Sekar: Selling to discretionary IT budgets creates false product-market fit signals
Kiren Sekar · Saying yes to everything: How customer obsession built Samsara | Kiren Sekar (CPO) · Sep 11, 2025 · at 43:12
Kiren Sekar, CPO at Samsara and former early Meraki leader, discusses the difference between selling to enterprise IT departments versus physical operations businesses.
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“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, oh, I'm building something that is getting traction, but not very many people make decisions like that, but you can kind of fool yourself into thinking they can get a product market fit, and then all of a sudden you can't You can't scale and customers aren't renewing.”
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