The Exchanges

Q And did you find, how did you, Get just in the early days, just that acquire brand new domain experience. We'll just go hanging out with fleets. Did you, was there a key hire you made to the team, like a COO or VP of ops or something? Was there anything special? Just good old fashioned founder learning?

A Just get out there. And it was, at the beginning it was show and tell. Like we basically built the simplest cloud connected sensor we can imagine, which is a temperature sensor. We took it into two industries, which is food and beverage and then pharma and biotech thinking that, Hey, they have like temperature sensitive assets that might Spoil if something happens. And we said, Hey, this is, let's see if we can go do something useful with this. Those initial beta testers were the ones who actually brought us into the fleet. They said, this is cool. Our big fridges don't actually break very much. What does break is the cold chain. Like when we try to move something from site to site, we had a customer, they were delivering this cowgirl creamery since you're here in the Bay area, right? Like they make fancy cheeses. They would lose like 10,000 dollars of cheese when they deliver to Whole Foods because someone would leave the doors open and all the heat would come in.

AI assessment note: “Just get out there. And it was, at the beginning it was show and tell.”

Q Got it. And did you, I know it's a little bit nerdy or tactical, but did you put new GMs in charge of it? Did you create little pods? How did you attack these different verticals?

A I would think of them more as campaigns. So we said, okay, we want to go win in field service, or we want to go in construction. Let's go understand the customer. Let's, we have to build some technology partnerships because they would integrate with different pieces of software. So let's go do that. Let's of course speak their language, right? So when we're doing marketing case studies, but we never specialized the sales team and we never specialized the product teams, except for public sector. Public sector has a different buying cycle, right? And they have like different contracts. So government sales is a little different for us. But it's the same use cases. So we try to sell the same products across the board, in other words.

AI assessment note: “we never specialized the sales team and we never specialized the product teams”

Q today that are incredibly talented, worked together for decades, prepared eggshells with each other. Any tricks for keeping you? I'm sure it's great, but there must've been a few tough, tense moments or not everyone grows at the same rate, even if they get to the same place. Any, just any good learnings or tactics to keep the four of you together for so long to deal with the friction?

A I think it's always just being super real with each other. Like we've been friends now, 1520 years across these companies and we've been through a lot. I think we each know our strengths and weaknesses like with each other. And so we can be very open about, okay, I think you're missing this or. It's actually just all being honest and being open about, okay, we're all figuring this out together. It's not like any of us have done this at this scale. Like we are figuring it out as a team. And I think once that humility is there, it actually is, is much more possible to have a real conversation. I think when egos are at play, that's when you tend to see those like crazy conflicts and you just step back. Like we're all just trying to solve a problem here.

AI assessment note: “I think it's always just being super real with each other.”

Q too, but now that your brand is pretty dominant, you can challenge me, you can say it's not dominant, our TAM's eight trillion, but I would suspect it's dominant in your niche markets. Do you sell, can you sell telematics and safety and your other products? Can you sell them all up front? Is it gradual? How is, what's, what have you learned about how's that motion changed over time?

A It's both. So most of our customers today use multiple products. So they adopt two, actually three or more in the enterprise. So that's gotten to be really strong. Many of them are under contract with the legacy provider and they'll say, I need to roll off that telematics contract, but let's put in the safety coaching. And when I'm done with that contract, I'll just bring it all on to Samsara. Got it. So there is a benefit there. We can land with a number of different products, but ultimately customers are adopting the platform. And the scale, it's not just brand, right? There's actually a lot of data that we see in the system that nobody else has a scale of data. We have our ability to support customers at scale, help them with these programs, help them figure out how do you coach drivers? These are all things that get better, the bigger you are, because we, we see more, right? We see so many of these very large companies do this. That's an interesting flywheel effect as well.

AI assessment note: “It's both. So most of our customers today use multiple products.”