and running in an afternoon. And that was really what created the core product fit, mark…”
Sekar: Price in the middle with superior quality to reduce sales friction
“Early on, it was actually like, how do we make this an easy decision for customers, right? Which means if there's existing vendors in a space, maybe there's the really expensive one. There's a really cheap one. Aim to be in the middle. Right? And if we can act…”
Sekar: Samsara does not charge separately for its platform layer
“So we don't charge for the platform. It's really a, the reason you would like to buy these Five products from Samsara as opposed to one product from Samsara and four from, you know, four other companies is each of these products kind of stands on its own as be…”
Sekar: Samsara abandoned channel partner sales because customers wanted direct relationships
“We tried that at Samsara, and a lot of actually specific partners that would have been very successful with at Meraki didn't work. And we found that actually these customers wanted to primarily buy directly from us and have a relationship with us. So that's so…”
Sekar: Samsara exclusively demos live software, never mockups or sandboxes
“Both at Meraki and Samsara, and really to this day, we start with a demo, right? And that can be over Zoom. It can be in person, but we start with, we're gonna show you a live working system. It's not a, you know, a sandbox. It's not Figma. We're gonna show yo…”
Integrating Hardware Solves Problems Pure Software Cannot Address
“By integrating hardware with our solution, we make it possible to solve different types of problems than we could with software alone.”
Samsara Closed Its First Post-IPO Quarter at Over $550M ARR
“We just reported our first first quarter as a public company a couple of weeks ago, closed the quarter at a little over five hundred and fifty million dollars in ARR, which was over 60% growth from a year before.”
Fragmented IoT Architectures Cost Millions and Fail Mainstream Operators
“We'd seen other companies try to build IOT data systems where you have one company building sensors, another providing connectivity, another providing the infrastructure and storage, and someone else building the applications on top. And then you pay an integr…”
Samsara Ingested 4.6T Data Points and 85B Video Minutes Last Year
“The 4.6 trillion data points that we ingested last year eighty-five billion minutes of video footage, running AI on that to detect almost two and a half billion AI detections. We're processing billions of API calls as customers connect Samsara with other syste…”
Samsara Has Two Separate Products Generating Over $200M ARR Each
“We now have two products that are over two hundred million dollars in ARR each, both growing well.”
Target Established Markets Needing 10x Solutions Rather Than Educating New Ones
“We would really seek out markets where there was an established industry where we didn't have to convince customers for the first time of the value of data or software or a particular solution, but then try to find areas where we saw an opportunity to deliver …”
Chasing Individual Deal Requests Creates Niche Features Lacking Broad Demand
“One is when we weren't disciplined about making sure we were looking for signal across a
Broad pipeline. Could get into to deal chasing mode. Build something that we thought was really cool, and actually a customer thought was really cool, but then the broad …”
The other half of the tape: Kiren Sekar's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 2 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Sanjit Biswas 1Kieran Saker 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the Official SaaStr Podcast 2
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Kiren's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 IN DEPTHLEDGER | Chief Product Officer, Samsara | 1 | 23 | 100% 4/4 | full record on In Depth → |
| SAASTRLEDGER | Chief Product Officer, Samsara | 0 +1 | 25 | — | full record on the Official SaaStr Podcast → |