Saying yes to everything: How customer obsession built Samsara | Kiren Sekar (CPO)
Description
Kiren Sekar is the CPO of Samsara, a company that brings real-time visibility, analytics, and AI to physical operations. Before Samsara, Kiren was an early leader at Meraki, which was acquired by Cisco for $1.2B.
In this episode, he walks us through Samsara’s origin story: from hardware hacking in a basement to scaling a cross-industry IoT platform. He shares how early customer feedback loops led to the company’s first product, why starting with the mid-market was a deliberate choice, and how Samsara kept a startup mindset even as it scaled.
In this episode, we discuss:
- Lessons from Meraki’s acquisition by Cisco
- How Kiren hires for intrinsic motivation
- Why Samsara was built for operations industries
- The early hardware prototype and the Cowgirl Creamery insight
- Building broad vs. niche from day one
- The shift from founder-selling to a scalable sales motion
- Organizing product teams around revenue vs. experience
- How Samsara uses LLMs and AI today
- What Kiren learned from longtime co-founder Sanjit Biswas
Where to find Kiren:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kirensekar/
Where to find Brett:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson
References:
- Cisco: https://www.cisco.com/
- Clay: https://www.clay.com/
- Cowgirl Creamery: https://cowgirlcreamery.com/
- IBM: https://www.ibm.com/
- Meraki: https://meraki.cisco.com/
- Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/
- Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/
- Samsara: https://www.samsara.com/
- Sanjit Biswas: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjitbiswas/
- Uber: https://www.uber.com/
Timestamps:
(01:27 ) Meraki’s growth and acquisition by Cisco
(03:25 ) The "evaporating" exit strategy from Meraki
(04:42 ) Identifying the IoT market gaps
(07:38 ) The early keys to success at Samsara
(09:39 ) What does quality mean to Kiren?
(10:54 ) Building a customer-centric roadmap
(17:34 ) Early customer research and the failed fridge monitoring idea
(20:57 ) How a cheese producer helped create Samsara’s first prototype
(28:06 ) Balancing depth and breadth in customer profiles
(33:45 ) Developing customer trust to build feedback loops
(40:27 ) How “ease of use” became a growth secret
(44:23 ) Pricing strategies and market positioning
(51:51 ) How Meraki influenced Samsara’s GTM strategy
(57:19 ) Helping customers navigate change management
(1:00:48 ) How Samsara’s team evolved during rapid growth
(1:04:03 ) What AI means for an IoT giant
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