Samsara

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“Now we can use LLMs as a starting point and we can start to do things that just would have been impossible before, right? So for example, now if you slam on the brakes and it's because someone cut you off or a pedestrian ran into the road or an ambulance cross…”

“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…”

“Part of our vision was also that we're not trying to find a single data point for a single industry. We're actually trying to build a platform and, you know, thinking about what did a company like Salesforce do for sales teams and for customer data? In the ear…”

“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…”

“One of them it was Cowgirl Creamery, a cheese producer in Northern California, said, you know where we lose product all the time is, is in trucks, in, in, in transit. Is there a way we could put one of these on a truck? And so we found a way to, you know, conn…”

“And it's actually now our number one product by revenue and growth”

“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…”

“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…”

“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, …”

“Actually being able to make change management part of our pitch was super helpful, right? Especially in the enterprise, being able to say, we have the technology, but we will also help you be successful with it. You can get this done end to end in X months, ri…”

“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.”