Leadership Secrets from Samsara’s CEO You Can Use Today

When we get on site, I always tell people, like, big eyes and big ears. Like, let's see how these operations really run. Let's listen to where those pain points are. So I love it in terms of helping me understand what problems need solving next.

Well, first of all, it's definitely one of those milestone moments. I think as an entrepreneur, it's actually hard to imagine that you're going to get to the point where the company's going public and there's all this fanfare. One behind-the-scenes story that I don't think a lot of people know is that that opening bell ring is by a button, right? So, you're on this podium, they ask you when the market opens to press the button. They actually have someone with a fail safe because it turns out a number of people forget to hit the button. So, I was not aware of that. I didn't know how any of that stuff worked. They guided us through it. It was a lot of fun. But it was actually funny to hear maybe 10-15% of people actually forget to press the button, and the market doesn't open unless someone hits it.

Well, you know, it's funny. John and I have known each other now over 20 years. We met as grad students back at MIT, and it's always been a great partnership. So, even before we started any companies, we were working together. We were doing research together. He was the guy who loved to write code and like if he could just spend all of his time just in the details of the technology, he would. And I was the person who kind of did, you know, a bit of the research, but also the everything else. So, in some sense, as you're founding a company, you need someone to do the everything else. That person in my case became the CEO. And that's a partnership we've had across both companies. So, he's been CTO, I've been CEO. And I think from a opening bell perspective, he's like, "I don't want to do it. You do it. It's the everything else."

Well, if we go way back, 40 years or maybe a little bit less to when I was in middle school or high school, I always loved technology. It's my background. My dad was actually a computer science professor, an electrical engineering professor, so I grew up with a lot of this technology around me. One of the things that I like is actually seeing other people use technology, other people get utility or value from it. And going all the way back to middle school or high school, I remember being really enthusiastic about bringing this idea of internet access, which was really new at the time—this is back in the 1990s—to other high school kids. And now that I kind of think back on it, I was like, that's a really unusual thing that I felt passionate about, but I just thought it was the coolest thing, and I just wanted everybody else that I knew to use it. So that maybe was a formative moment that didn't make sense at the time, but in retrospect actually fits a lot of what I've been doing for the last 30-ish years, which is bringing technology to people.

I think so. And it's hard to say which influences cause which decisions and actions, but I was really fortunate that, even back in the 1980s when computers are pretty expensive and hard to get a hold of, we did have one at home because of his work. And he was always around to answer questions, curiosity questions, and I was able to kind of go down the rabbit hole early as a side effect of that of just, well, how does this stuff really work? And what could you do with it? That sort of thing.

Well, yeah, this is my first job. It was a summer internship that I got at Oracle. I don't think they knew I was 15 when I interviewed because it was like a coding interview and it was all very technical. I think they figured out when I showed up and it was my mom that had to drop me off because I was too young to have a driver's license. So that was definitely interesting. I learned a lot in that first job. I actually still have pretty vivid memories of everything from the code and the technology to the team that I worked with. It was, again, the first time really seeing a company and this idea that you could get paid to basically do your hobby. Programming was a hobby of mine at that point, and it was really interesting work and you got to work with really smart people. That was energizing in a really deep way.

Yeah. For me, it's never actually been about age or even years of experience. It's actually what do you bring to the table in terms of the discussion. So if it's a technical discussion, what ideas are you kind of debating or navigating? I think when it comes to business discussions, we have a lot of really young salespeople that are very close to our customers and I want to hear them out. So I've kind of learned to ignore the age component of it. There's a lot that comes with experience where there's some wisdom there, but so much of it is the type of experience and your insights and your knowledge. So maybe that was a deep learning from back in my 15-year-old days.

Well, first of all, it was an amazing undergrad institution, right, in terms of the breadth and the diversity of ideas that are thrown around. One of the things I loved about Stanford is it is very strong at both the humanities and the sciences, right? So you have engineers, you have people who are just out of this world in the liberal arts, and that balance of sort of numbers and qualitative ideas, that side of things—that balance is something that I really took away from that experience. And even when I look back, and this is now 25 years ago, some of my most formative experiences in college were actually not necessarily my computer science classes. It was when I took like a Zen Buddhism class to fulfill a requirement. I thought I was being very clever because I think that class fulfilled two requirements at once—culture and religion, or something like that. But just some of the philosophies have stuck with me decades later. And so really thankful that I had that experience, an experience I wasn't expecting to have. I went in thinking, "Okay, I'm going to take as many engineering classes as I can." But I'm really glad that I had that sort of well-rounded side of things as well.

Well, we want the whole brain. There's folks that are really good at, again, the kind of quantitative side of things—the numbers and the math and so on—but their ability to apply it to understand how is this going to benefit a customer or change their world, that's what makes that engineering innovation relevant, right? So I think that's important on the R&D side. And then similarly on the sales or marketing side, you need to not just have great sort of marketing ideas or a clever tagline or something like that, but you do need to understand what's having an impact. So I think there's a really important balance between those two.

Well, at a deep level, I think I learned a lot about this idea of working in a team. In some situations, there's a leader who is the everything. They're the commander, and they're calling all the shots and so on. That was never the case. Whether it was in my undergrad or graduate research or something like that, it was always a really amazing group of people, and people had different talent. Some people were really good at analysis, other people were good at coding, other people building things. But this idea that you can form people together in a team and that the sum of the parts is greater than just the whole was really compelling there. And I was really fortunate the research projects we worked on ended up going on to win some amazing academic research awards. Some of that research is still taught in class today. And when I look back on it, it wasn't just like the first author or any individual like the PhD adviser that was responsible for those insights. It really was the discussion and debate that we had as a team, the way we built, and the way we built over a long period of time that made some of that research impactful. So that was a pretty important learning at MIT, and it's something that I've taken with me into Meraki and into Samsara, the companies we founded after, is just the importance of the team kind of playing to the different team members' strengths and then really being cohesive.

Yeah. I think a lot of startup stories have a tremendous amount of purpose at the very beginning of like, "Oh, we had a business plan and we wanted to go raise funding," and in Silicon Valley there's a number of those kinds of tales. For us, this was actually more of we had a technology that we'd been working on as graduate students, which is this idea of we were building basically large-scale Wi-Fi networks before Wi-Fi was mainstream. So again, this is the early 2000s. That was the research that we did at MIT. It was a project called RoofNet. We covered all of Cambridge, Massachusetts, with free Wi-Fi. And that was really exciting because we got to be able to provide something of utility to our fellow students. So all the grad students had broadband internet without having to pay for it. We got to do really interesting research. And in that process, we said, "Well, wouldn't it be amazing if other people could build networks like this, like in their apartment complexes or on Main Street and that kind of thing?" So with Meraki, it was actually simply we wanted other people to be able to build big Wi-Fi networks. We didn't know the first thing about starting a company. We had no capital of our own. We had no access to venture capital, but we just had this desire to bring it to the world. So that's how that company got started. A little bit of a different story than I think what you hear about some days. Some companies now start with the seed round and then the Series A and so on.

Yeah, I think every entrepreneur figures this out: what is their true strengths, what's authentic to them. For me, I'm still a product person at my core. I love the technology side of things, but I do love spending time with customers and seeing that impact. And that's how I spend my time. I love to spend time out on the road. And at Samsara, we've got customers in really diverse industries all over the US and really all over the world now. So, I like to get out in the field. I like to stay current with the engineers on what they're building and what new chips are available or what new advances are happening in the world of AI and all that kind of innovation. And then I like to connect those dots. So, for me, it's about being true to myself. I'm probably not your best salesperson. I'm not a finance wizard. I know sort of what I'm good at and where I need help. And so I try to focus on that kind of product and that customer experience.

Well, for me, it's really about just getting in there. None of us are born knowing how to do these jobs, right? Especially as a CEO or a founder of a company, you're figuring it out as you go. I think learning by doing is really key for me. I love the interactions and the engagement. So, for example, on the sales side, I had never sold a thing in my life. Through MIT, I was a research scientist kind of engineer student. And I'll tell you, anything that involved selling, even in middle school or high school—there would be those projects where you have to sell the candy bars—I would just find a way to get out of it or shy away from it. I just did not like doing that. But when it came time to figure out how to get our first sale to happen for Meraki, because we didn't have any money to run the company otherwise, we figured it out. We figured out what a PO was. I discovered that means purchase order. I figured out, okay, how do you translate that into an actual check? All of that happened by just trying it out. And it's actually much more straightforward than people sometimes realize. You could read books and books and books about how to start a company, or you could just try it. And so I always recommend people to just try it.

Well, at work, we call it running feedback loops. This idea of iterating, spending time with our customers, figuring out, well, how could you make it better? Because, like you said, the odds that you got it right on the first try are kind of zero, right? There's always a way for something to be better. The question is, well, where should we invest our energy? What should we do next? That applies, by the way, to products and product management, but it equally applies to your sales process or your marketing message. Like, there's a lot of things you can kind of tune and tweak. And I think in today's age, it's gotten way easier to essentially iterate on the fly and do it in a thoughtful way. It's not sort of haphazard, but the idea that we're going to run a process, we're going to get something out, whether it's a beta product or early access or whatever you want to call it, and get feedback, I think, is really important.

Shared code kind of refers to, well, what's the sort of common way that we all operate? And if you think about software, software has many forms and manifestations, but ultimately it's code down at the bottom of it. And you might have lots of different users, but they're all running on that same codebase. What I found is unless you're explicit about it the way you are with engineering a product, you can have people running different code, right? So you may be under the same company banner, but if you're operating in two totally different ways, the way people perceive the company, the way they engage with the company, it's going to be two totally different experiences. So by having this sort of shared code, if you will, the consistency of the experience is really common.

Yeah, and I think that's really about distilling down what's worked for us so far. What we've done in both companies seems to be something people like. Well, what is it about our way of running? And so we do call them operating principles, basically, okay, what is it that we want to make sure everybody is doing? And for us, this idea of focusing on our customer success is really core. It doesn't matter which team you're on, that's something that's really important. Building for the long term is another one. There's always a bit of a trade-off of are we doing something for this month or this quarter, or we're actually going to live with this decision. That's also something that's really important, again, that applies across departments and so on. So we've got about eight of these operating principles. We evolve them every couple years, we have a refresh on them. But the idea is this is what's worked for us so far. We really try to think about them, distill them down, share them with everyone, especially new hires. So as they're coming in, hey, this is what's worked for Samsara, for example, and this is something we want to do more of. So for us, those operating principles are kind of key to how we run.

We try to operationalize them in a few different ways. So at the very beginning of the process, which is the interview process, we actually interview based on those operating principles. So behind the scenes, we kind of assign different principles out of, hey, see if you can figure out how they built for the long term, like ask them for an example of that, or how they adopted a growth mindset, or something about their customer centricity. Those are things you can filter for at the beginning. And then, like you said, what you recognize and what you reward is also really important. So we ask for nominations. We have different awards in different teams, and we'll try to align those with the principles. So-and-so adopted a growth mindset; here's an example of how they picked up a new skill or something like that. And then what we talk about at, call it a town hall, a broadcast meeting that goes to thousands of our employees, that's also important because that sets the tone that says, okay, that's really important to the company.

There's a few that come to mind. Some of it just actually relates to the way that people try out our products. Something about Samsara that people sometimes don't appreciate is in order to adopt technology and operations, you sometimes need to install a piece of hardware, there's some software configuration, and so on. A lot of that, by the way, can be made plug and play. So it used to be that in order to install technology, you needed to be an engineer, you need to have someone come on site and splice a bunch of wires or write some code or there was like a little bit of a hurdle. Something we emphasized very early here was, well, how do we simplify it so it just always lands on its feet, just works out of the box? That is something that enabled us to do free trials. So in other words, we don't even need to set foot on site. If you're up for it, you can just plug this thing in and try it out for yourself and experience the technology. That's a radical simplification of the customer experience. It's very complicated behind the scenes, but the result was we were able to grow our business very quickly because we could essentially engage with people over Zoom or on the phone, convince them that they wanted to try it out, and then just send them a unit or five units or something like that.

Well, like many businesses, we were lucky to be in the right place at the right time. So, we were starting a company that was making it easy to deploy Wi-Fi in the mid-2000s. We started in 2006. That was about the year before the iPhone was introduced. So we ended up in the right place at the right time in the sense that all of a sudden after the iPhone and then eventually the iPad and so on came out, people wanted Wi-Fi. They wanted guest Wi-Fi to offer to their clients and their customers and that kind of thing. We were just really lucky that that happened. Now from a strategic perspective, we had a sense that there were going to be a number of challenges with doing that at scale, right? It would have to be secure, it'd have to be easy to set up, you'd need lots of great coverage. And so we set up the product and the company to be ambitious in that sense. We didn't just do hardware, for example. We did the software, we did the configuration, we did the security and everything. And so strategically, that ambition paid off when the complexity really went up for the customer and they needed something that just was all-in-one that worked entirely. The same thing paid off years later as we continued to be ambitious. We built Ethernet switches and routers. These are all the building blocks of a big network. We didn't just stop at Wi-Fi. In other words, we kind of built everything the customer needed. And then we saw customers saying, "Hey, I love what you guys have done for Wi-Fi. I need that for my whole network. Can you do that?" And we were in that right place at the right time. So, the ambition I think is really key.

Well, I think most engineers are driven by a love for solving problems. They want to see their hard work have impact, and so they want to see their technology used. In other words, when we connected those two dots, that sales basically translates to customer impact—people using your stuff—everyone got into it. Even engineers who had no interest in selling, everyone wanted to see, okay, what's the customer using? Like, did they turn that feature on? Wow, this thing's getting thousands of users, that kind of thing. So connecting that feedback loop to the engineering teams and not making sales a bad word or something a different team does, but we're all in this together. And by the way, those sales, those dollars that come from those revenue dollars get reinvested right back in the company, means we can build more product, right? And so going back to this idea of being ambitious, we felt like, well, okay, if you want to build a lot of stuff, you're going to need more than a handful of people. You're going to need a sustainable R&D effort. The way to do that is not necessarily raise more and more venture capital; it's actually go get your sales engine running and have a reasonable set of margins and all that stuff so you have a sustainable enterprise that you can keep reinvesting in for a long, long time.

First of all, I kind of still think of Meraki as like this project that took on a life of its own, right? This idea of like, can we make it possible for other people to build networks? And yes, that's what became the business. What was happening, just for a little bit of historic context, is we were doubling revenue every single year. And this is a company that, by the way, was really growing in the global financial crisis era. So the idea that we were able to double revenue every year was really astounding, and I think that goes to show just how much market pull there was for the product. The company was getting to the point where Meraki was getting ready to go public. We had enough revenue scale. All the numbers made sense to go public. And at that point, Cisco approached us. And just for those people who aren't in the networking industry, Cisco is like the big name, right? They are like the biggest brand, best known, they have majority market share in most of the products they sell. And so they were effectively our biggest competitor. Now that actually made it kind of high stakes because they approached us and we're like, "We don't want to share numbers with you. We compete in the market." But they said, "No, no, we get it, but we hear great things about the product. And we want you to think about one thing, which is what would happen if your product could be sold through the Cisco sales force and the Cisco partner channel with the Cisco logo? Think about how many more people would get access to it." And that was actually the compelling sort of reason for doing it. They had to make the numbers make sense from a finance perspective, the investors needed to be able to get a return, but for me it was actually more about impact. Well, we kind of did this as an experiment. We can keep doing what we're doing, but we had a long way to grow. We were a relatively small company compared to a Cisco. Now what if you could do the experiment of, well, what would happen if you turbocharged it and made it available all over the world? And that's exactly what happened. If you now look at where Meraki is now, I don't know the exact numbers, but it's billions of dollars of sales a year. Whenever I walk into a Starbucks coffee and I look up, I see a Meraki access point. My kids' schools have Meraki access points. I go to an airport, you see it. And that is ultimately what we were there for, was to see that impact happen. So that's ultimately what did it for us was this idea that, wow, you could really get this out to a lot of people.

Proud. Absolutely. So you mentioned it's like a child. It's the kind of pride that you get of like, wow, we really did something meaningful.

Well, at the beginning, we just spent our time making sure that we integrated the products well inside Cisco. So, there was no plan to do anything next. But within a few years, it was pretty clear that this was working, right? Like the products were growing at an even faster rate than they had before. So, that was excellent to see. And at the same time, Cisco said, "Hey, you guys have done a great job with this. Are you interested in—their headquarters are down in San Jose, California, we're in San Francisco—do you guys want to come down to San Jose and take on some more of the business, like some of the other parts?" And that didn't feel like it fit for us because we're not professional operators in the sense of we come in and run your business that you've already got. We're builders. We want to build something from scratch. And so, we said, "Okay, well, that's probably not for us." But it's not like we left with the—

Here's the next idea we want to pursue. For context, John and I basically hadn't really taken time off. Meraki was an intense experience. So first thing we decided to do is take a real vacation. I remember for me personally, we just had our first child, so had a baby around, that kind of thing. So I was just thinking, I'm just going to take a little bit of time to reset. My initial thinking was actually to go back to academia because the two of us left without finishing our PhDs. We were all but dissertation. We were just like right there at the finish line. Long story short, we realized academia wasn't going to be for us, or at least I realized it wasn't going to be for me, because the feedback loops are really long. It takes months to find out if your paper gets into a conference, and then it's really hard to see people use your stuff. So I figured that out the hard way. Actually wrote a paper, got into a conference, etc. John, he's way smarter than me. He was like, "I knew that wasn't going to work for us," kind of thing. But after a couple of months, we kind of went back to our curious selves outside of it. So we were just kind of curious about the world, found ourselves really fascinated by the world of operations. And that's ultimately what led us to start Samsara—was that same curiosity that got us excited about Wi-Fi a decade earlier got us excited about operations, because we were just wondering, how does all this stuff work?

Curiosity is just such an important and special thing, right? And curiosity is sort of like when you let your mind wander a little bit and become fascinated. And it's something we all have as kids, right? Like you're kind of wondering, "Okay, how does that airplane fly?" or whatever it is, right? There's something there that doesn't go away. You get really busy and you get kind of sucked up in the flow of things. If you ever get a chance to basically hit pause or hit stop—sometimes you can do this if you take a week-long vacation or something and you let your mind wander, you're sitting on a beach or on a mountain somewhere—then your mind takes you to something that might be really interesting in a deep level that you couldn't articulate. For me, that was how we found operations. But it happens all the time if you give it time to happen.

Yeah, so as I alluded to, we focus on the world of operations. This is kind of the infrastructure of our planet, if you will, right? So think about the supply chain, or the utilities, the construction companies, all the people that keep our planet running. That's what we're referring to with physical operations. And what we do is we try to bring them new digital technologies to improve how they run. Basically, make it possible for them to run smarter. One interesting thing about operations is just how intense it is, right? You've got millions of trucks out on the road. You've got hundreds of millions of frontline workers. And so there's this kind of tremendous orchestra, almost ballet, that happens behind the scenes that no one really thinks about. But it's an area that technology can really help because you can make way smarter decisions if you have cameras that are able to see risky behavior out on the road, or you have GPS trackers that understand fuel consumption and analyze all that data. So those are the kinds of things we work on.

Yeah. It's really hard to pinpoint, but I've kind of thought about this over the years, and I've studied leaders like your listeners have, right? Like I've listened to so many podcasts, I've read so many books. And one interesting takeaway is everybody needs to figure out their own authentic style or form of leadership, right? And so there are things that we have natural talents at, and I try to focus on, like I said, the product side and the customer side. And then there are things that you're not so talented at. And for me, sometimes it's actually communication. Like I'm great in terms of a one-on-one communication. I enjoy getting to know people, but communicating with thousands of employees is actually really tough because you can't read their faces. You can't engage and interact with them. So that's the kind of thing that as a leader I've had to try different ideas and iterate a little bit. But again, leadership is really a personal sort of fit. Everybody's got their own leadership style. And then it's also a contextual fit. The way you lead a tiny company, a startup that has a dozen people, versus the way you lead a company with thousands of people is a little bit different. You kind of have to figure it out along the way. So for me, that's been a big takeaway.

For me, I was fortunate to have had the Meraki experience, so as we scaled Samsara, I was very mindful of this. When you bring in hundreds of new people every year into an organization, it's very easy for the culture to drift, right? And it's a very practical thing, which is that people are bringing their own way of doing things with them and you're not able to be everywhere. So the Samsara way or the Meraki way, it's hard to transmit when folks are reporting to a manager who just started three weeks before them, kind of thing. So that kind of dispersion is something that I was very mindful of with Samsara, and we were lucky that our business grew really quickly, so we had to really stay on it. It's not like we could just add 5% new people every year. It's like we had years where we doubled the size of the company. We had one year where we tripled the size of the company. That's really hard.

Well, they may be great companies, but those playbooks, if you will, may not apply in our environment, right? So a lot of what we did was keep it simple, like we would go on customer calls together, right? Like let's go show and do a product demo, right? And actually show what the product does. That was foreign to a lot of people that came from companies where they never demoed their product. It was too complicated or sold differently. So just showing the way we do things in a very practical way helped build some of that culture. The interactions—we love to grab lunch or grab dinner or just coffee with each other and get to know each other, answer questions. And then that's the other one: Ask Me Anything sessions. So I still do these. The new hires that come in, we do a big Zoom call, and I'll answer whatever questions are on their mind. We'll do that with top talent. We'll do that with certain kinds of teams. But that interactivity I think is really key to kind of creating the cohesion.