Samsara’s Rise to Vertical SaaS Leader and $1B ARR with Samsara's CEO and Co-Founder

I know this is a basic question but just to ground the world is there any downturn in the world of it I don't know because I don't sell into it ex right yeah tempar is there any downturn no it's very consistent because if you think about who these folks are it's the folks picking up your trash delivering food to the grocery store running the electric utility these are essential services so they're just constant right they're just running non-stop hey everybody at saster we have a treat this week I get a chance to talk to one

of my assassin Cloud Heroes sjet biswas who founded samsara two-time founder over 20 years I want to dig into but we've been talking on saster folks I would say a lot of folks in the public markets know samsar people have been chatting about it it's one of the High Flyers which I want to get into growing 36% at 1.26 billion in AR but we've been chatting about on saser before it ipoed as just a great vertical SAS leader and it has there's a lot of things I want to talk about but it has disrupted I

think in some ways a space that was midsized which is now huge right would that be accurate to sayx yeah yeah and so those so many interesting things here but before we go your customers we're going to dig into it your customers are in operations fleets trucks just I know this is a basic question but just to ground the world is there any downturn in the world of it I don't know because I don't sell into it right yeah is there any downturn no it's very consistent because if you think about who these folks are

it's the folks picking up your trash delivering food to the grocery store running the electric utility these are essential services so there's just constant right they're just running non-stop yeah so roughly just be it's just I I know you luckily you don't have to talk with all the it Debbie downers outside of AI but you're you are a market leader which we'll dig into but roughly your growth in part is tied to the health of the end consumer economy right which in the US is pretty good right it's it's overall it's pretty good right yeah

and it's just the size and scale the infrastructure that runs the planet so you got then consumers you got businesses you also just have the world of infrastructure which like I was saying it's utilities it's the roads it's all of this other stuff that's behind the scenes yeah that is going through this digitization process that it went through 10 20 30 years ago yeah and it I hate this metaphor but it's also helpful ground things in the beginning that digitization of the real world of Transportation of fleets like what inning are we in in terms

of like how archaic are some of the business processes you upgrade it's interesting because I I spent a lot of time out in the field with customers I was at a customer last week I literally saw an IBM as400 green screen system that they're still using to type in orders yeah meanwhile I pivoted like 20 feet and there's a warehouse robotic system that's like state-of-the-art so it's happening it's happening as we speak and what's interesting is some of these companies they're under 150 years old so they are transforming it just takes longer than you'd expect

because it's not like they're starting with a clean sheeet of paper yeah some and samsar is not that expensive I don't think but some of these folks maybe even have five or 10 year sales Cycles to fully create this business process change in that sort of main frame plus robotic mix environment yes and what a fascinating environment to be in so like sometimes you have to go figure out how are we going to make this API call to an IBM server and then turn it around and dispatch it to some autonomous vehicle they're experimenting with

yeah a lot of that is it's still crazy we have to build that stuff sometimes just build it however best we can yeah yeah it is interesting how much we still compete with spreadsheets and M Windows 31 as in the in the real world right outside of this little hurricane of like Hypertech of the B area yeah a big place so I want to talk I want to talk about all of that but before we get there just a couple minutes on something that I think about a lot I don't want to talk too much

about the very early days but maybe just two things before Sam Sara you had what back then seemed a stunning exit back in the old days when everything was smaller right you sold a networking company to Cisco called moroi for 1 point something billion I wrote it up and the V of the first saster post in like 2012 I couldn't believe it like it was such a it was like four years to a billion or something like that right crazy two questions one for real why did you guys do it again and two how do

you really context switch to a totally different domain like how do you it's fun to talk about over French toast and stuff like that but for real it's not that it's not that easy is it yeah so maybe just a little historical context moroi was the first start my co-founder John have been working together for a long time we met as grad students at MIT over 20 years ago and basically moroi was us taking our networking research from grad school putting it a box making it into a product that could go have impact in the

world so really fun project that turned into a company basically yeah um and we had never sold a thing in our lives so it was trial by fire we had to figure out like there was like literally what's a PO like there really basic questions we had to figure out and eventually we did figure out what a PO was and we got many more of them and that's what led to the exit and then we spent time at Cisco basically getting it to to run in the Cisco machine and get to scale so moroi now

Powers millions of networks around the world you go to a Starbucks you go to most big venues moroi access points it's really cool The Branding still there I see it is it still there today is it still it's CCO maroi but it's still they kept it yeah that's nice yeah and what was incredible about that is it showed us what it meant to have impact right like we believed Wi-Fi was going to be a big deal when we started doing networking research on in the early 2000s it was really cool to be part of the

process process of bringing it out to the world and having that impact so that's what got us excited we realized at some point Cisco wasn't for us it was very big company we hadn't built it and we were being asked to go work on other parts of it that weren't related to maroi so we said okay we've done our thing we've gotten to scale it's going to keep scaling which it has let's go do something else or take a break and at that point that was it we didn't have a plan beyond that there wasn't

like let's go do this other company we've been waiting to do we were actually tired like we hadn't taking a vacation ever so both of us took some time off both of us had just had kids so like young kids phase of life and that's when we started tinkering again that's what got us back into just building stuff and as Engineers we just like building things we like being useful and totally became fascinated by the world of operations and infrastructure because you're just curious like it's the world behind the curtain and at the time I

think I was interested in understanding like where do all the missions in the world come from I was just like asking kind of big curiosity questions and kept coming back to whoa this is fascinating like I'd never thought about how the roadways get built we never thought about how food gets delivered so anyway became fascinated by the market and the customer and and while we were tinkering we were basically building little sensor systems because we knew how to make Hardware we knew how to Cloud connect things and lots of interesting technology had happened in the

10 years that we've been involved or 10ish years that we were involved with moroi the cellular was everywhere we saw the beginning of GPU compute even 10 years ago like you could see the inference capabilities kicking in we just saw like what you could do with mobile apps like everything was new to us it was really fun so that's what got us into it but to your point we had never spent time in operations didn't know anything about the market and so it's actually good to go back to beginner's mind I think if we went

back to it it would have been tempting to just dust off the playbooks and run them over again yeah which rarely Works 10 years later so I think it was really good that we switched markets and did you find how did you get just in the early days just that Acquire brand new domain exp with 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 oldfashioned founder learning just get out there and it

was at the beginning was Show and Tell like we basically built the simplest Cloud connected sensor we could 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 sight to site we had a customer they were delivering there cowgir creamy since you're here in the Bay Area right like they make fancy cheeses they would lose like $10,000 of cheese when they deliver to Whole Foods cuz someone would leave the doors open and all the heat would come in got it that's a real problem so that was the process was just go spend time with operations folks they were very generous with their time they let us into their loading

docks and warehouses they let us be interns or Shadow them for a day or two and immediately we we just saw okay they're doing everything on pen and paper they're making phone calls to figure out where people are um if they have GPS tracking was like a breadcrumb that dropped every 15 minutes or 30 minutes it was super Antiquated and immediately we saw okay that's where we can go be useful that's where how we have impact got it got it so you honed it not quickly after the after they pointed you to the cowgirl trucks

and Everything You Off to the Races from there yeah and it wasn't just C like it was a couple of different folks across different Industries and you say okay this is like a industrywide problem and then we started like pulling on the string we like so how many commercial vehicles are there 30 something million in the US even more like there's 12 million in Mexico there's even more in Europe like 60 million said okay that's pretty big what are they using today old stuff year old technology and are they happy with it definitely not did

we know anyone else working on it no so there were a lot of kind of raw ingredients there and that's how we just got back into it yeah and so you your co-founder was John John bck but there were and I think there might have even been a couple other folks on your senior team that were from moroi right um what have you learned I've tried this experiment watch it I find sometimes it works sometimes the band doesn't want to get together sometimes they want to be CEO next time or they're on their own Journey

what have you what does it work to get the band back together and when does it maybe not work yeah uh it's a team that we love working with and so a bunch of us either knew each other from Rocky or even from before that we were just personal friends so that chemistry has to be there that sort of mutual respect and everyone wanting to do something a little different so Kieran who I think has presented at s couple times great a couple times he's running product now he used to run marketing for us at

morocc and he used to be an engineer before that so it was just hey let me go see if I can figure out how to do product and R&D um there's always a new challenge and then Ben who runs our Hardware team he did Hardware at M but it was different kind of Hardware right so he was like hey this is fun so there needs to be enough of a challenge that each person is engaged and has enough to do and then there needs to be mutual respect so people enjoy working with each other otherwise

it's not going to work you've got four members of your senior team who are all multiple times together right yeah that's the name Samar it's the cycle of reincarnation rebirth we thought it fit but actually not know I did not know that because it's the team it's the team being re re reborn yeah but actually a lot of our early sales leaders even our early reps a lot of Engineers like people we we all liked working together so that's what got folks interested they didn't know anything about operations either but we were like let's go

figure it out yeah you really can pull the Reps and the individual contributors together if the manager are like super excited they want if they're the best they want to follow them yeah it's funny I'm I'm trying to help through some founder conflict of a couple folks coming up on a 100 million today that are incredibly talented work together for a decade out eggshells with each other any tricks for keeping you I'm sure it's great but there must have 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 frictions I think it's always just being super real with each other like we've been friends now 15 20 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 hey 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 it is ego right we like to you need a little bit of it or you can't do this stuff you need some maybe ego is the

wrong term but you need a certain amount of self-confidence right because otherwise imposter syndrome can overwhelm you but it can be tough right yeah and that and we've been at this long enough that you try a lot of things and those are the two-way doors like it didn't work back up try something else and as long as everyone's okay with that like totally made a mistake on that like I often say that was the wrong call like we just messed up my bad but if you own it it's way easier to figure it out together

if you don't own it and people are like too afraid to tell you that's where I think those conflicts start to brew yeah for sure or even just finger when things are tough even just you you just what you said you've got to step up and take ownership number one right because everyone's to blame right for every shortcoming everyone's to blame that and as Founders and really as a CEO it is all technically your fault like you're the one who's responsible for it so let's go figure out how to fix it I found that help

and then I think the other piece is you you have to actually be spending time together like if you're all working in different corners and not working together on things that trust starts to erod so we we still all collaborate and and work on whether it's customer deals or products or we're always working together on things yeah now do you guys hang out on the weekends we do and uh probably talk on the phone every other night at this point that's a good that's that's my view of a great co-founder is it's someone you'd like

to talk to at the end of each day or every other day right when you enjoy catching up it's a a good sign yeah and and on the co-founder relationship especially as a company morphs as it goes from seed stage to 100 million and Beyond there are very few people who you can be totally honest and and open with because other people may have agendas or they're insecure you've all been in it together and anyway it's great to have buddies all right one more question on management then I want to dig in on samsara business

model but you've got so much energy it's been 20 years with the team how do you keep it keep the energy going and how of how do you I find that every five years you've gotta reboot your strategy and I don't know how long you have to reboot yourself but it might be at least once a decade you have to reboot yourself too so what have you learned about these this 20 year the samsara 20 years with these teams in this journey how do you keep the energy up and reboot yourself yeah it's you got

to install the software updates every once in a while otherwise you become that IBM Mainframe so uh what I found is it it is actually about challenge if you think about what it's like to build up experience imagine you went back to like fourth grade like you probably do everything in fourth grade like super easy I've got a nine 10 year old so I think about that a lot but it's challenging when you're in that moment because you've never learn multiplication or whatever it is once you accomplish it though you know how to do it

so it's important to always be challenged and I feel like as a as Tech Founders there's always a new challenge there's like a new market you're trying to enter a new product you're trying to build new integration new partnership whatever and you have to have enough challenge for it to be interesting and that's where the energy for me comes from is it's a puzzle like you want to solve it like you almost start obsessing over it of like I know there's a path here and once you unlock it you get this dopamine hit of wow

that was amazing let's go do it again let's see if we can 10x it that's what keeps it interesting like the numbers rack themselves up up in the background but really it's about solving challenges and puzzles and doing it in a way that's useful for customers and you still do we just before we started we're talking about how you're just out in the field with customers tractors and all that does that still give you energy does being out with customers does it give you an energy boost doing that oh yeah it's super fascinating I I

learned something on every single trip and like I said these are not parts of the world you get to see like how many distribution warehouses do you get to see robots running around in right super cool stuff going on there I saw we were talking about track before we started autonomous tractors that are controlled by an app right like that it's pretty futuristic so anyway each of these trips is really fun yeah I almost feel like it's if you don't at least in business stuff B2B if you don't gain energy meeting with customers maybe you

should find another CEO like it's it's not a CR it's just a sign right it's one it just it should just fill you with energy when you go out and Fascination when you have that factory visit right yeah and the fun part is I see more problems that can solve every time I get to set on site because you're like oh wow I hadn't even thought about that would it help if we had an app that did this or can we build you an integration that does that it it feels like you're being useful so

there's something deeply fulfilling about that at least for me and do you still get at your scale at 1.26 billion more when we do the next quarter how many of your ideas do you get out in the field just to help other folks how many times you come back a year or a quarter with an idea that actually goes into production oh pretty often and a lot of these are features right they enhancements or tweaks but they might be like wow and every once in a while you come back with something where you're like whoa

this could be really big and that's actually like everything we offer on the platform we came up with organically through these customer conversations we can talk about being multiproduct but it's really just solving multiple problems for the customer that if you like boil it down cool so let's talk about a couple things that I think just are really interesting about the business and I may be misdescribed it I'm just I'm just an observer but probably an unfair way to describe ssar in the early days is next Generation Fleet Management not completely fair but your customers

are in transportation y it's an old category you've got folks like Qualcomm and Verizon charging a lot of money for very limited capability on creeky Old networks I don't know what it was but it's probably a a couple hundred million dollar market right $500 million Market it pre samsara for all of the vendors sure for all of them right yeah uh what changed even you said there's 100 million vehicles in North and South America right but if you only got 10% penetration your product was creaky and expensive it's hard to get to 1.26 billion growing

some odd percent so the market this is what we all hope for as Founders is that between our Innovation and Market changes because sometimes it's got to be both right um it's got to change because you've unlocked a market that's got to be 10 10 maybe 50 times bigger than what it was before yeah so what we didn't create were the need for commercial vehicles those were there already and had been getting built up over 100 years what what you would find is if you stopped commercial trucks on the road and just looked what they

had on board most of them at least when we started didn't have a ton of Technology they weren't connected to the cloud so if you wanted to know where your Telecom field technician was you were making phone calls right the industry that did invest in it was Long Haul Trucking so you mentioned Qualcomm most people don't know this but qualcomm's original business was tracking trucks like it was the omnitrack system this is what got them you know building the predecessor to CDMA you can nerd out on this stuff it's really fasc they took the yeah

yeah in 91 if you to it tracking was their product at the time of they went on to do amazing things with chipsets and cell phones and stuff but anyway the in in interesting thing is it's an old market right so tracking trucks have been around 20 30 years it had been kind of Niche and what we found was that outside of Transportation people had invested in it so that's why it was so small it felt inevitable though right if you're delivering food if you were doing field service if you're even doing construction you would

want to know where your people are right so that was the it felt obvious to us but the dots hadn't been connected and the products were a little clunky like they had been acquired by private Equity the R&D teams had gotten hollowed out they' been frozen in time in other words and so if you wanted to take the Qualcomm omnitrax platform and stick it in your field service Fleet it wasn't practical you'd be dealing with a bunch of wires it was very expensive it just like wasn't worth the the effort and and that's why people

hadn't done it meanwhile in in the consumer World door Dash was happening Uber and lft and like all this real-time tracking so you knew it could be done and it was like okay how do we bridge that Gap yeah I hadn't really thought about that but you already saw the example it exploded in consumer right from Uber and dur Dash Why can't that be in fleets in the business side why can't everyone have that identical functionality why not EXA part of the unlock and that was part of the unlock but to your point earlier around

you do want this kind of Market Tailwind behind you like the Market has been growing for us at a pretty hefty rate and the reason is because everyone is a consumer they're all seeing this modern technology in their hands in their mobile phone and so on and they're asking the question of how do I get this for my fleet of 5,000 Vehicles this seems obvious how do I make it happen then they end up engaging with someone like us yeah they they ask and it's also great marketing too right if you can leverage it right

this is what we should we can deliver this to your Fleet right we can deliver what that door Dash and it was an uberit and all we can do this for your Fleet in a week it's a pull P that maybe didn't exist right right but do in a way that it's going to work for your Enterprise and be set up with the right hierarchy and structure and security that's the Enterprise side of things right yeah the interesting thing for us was actually that was the entry point but then our biggest product now is a

driver safety coaching product that uses cameras and AI to basically help break risk prevent risky things from happening on the road that was not in the cards when we started the company and so that was customer feedback loop happening that's not something that you see Uber and and door Das and lift do because it's much more of an Enterprise use case yeah let's talk I should know more about that I don't but I get it the whole driver coaching process monitor it using ey health safety whe they've been on the road for too long there

all that stuff can be done that in managing a fleet their status right same buyer different buyer same budgets different budgets same sales teams is that yeah same budget yeah yeah exactly it's operations budget so if you think about you're the VP of operations the co you're running this big operation you're trying to just make sure your field operations are efficient and safe yep and and then you've got a bunch of budget tied up with that it tends to actually be a very high Opex industry so if you think about what it cost it's not

a high margin from a profitability perspective but what it cost to operate a food delivery Fleet a huge amount of the operating costs are your trucks and your fuel and your people and the insurance and so if we can go help with that the same buyer cares and so our same sales rep can talk to you about it yeah because it's always it's always interesting if you can sell to the same buyer it's easier to get them on the phone if they love you if your MPS is high challenge is sometimes you don't Lo unlock

as much budget as if you found someone else in the organization who has different budget right but maybe the non obvious thing here is the Ops budget so large you were able to just tap into more of it was is that is is that the answer yeah that's right so in these industries it's hard to come come up with a general number but the vast majority of the operating cost is in the Ops budget like it's cogs right if you think about it from a p&l perspective yeah and so for them like anything they can

do to reduce their accident costs reduce their met a customer last week $45 million of fuel spend a year that's a really big gas bill if and we cut it down by almost $2 million as a byproduct of another program that we're running with us and so that's the kind of thing that makes them really want to do more with us this is super valuable tons of Roi let's do more like what else can we digitize and I probably should know this too but now that your brand is pretty dominant you can challenge me you

could say it's not dominant our Tam's eight trillion but I would suspect it's dominant in your niche market 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 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 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 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 these very large companies do this that's the interesting flywheel effect as well if you're let's say you've got that customer they're on a they're on a a dated platform they're going to switch over to you for telematics in two years but they're excited they buy safety today what do you get by combining the data from driver safety and from telea what do you get more out of two data sets or combined data set

um that you don't get from the Standalone like how do you combine those data yeah so safety is a great example an accident happens you want to know why it happened where it happened all that kind of stuff if you have the telematics as well you can see was their foot on the accelerator of the break how fast were they going were they on a route were they on shift for eight hours so there's a lot of context there that's related to the telematic side of things it seems you're a good salesperson even though you

didn't know what a PO was that seems like a no-brainer if I bought in if I it almost seems like safety is almost more important because telematics is an understood space I've already bought into in safety of course I want them integrated there would have to be a dramatically better reason to use another vendor right because the integration is so powerful because accidents are what percent of fleets have an accident 2% a year 3% a year it's way higher than that because more than 3% oh my God know what it is imagine you had a

thousand trucks in your Fleet it's just like something is happening somewhere right yeah and this is just like the side effect of scale so that's by the way why our customers have safety managers but to your point like really these two feel obvious that they should be together but once you put those two things together don't you want to also see the trailer or the construction equipment don't you want to see these other work like it it starts swirling around you say wow there's a lot of value to just getting these onto one platform yeah

and can you I know I've written this up but can you help me think what was in your mind in terms of sequencing these products obviously you get you're meeting with customers you get excited if you're in y combinator everyone's telling you not just spread yourself too thin and focus what you're learning on timing you've got how many core products you have today we have multiple products we've had them for a relatively long time so I think we started working on the Safety Products we must have been somewhere around 20 Mill 10 to 20 million

in ARR I see which for us happened really quickly we went it's still on the S1 but I think we went 117 close to 70 so it was like a very sharp hockey stick it was fast but the customers that fast yeah so the customers were asking us about safety they were said this is an amazing telematics product is there a camera that you recommend that you integrate with really well that didn't exist in the market people using there probably wasn't any great so we built them one and that's how the second product came about

so it's actually more about listening to your customer than it is like product or not like it wasn't T exhaustion you just it was just making the site much making the product much better yeah just solving more problems for the customer and and again is we run this 8020 filter once you start hearing like 80% % of customers are interested in something you should probably do it right like it really is a is a good sort of adjacent fit so that is interesting so for your suite for your products it wasn't really about layering with

your with deceleration and anything it was about customer pull like how can I make this sweet period just let me build it as fast as I can at a quality level what the what 80% of my customers are demanding yeah and if I step back and I look at the telematics product which was number one it's over 500 million in AR it's growing north of 30% not out of Market at all like we're probably the largest player from a revenue perspective in these areas but there's still so much Market ahead of us that's not the

issue it's hey can we just do more for the customer yeah that is interesting I don't maybe I didn't know if it was broken out but if you're at 30 something percent for telematics your initial product it's this isn't about it hasn't it isn't growing more slowly right we can see others like at HubSpot which is great they're slowest growing products marketing they they own the market right it's at a billion in ARR and it's growing in teens right but sales is growing 30 something percent right but your core it is interesting your core is

growing great it's growing your company's growing in the 30s at 1.26 and the core is growing in the 30s yeah right and and that's what you need to sustain growth at scale right like you actually need a lot of things growing fast which is its own challenge like how do we keep investing in all these areas while doing new things there's lots of trade-offs and balances but yeah there's a lot of growth that's possible here all right one more thing on this because I I actually learned a lot it's so helpful one of the things

you said you've said is that and I was just trying to tie this all together but the majority of your new bookings are from new verticals outs yeah so maybe is that accurate yeah I think that's right about I think in the last earnings call we talked about 133% of our bookings were in transportation 87% the complement was everything else it's crazy right construction utilities Etc so are those and those are and talk about how that transition happened because it it's a the I get the 8020 on the product but going into brand new vertical

is not easy right even if they sound the same like construction they're not the same absolutely yeah and and construction is pretty different than food and beverage right like 20 different businesses so what we discovered was most physical operations companies have fleets of some kind right they might be little delivery vehicles they might be technicians but they're people that have to move around so that's a common element but these businesses are very different construction cares about very different things in field services which is different than Long Haul Trucking so what we did at the beginning

was say let's go get up on our feet in what we call Transportation warehouses so Logistics and Trucking and food and beverage which are actually very similar right like big trucks right once we got the hang of that we said okay what would it take for this to be really useful for someone with a big field service Fleet HVAC repair or elevator technicians or something like that they don't care about trailers they don't care about about long hauls right like they're out driving 8 hours but they do care about safety they care about maintenance so

we we started saying we can borrow 80% of the platform and bring it over and that's how we expanded so it took us probably three to four years to do that systematically we just went for adjacent vertical after adjacent vertical and then we covered most of the market it's very rare that we come across in the industry we've never seen before now got it and juu I know it's a little bit nerdy or tactical but did you put new GMS in in charge of it did you create little pods how did you attack these different

vertical I would think of them more as campaigns so we said okay we want to go win and 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 specialize the sales team and we never specialize the product teams except public sector public sector has a different buying cycle right and they have like different contracts

so government sales 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 same sales team no GMS selling in construction HVAC food and beverage and fleets yeah and so the GMS are more focused on the product so they we have a someone who manages safety or telematics and compliance those sorts of things yeah no it's inter I I appreciate it it's I'm not saying I don't know that this breaks any rules but it is slightly different than what what most folks

try to specialize they try to break teams up specialize um but you have you haven't had to do that you've made it all work keeping it together a lot of Founders would like to not do that a lot of Executives would like to not have to do that I I am always a fan of let's keep it simple we do we would run Salesforce reports that would cut by industry vertical so we look at what's our win rate look like here what's the price that clears the market there does it need to be different what

features that like so it's important to look vertical by vertical or industry by industry but like you totally split off the teams like how do you set the quota right are those sales reps going to feel successful it's way better if this sales rep can win a bunch of deals over here and then pick up a couple of deals to to say okay I'm able to open up the construction market so that's how broke into it in adjacencies sometimes it's hard that let's say you want to go into construction samsar is such a powerful brand

but you're new to a vertical there's off there's always a couple entrenched competitors maybe they're 20 years old maybe it runs on Mss but they're there and they know the market they the people they know the market cold so sometimes that rep that wants the deal can just never talk the market the way that 20-year-old vendor can so sometimes it's harder for the to cross those lines than you might think without that specialization yeah and we've totally had to learn a second language multiple times the key though for us has been have a couple of

wow features that that market has just never seen so whether real time tracking or AI in the camera or apps there would just be things that Legacy player was just it wasn't on the road map even and we just demo it live over zoom and the prospect would say okay you don't really speak my language I get that you're from this other industry but I could really use that feature that sounds great I love that's a great Insight I call them 10x features but maybe they're really wow features at scale right which is you can

just open up the laptop or open up zoom and boom you just any anyone you can train anyone on that wow feature right this is what you got to get an expert in demo the wow feature get him in and get him in the door where they just have to have it it just doesn't exist in the incumbent and it has to be genuinely useful there's like eye candy and stuff like that but are you doing something that really gets the prospect excited you're solving a real problem for them all right one last nich one

because this is so interesting can we talk about going up market and not going up Market if I if I have my metrics again I am a student but lot you've talked a lot about going more Enterprise more 100K deals and mathematically it's tough to get to 10 billion in AR probably without more 100K deals and you go but but talk about the smallest on if I have the numbers more more Enterprise tell me about that but 10 to 100K deals are still 39% of your revenue and the little ones are eight and I don't

know how many of the eight grow into the 39 and grow into the 40 sorry 40 some odd but how does that all work together and how do you focus because you're going up Market but also the long tail still wants samsara yeah this is the conundrum you get in like you want to go up Market but but the long tail if they love you I always worry about leaving the long tail behind yeah it is hard to be everything to everyone and so serving someone who has you could technically have a fleet of one

it could just be you driving you probably know where you are so we're not going to be super useful in that context but if you have 10,000 we're super useful so what we deci said is we're going to focus on people with complex operations now the interesting thing there is you might have 10,000 trucks we have customers who have 40 50 vehicles but they're in four different states so they view their operations as complex or they have Hazmat or they have something else going on that makes their operations complex we are a good product for

them because they get a lot of value from all the software the reports the apis all that stuff if you have a really simple operation you probably can get by with a relatively inexpensive like basic product and just go back to doing your business right so we we can't serve everyone we focus on the kind of Enterprise and the mid-market sections but we'll go down to someone who's an 8K customer that's okay um but probably you're going to resonate with us if you got something complicated going on I see that's that is interesting line complicated

you I I don't know the whole Market but there's probably really low end mobile apps you can track one or two people on your phone it's 20 bucks a month or 30 bucks a month right and yeah exactly there's no complexity there for the three of us that's right yeah and that's fine what we discovered though is the resonance was so strong because the bigger the companies get the more com kind of complex stuff there's going on and they will often buy the smaller folks and roll them up so there's this weird that happens in

physical operations private Equity is quite powerful in terms of providing Capital to to basically get bigger and bigger so the consolidation effect in Tech it's the other way around startups that that grow get big in operations these are asset intensive labor intensive Industries they tend to actually consolidate and and so anyway it's been a dynamic that's been a little different than what we experienced before got it that is super interesting I I like that complexity line that's a very that's a learning for me a very helpful way to understand it right if it's complex they

have Enterprise is issues yeah maybe not the same as a 100,000 Fleet customer but Enterprise is naughty issues to solve that you should be able to extract some amount of value for right right yeah all right last one I have a lot more but I don't want to keep you forever we T talk we started this conversation of is there a downturn in Sam sar's world the answer is no the the numbers say it but I needed to hear the co say it let's talk about real world AI with real world customers that are driving

fleets and HVAC systems and constru C and are busy I know you've talked a little bit about the role of AI and in looking to dat at samsar but what's really happening with to C what's your what is the AI story at samsar at a tactical level and do customers care are customers out in the fields saying to they need more AI they need more chat Bots and chat gbt and their in their field management product what do you think what have you learned on AI no I I think AI is this incredible enabling technology

so our customers do not go sh shopping for AI and gp4 enabled Bots like that's just not their world or their language what they are trying to figure out is how to reduce risk on the road AI is super useful for that because you have all this data right you actually know where people are driving how long they've been on shift if they run stop signs right they're all these like leading indicators of risk that you're like okay this is likely to or do they speed a lot that's a great one if you have all

that data you can actually get out in front of the risk and coach driver the only way to sift through like gazillions of hours of GPS traces is to have ai right the AI finds the Insight in the data and then you need to actually have the workflow to take the action so AI is a important step in that process you got data you got insights and you take action if you close the loop for the customer you eliminate the risk or you cut it way down that creates the value right then they want to

go do more so now they're saying great can you help me coach my drivers on fuel efficiency AI is great for that right see that that's how we think about it so enabling technology that's getting better and better at a cheaper and cheaper price right these models are incredible for what you can get and llama's free right like it's like how many times has this happened so AI is very strategic and very important for that reason but it has to be in context of value right otherwise it disconnected from everything but there there have been

a step change in AI but extracting structured data from these disperate data sets I you've been doing that since day one at some level right so has AI led to any magic any any wow moment in the product or is it mostly in in the background in terms of constant Improvement yeah the wow moment for us on the safety side which I mentioned earlier was around so we built this dash camera we ended up putting AI in it and what the originally I was doing this is 2018 2019 was detecting mobile phone use wh while

while you're driving oh that's a good one as a consumer we we've all done it we've checked our message that comes in or whatever imagine you're driving your company truck it's like a big rig or something that you're taking a crazy amount of risk and it's a bad habit yeah so these companies all had policies do not use your mobile device while on shift Etc there's no way to enforce them what this would do is actually just provide a beep like a coach like a coaching moment it would break the Habit right so that was

our first like mainstream use of AI was basically a convolutional network like a image recognition kind of model and that now seems really basic right like now we have a model for drowsiness that looks at your state of uh how long you've been driving all kinds of stuff yeah but even basic AI had a ton of value there and that's how we got into it cool all right last question anything coming out in the next 12 months or so that you're just extra excited about as an engineer what do you any any big feature any

big expansion a what gets you what is there a wow moment coming out that you're excited about just U building up that last one we were talking about we just rolled out the drowsiness detection it's such a powerful feature because people get tired on the road it's daylight savings season here in the US we're going to see that shift happen we had one customer we piloted with they said they they're a very large company and so they had people basically say we were getting drowsy on the road they turn on the coaching they haven't had

a single drowsiness incident in a whole week right and they're driving long distances in the middle of West Texas where there's no lights so that's the kind of thing where you're doing something that's saving lives feels really fulfilling and as an engineer you're like what else can we do now so that that's one if I just had to pick an example that's a cool all right son this was so great again I big inspiration to everybody for all the success and I actually learned a lot I learned a lot about keeping the team together about

going multiproduct about Enterprise that were a little bit not obvious and maybe for what it's worth more different than other folks and it might look on the outside so this was super helpful so really appreciate your all your time we'll we'll check back in at let's see one we're at 1 point two what's 1.2 times we check back in around five billion sounds good all right thanks for the time okay thanks Jason