Announcer:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're Inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership, and vision and global business; The dream-drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism, right here, right now at the NYSC and at ICE's exchanges and clearing houses around the world. And now, welcome ... Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
According to the CDC, eight in ten Americans begin every day with some caffeine. Over the course of my career, I've had the opportunity to meet people from every walk of life, and can attest that the uniting factor of early-morning meetings across disciplines are the ubiquitous cups of caffeine. It has been my preferred method of caffeination since those long days and longer nights working on political campaigns in the White House. The particular composition of the styrofoam of the White House Mess' to-go cups really felt good in the palm of my hand.
That's why, (and it's no surprise to me, anyway,) that some of the biggest technological breakthroughs came out of the quest for caffeine. The webcam was first used to monitor the Cambridge University coffee pot in England, used by programmers and researchers who couldn't be bothered to make late-night trips to the break room only to be met by disappointment. On our side of the pond it was at Carnegie Mellon, the institute named after two of the people, (Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon, who made their fortune here at the NYSC,) that a different problem required a technological solution.
According to computer scientist, Tom Lane, and I'm going to quote them here: "In the mid '70s, expansion of the department caused people's offices to be located ever-further away from the main terminal room where the Coke machine stood." It got rather annoying to traipse down to the third floor only to find the machine empty, or worse, to shell out hard-earned cash to receive a recently-loaded, still warm can of Coca-Cola.
One day, a couple of people got together at Carnegie Mellon to devise a solution. That solution was to install sensors inside the Coke machine that would be connected to ARPANET, (a precursor network to the modern internet.) This launched the first internet-of-things device, and changed the relationship between the physical and digital world forever.
I don't know if our guest today, Samsara's CEO Sanjit Biswas, has a preferred caffeinated beverage, or is among the 20% who abstain. But his incredible success dates back to his own innovative experiences connecting people and things to the internet while in graduate school at MIT. Our conversation with Sanjit Biswas on his professional journey, the growth of Samsara, and the internet of things is coming up right after this.
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Josh King:
Our guest today, Sanjit Biswas, is the CEO and co-founder of Samsara, which trades under the ticker symbol "IOT" on the New York Stock Exchange. Prior to founding Samsara, he was CEO and co-founder of Meraki, which was acquired by Cisco back in 2012. Welcome, Sanjit, to Inside the ICE House.
Sanjit Biswas:
Thank you, Josh. Happy to be here.
Josh King:
Were you surprised that IOT was available as a ticker symbol considering how many companies and exchange traded funds have been hyping the concept for years as one of the next big things?
Sanjit Biswas:
To be honest, we were very surprised when we heard it was available, and I think I told our general counsel, "We have 10 seconds. Grab it. Just go for it."
Josh King:
How has it worked out?
Sanjit Biswas:
It's been great, and it's been fun being a public company, seeing Samsara's name on the floor and on the ticker itself. But it's honestly a little bit surreal.
Josh King:
Do you use that IOT in marketing, and has it helped in the conversations you've had with customers and relationships?
Sanjit Biswas:
We have, and I think people are familiar with the concept of the internet of things. It's an idea that's been around for some time. We're one of the first companies to make it real at scale. So that's been fun to be able to connect this concept which has been around with products that are now having real impact.
Josh King:
We do our research here at Inside the ICE House, Sanjit, and we realize that the term "IOT" was coined in 1999 by MIT's own Kevin Ashton to describe connecting physical objects to a network. But as I talked about in the introduction, the idea began years before it really had a name. Do you remember your first interaction with computers and networks?
Sanjit Biswas:
I do. I've grown up around technology my entire life. My dad was an electrical engineer and actually was a computer science professor for some time, so I was lucky to kind of grow up in a computer science department. I don't think there was anything internet connected in terms of coffee machines or Coke machines. There was definitely a lot of caffeine, to your earlier point. That's probably part of the fuel here.
My first exposure was probably when I was six or seven years old, just tinkering around and trying different things out, and I fell in love with it because it's one of these things where technology that you can really experiment with, it's a feedback loop. You just get into it. So that was my first exposure, and it's kind of been compounding ever since.
Josh King:
Where was he on the faculty? And working to emulate your parents' role model, how did that interest in following them lead to you beginning your career in computer science while most kids really are still mastering tying their shoes?
Sanjit Biswas:
Tying my shoes was also a different challenge. I think I mastered it eventually. But for me personally, I grew up in Texas in the 1980s. My dad was a professor at SMU, which is based in Dallas. It was kind of a lucky break or a head start, because not a lot of people had computers in their homes back then. They were pretty expensive, and they were honestly pretty exotic and rare. But because he was a professor, we had a computer at home and I got to play around on it.
I think it was really in high school that it took off for me. We moved to California, (to Silicon Valley actually,) and one of the projects that I worked on as a high school student was getting my fellow classmates online. This is in the mid 1990s. The internet wasn't really mainstream, the worldwide web was just kind of coming online. And I think that was what brought it together, this idea that technology could have impact for people. I got to see people seeing email for the first time, seeing the web for the first time, so that is really what has driven me. I just got lucky that my dad happened to be involved with computers so early.
Josh King:
This kid, Zuckerberg, wouldn't come along for years at this point. But you're building websites and email addresses for the entire school district. You spent your free time writing papers on new ways to improve info security. I think you also scored 1600 on your SATs, and then suddenly found yourself with an employee ID card at Oracle when you were 16. Where did that drive come from? And at the time, did you realize your path was far different from your classmates?
Sanjit Biswas:
The drive for me has always been seeing people use the technology and enjoy it. And that idea that you can change people's lives by giving them new tools, giving them new ways to communicate, it's so fundamental. And this has been an amazing time to build a career. For me, seeing the birth of the internet in terms of its mainstream adoption all the way through to the point now ... I don't know how many billion people are online. I think it's five or six billion is the last stat I saw. It's absolutely incredible. The world is completely changed, and I was just very lucky to be born at the right time to see that happen.
Josh King:
One of your Oracle colleagues, Sanjit, said about you once, and I'm going to quote him here, "The only time where his age became apparent was when he had to rush out of work so his mom could pick him up." So, how does a 16 year-old learn the skills to not just do the work of an experienced computer engineer, but also fit in with employees that might be three times your age?
Sanjit Biswas:
I think the great thing about computer engineering and just writing software in general is people truly do focus on what you're building and what you're making more so than who you are or where you came from. So I remember even as a high school intern, (I think I was actually 15 at the time, which is why I didn't have my license yet,) there was that initial, "Hey, this kid's in high school," kind of resistance I guess to a conversation. But within 60 seconds you were talking about something with the latest computers, or something with the latest programming language, or getting into the details.
So it never really was an issue. In fact, looking back on it, I was just really lucky that I was able to engage and interact with these amazingly smart, brilliant programmers at such an early age. Because it showed me that there were people like me, there were people who had gone on to build pretty impressive systems and do it at scale, and that was a career path.
Josh King:
So perhaps going against traffic of what happens to a lot of people who end up in the Valley at places like Oracle, you leave Oracle and then head over to Stanford where you spent a lot of time going through, among other things, the archives of Andy Grove. And we had on the podcast earlier on in our run from Kleiner Perkins, the legendary John Doerr, and he mentioned the impact that Andy had not just on him, but on Larry Ellison. Is that who introduced you to his concepts? And how did that jumpstart understanding how to run a business and shape what would eventually become your leadership style?
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, I think it was really just a general interest I had in entrepreneurship and these folks that were building tech companies. So, we moved to California to Silicon Valley, and everywhere you looked there were artifacts of that. There was the Apple campus. So, the Apple founders went to the high school next to mine, probably 20, 30 years before me. There were these big tech giants like Oracle that were popping up. There was Sun Microsystems, where I did another internship a little bit later.
So there were all these amazing stories of people like myself who were engineers, taking these ideas, building products and seeing them launch in the real world. So I started reading books. I remember I read a ton of books about Bill Gates and Microsoft, I read about Apple. And then I found my way to the Intel and the HP stories, who were also kind of local legends. That's when I started really resonating with this idea of technology entrepreneurship as a pathway to have impact, and I think it was along those lines that I found my way to Andy Grove and Bob Noyce and some of these other iconic founders and operators of these tech companies.
Josh King:
At some point, Sanjit, you're at Stanford when you make your way 3000 miles east to my hometown of Boston, and you're meeting John Bicket, who co-founded both companies that you started. I'm sure you didn't suspect that the two of you would build multi-billion dollar businesses, but when did you realize that he was someone that you could successfully partner with?
Sanjit Biswas:
That was another incredible stroke of luck. I met John my first day of grad school. We got assigned to the same research lab and the same research advisor, so we started working together on research projects. And as a first-year grad student, you honestly don't really know what you're going to work on. You know the area that you're going to specialize in, (for us it was computer networking,) but you don't know the exact research project.
So a lot of it was this process of exploration, kind of figuring out what we both found interesting. And at the time, John was working on this big wireless network called Roofnet. That was an area of interest that he had, and our research advisor, Robert, suggested, "Hey, why don't you guys work together on this and see where it goes?" We thought maybe it's a six-month project and maybe we'll get a paper out of it. We ended up working on it together for the entirety of our time in grad school, close to five years, and it became just an incredible opportunity to build, and we learned a ton in that process as well.
Josh King:
For our listeners who don't spend time in Cambridge and can't imagine what life on the MIT campus or the various labs are like, tell us what Roofnet actually did. And it actually became the basis of your decision to drop out of MIT and start Meraki, if I'm pronouncing that right.
Sanjit Biswas:
That's right. So Josh, I think it's helpful for listeners to go back in a time machine a little bit. We were starting grad school about 20 years ago. So, early 2000s, and the technology that we were tinkering with was what's now known as wifi. So back then I had a technical name, "802.11", and we saw an interesting possibility of building a really big wifi network that would cover the entire city of Cambridge, and that's what Roofnet was. And the name is not the most imaginative. We had this idea of putting antennas on roofs, and so we said, "Let's call it Roofnet."
So the Roofnet project was a research project, and the way that we built the network out is we were giving all the grad students in and around MIT campus, (and all the way up to Harvard, actually,) free internet. And if you're a grad student and you know what it's like to live on a stipend, every dollar counts. So it was a welcome project by many, and we were able to get hundreds of students online. Again, this is 20 years ago, internet was relatively expensive, wifi was a new technology, but we got to see how you could take this brand new technology and have that impact and really affect the lives of people.
So that's how Roofnet got started, it scaled up. And then Meraki, which was our first company, was founded with this idea of: How do we take this technology and put it in a box so that other people elsewhere in the world outside of Boston can experience it? And that's what Meraki was all about. Again, we thought it was going to be a couple of months. "Let's see where it goes. Maybe we can get a hundred networks built this way." We had no idea it would become a multi-billion dollar enterprise that's still running and scaling today.
Josh King:
To help run it and scale it, you added Hans Robertson from EMC and continued that work driving down the cost of it. How did Meraki's success introducing this $50 alternative to a $1,500 network hardware really changed your life, and really the entire tech sector?
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, for us it was about thinking about things in a different way. Technology like wifi networking had been evolving for some time, but it was very, very complex. You basically needed to be a PhD in computer science to set one of these networks up, and that was really what was holding people back.
The chips were around, the interest was there, people were getting online, but it was really difficult to build a network, (and especially a large-scale one with service for hundreds or thousands of people.) So, Meraki really made that easy. We were the first company to connect that kind of hardware to the cloud, make it plug-and-play, and then make some really nice, easy-to-use interfaces so you could see who was on the network, how much bandwidth they were using, introduce security to the network, those sorts of things in a very easy, turnkey sort of way.
So that's what Meraki was about, and it was just an idea when we started. We just thought this was the obvious way to build networks. We honestly didn't know any better that there's a traditional way to build them, which involved the command line and having to set them up over months. We just thought, "Hey, shouldn't all networks be plug and play?" It seemed obvious to us.
Josh King:
And it must have seemed obvious to another pretty smart guy, John Chambers, because he starts to look around and Cisco eventually writes a check for $1.2 billion to acquire your business. Pete and I in doing the research, Sanjit, came across the email that you wrote to the company that detailed the process of accepting the offer, including breaking the decision down to both its qualitative and quantitative components. Why did you decide with your employees to be so transparent with the company? And is that the methodology that has allowed you to make some of the most important decisions after that?
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, it was really a reflection of our culture, and it's a principle that we brought with us to Samsara, which is our current company. We were always operating as a team, and for us, teams are built on trust. You go through a lot of hard times together, and you go through a lot of victories, too, but that trust comes together and it's built over time.
We didn't want to destroy any of that trust that we'd earned with our employees, and I've always felt that it's important to explain to people why we do certain things. Not just what are we trying to do, but why are we trying to do it, and this was an important moment for the company. So, when Meraki was being acquired, we thought it was important to explain to all of the employees why we decided to make that merger happen.
Josh King:
So the merger does happen, I guess we're around 2015, and you announced that you had brought the old Meraki founding team back together to form where you currently are, Samsara. How did the mission to find the best French toast in San Francisco lead you to start a connected operations cloud company?
Sanjit Biswas:
We just talked about how Meraki became part of Cisco. That was about 10 years ago in 2012. We spent a few years there making sure that the business was going to continue to scale and we could have the scale of impact that we were excited about. And then in 2015, I would say that our work was really done in terms of integrating Meraki's technologies into Cisco as a business, and then setting the team up there to continue scaling.
John and I hadn't taken a vacation in years. In fact, I think we went just straight from grad school into Meraki. It was a whirlwind, and we decided just to take some time off. Really it got to the point where we got bored, and the way that we kind of cut through that boredom is we would get together for brunch or coffee on a regular basis, because it was just such a novelty. We'd been so busy, we'd never had a chance to explore all those restaurants in San Francisco that you see those lines out the door on, and it was a great time just to reconnect as friends and reintroduce ourselves to the world of tech.
So that's kind of what we did, and French toast became a running joke. We're huge nerds, and we're kind of quantitative by nature, and we wanted to start keeping track of who had the best brunch in San Francisco. The two of us lived about a mile apart and there was, I don't know, a dozen restaurants. So we had a spreadsheet where we'd want to make sure we tried out every restaurant, and we needed a benchmark and all of them had French toast. So that's the backstory on the French toast.
Josh King:
So now we're at Samsara. Samsara means "the cycle of life and rebirth", which is a reflection of this being actually your second company. But it's also your vision as a rebirth of physical operations, like from ICE going from analog to digital, you going from analog to a digital discipline. Again, for the audience that might need some help following along your thinking, explain why operations was so slow to adapt technology and why the sector really was so ripe for digitization.
Sanjit Biswas:
So, what we saw at the beginning when we were starting Samsara was an opportunity to, again, have impact with technology. We really started this company market-first. So with Meraki, as we talked about, it was our grad school research and it was really technology-first. We wanted to see the technology go have impact. With Samsara we said, "There's this entire world of physical operations."
We'd gotten to see it up close because we were selling them wifi gear and seeing what their warehouses and factory floors looked like, and I remember distinctly setting foot in some of those environments and just noticing it was like setting foot in a time machine. You could have been in 1985 or 1995, pen and paper everywhere, big maps on the walls people were using to plan their routes, things like that. And we just saw an opportunity for technology to come in there and completely transform it.
And you asked why was that the case. Well, I think a lot of it was that this market was underserved. We didn't know anyone, (at least in Silicon Valley,) thinking hard about this world of fleet operations, or manufacturers, or other kinds of logistics companies in terms of bringing them the latest technologies. We knew a lot of people building enterprise software, networking hardware like we had, and then consumer technologies, but no one was focused on physical operations.
So that's kind of how we started, was customer-first. And then we sat down and said, "Well, we're the IT people. We have that background. We don't know the first thing about how you all run your physical operations. Could you teach us?" And it became a partnership and a feedback loop, and that's really what has been the key to Samsara's success.
Josh King:
Are you just cold calling? Leaning on relationships? How did you open these doors to basically show you what their problems were that you thought you could fix?
Sanjit Biswas:
It was actually an easier process than one might think. We did try every tactic you can imagine. We picked up the phone book and called all of the food and beverage distributors that were within a 10-mile radius of our office, we called everyone who had a friend or relative that was semi-involved in physical operations, and we just kept our ears open. We were out there to learn.
What was great is that these initial prospects and beta customers were more than willing to bring us in and show us how their operations worked, because they were hungry for technology and change. No one had been living under a rock. They had smartphones in their pockets, they were online in their personal lives, and they were saying, "Well, why are we still running our businesses off green screen terminals? It doesn't make sense."
So that's really I think the partnership that made Samsara work, was in that first year these folks basically just showing us: How does food get to the grocery store? We had no idea. And once we saw it, we said, "Wow, there's an opportunity to make this so much better. Real-time traffic, real-time GPS location, understanding what you're delivering and in what order." All these things make a huge difference, and no one had built them that technology. So that's how it all came together.
Josh King:
Operations may have taken decades to modernize, Sanjit, but Samsara wasn't the first to break into basically using sensors for industrial use. So, what was your business plan to create a better product than anything that had been on the market at the time?
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, I think we started with this idea of bringing data together and putting it together in a connected operations cloud. So instead of just sensor data that sat in a siloed system somewhere and got recorded to a database, how do you open it up? And what we saw when we got close to these customers is they might have had sensors in the refrigeration units to make sure their food was kept at the right temperature, or they might have had a route-planning software system that they used to understand where they were going to make deliveries, but they'd never put those two systems together because it was very difficult to integrate them.
So that's the other key insight that we had, was it's not just about internet-connected sensors; It's really about data, and making sure that data can connect and have impact in lots of different ways. So that was the breakthrough that I think made us a little bit different, is we wanted to make it a platform as opposed to a single application or a single database.
Josh King:
So if you look back at your bibliography or your ovra, in 2016, Sanjit, you wrote part one of the two-part post about Samsara's introduction of a new generation of wireless sensors. The second part was published just a couple of months before the company's IPO here at the New York Stock Exchange in 2021. Considering that we need to upgrade our iPhones and computers every six months, how were you able to design a product that can stay on the job remain competitive for years?
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, that EM21 was our first sensor. It was a temperature sensor, and it was really informed by those customer conversations I mentioned earlier. I still remember conversations I had with Cowgirl Creamery. They were a beta customer of ours, and Revolution Foods was another beta customer of ours. They basically showed us that they were writing down the temperature of food for food safety every half hour or so, and it was just resulting in piles and piles of paper. So that's where the EM came from.
And like we were talking about earlier, the value was in the data even more so than the hardware. It turns out temperature sensing hardware hasn't changed a lot. Once you figure out how to read a temperature digitally, you've kind of got it. The question is: What do you do with that data? So we found that once you had that data in the cloud, you could use it of course for the food safety logs. You could use it to understand, when something was out on the road, was it also being kept safe? Were people leaving the delivery doors open? That sort of thing.
So what was really fascinating for us is that that initial use case has remained there, tried and true, and then we were able to build on top of that. So we added GPS tracking, we added driver safety cameras, we added equipment monitoring, and a lot more. So between 2016 and the last year or so we were very busy, but it was building out the platform from a single sensor to an entire suite of products.
Josh King:
After the break, Sanjit Biswas, the CEO and co-founder of some Samsara and I will discuss how Samsara is transforming operations further and continuing to improve. That's all coming up right after this.
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Josh King:
Welcome back. Before the break I was talking to Sanjit Biswas, the CEO and co-founder of Samsara, about his early career in the development of the technology underpinning both of the companies that he founded. Sanjit, we started this conversation talking about the history of the internet of things, or IOT. Do you think the technology now exists to meet the expectations of what we've all seen as the IOT hype machine? Are we at peak IOT, or do we have a long way to go?
Sanjit Biswas:
I think there's still a long way to go, and these initial use cases are exciting, the idea that you can have HD video of your home and you can see it from your office. But I think what's really going to be transformative is when all of this data can come together and find insights for customers, and help do things they didn't even know were possible. So the hardware is first how you get the data into the cloud. Then it's all about AI, and it's about data processing, and it's about connections to other systems to get value from that data.
Josh King:
So, zooming into Samsara, why is right now a potential inflection point for your own growth plans?
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, I think it's about the customer, and customers are ready for this kind of transformative technology to be introduced into their environments and they're trying to figure out how to make it happen. The first couple years of Samsara was just about finding that foothold. What are those initial use cases where this new technology can have the impact?
And now we're starting to reach that next level where our customers are saying, "This was great. The first project we did was awesome, it resulted in a lot of business impact. But now let's take that data, let's take that information and improve our end customer experience. Let's improve our fuel consumption. Because the price of the pump is expensive, but also we're trying to reduce carbon emissions. Let's improve our safety in our operations." Those are the kinds of next-level projects that we're excited to be part of.
Josh King:
Building the technology doesn't help unless you do have those customers who are willing to engage with it. How do you stay connected with them to understand how to improve your products, and also educate them that they could have an impact on reducing their carbon footprint and be participating in new solutions that are coming to the market?
Sanjit Biswas:
I think the key is making time. So for myself as a CEO, I'm very busy. I've never been this busy in my life. But I try to take two days a week, (usually Wednesdays and Fridays,) to do things like Zoom calls with customers, or if I'm lucky, to actually just go out on-site. And it's the same way we learned in the first year of the company. It's keeping your eyes and ears open, listening to them about their challenges. And that's where we hear about the day-to-day challenges like carbon emissions reporting. This is a new phenomenon that a lot of large companies are trying to figure out, which is: How do we go and quantify our Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, and then see if we're making progress towards our goals?
Same thing with the labor shortage. There's an incredible labor shortage going on in the world of physical operations. These are hard jobs, there's not a lot of people out there who want to do them. So our customers are trying to figure out: How can technology help get new folks into the workforce, and ramp them up and make them as productive as possible? That's not something you normally can find in an industry analyst report, but it's something you can absolutely see firsthand when you go and visit a customer.
Josh King:
So you're a kid from Dallas with incredible work experiences and educational experiences in Silicon Valley and Cambridge. Tell us about one of those recent Tuesdays or Fridays that you can talk about, and what it was like, and where you found yourself landing, and what part of the country, and what you learned.
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, the easiest for me is to visit customers in Northern California, which is where I'm based. I'm near San Francisco, and I had an opportunity to go out on-site with the AAA of Northern California. You probably have seen the AAA trucks out on the roads. They do a lot of breakdown service for consumers. And it's fascinating because you get to spend time with the technicians, and AAA is a services business. You want to show up on time, you want to make sure you take care of people, that they feel safe, and you get them back on their way.
It was incredible to spend time with them and hear how much effort they put into delivering great customer service, and that they didn't even know it was possible to get real-time GPS data and traffic data, and understand the estimated time of arrival so they could better service their customers. That's the kind of information that you get here when you're out on-site. So I was lucky to just drive across the Bay, spend time in one of their depots. And we actually did a training with their drivers, and it was incredible to see their eyes light up and hear how excited they were to be able to better serve their customer.
Josh King:
In a similar vein, I'm curious about your integration strategy, and how does integrating with other companies help clients, (for instance, like Liberty Energy,) to operate more efficiently?
Sanjit Biswas:
Yeah, Liberty Energy is a great partnership story. They're a customer that basically provides services out at oil fields. They are in the energy business, as you can guess from their name. They have these huge pieces of equipment that are roughly the size of 747 jet engines in terms of their size and complexity. So for Liberty, they wanted to know first where all these assets were in the field, and then they wanted to understand: Were the drivers that were moving these assets around being safe? Either during their shifts while they were working, or when they were headed home to their families.
And then they wanted to understand: Could they become more efficient in their business? So what Liberty did with Samsara is they deployed our platform, they got full visibility into those physical operations, and then they accomplished multiple goals. They were able to improve their driver safety records and get people home safe, and they were also able to identify a $10 million tax savings by taking that real-time GPS data, matching it up with where they thought they were doing business and where they owed taxes, and optimizing it, making sure that they were paying the right taxes in the right places.
It sounds simple, but at their scale it was massively impactful. So a $10 million savings came out of that project, and they didn't even know that was going to be possible when they started. So that's the kind of impact you can have once you get this data up into the cloud.
Josh King:
Of the things that you mentioned, reducing your carbon footprint. In the old ESG lexicon, that's a good E. Working on the safety for energy, that's in the S. Anything else in the ESG space that is worth noting about how Samsara helps their clients?
Sanjit Biswas:
Well, I think a big part of ESG is getting that data. So understanding the emissions data, whether that's Scope 1 or Scope 2. I think it is the safety data, and how do you turn that into a workflow or new habit for your team so they can fundamentally reduce their risk out there? And then even on the governance side, once you have these workflows and once they're in the cloud, you can implement more streamlined processes. So that's another area of huge impact.
I think there's a lot of desire and interest in trying to figure out how to make these changes happen. The how is really important especially in physical operations, because it's labor intensive. There's a lot of people, there's a lot of work going on. So anytime you can save folks 30 seconds here or there, it adds up. You start to see minutes, and then hours, and then days of labor being saved. It makes the whole world more efficient, and that's something that we've seen not just ESG, but everywhere, is: How do you take this data and become more efficient?
Josh King:
Talking about becoming more efficient ... A couple months ago, Sanjit, you spoke with Derek Du Preez ahead of your company event, and one of the topics that you touch on is the opportunity for customers to use Samsara to improve happiness and safety around everything from COVID-19 to driving. Does this best encompass the type of impact that you set out to make?
Sanjit Biswas:
Absolutely. I think in terms of impact, there's so many different areas you can have impact. Safety is something that I think is close to all of us, which is that we all want to make sure that we're keeping people safe and communities safe. We talked a little bit about Liberty Energy. Another customer that just came to mind was Chalk Mountain. They're another oil field services company. They reduced their preventable accidents by 84% by deploying our driver safety coaching.
So that means helping folks be a little safer on the roads by speeding less, making sure they're wearing their seat belts, making sure that they're just developing good habits, not looking at their smartphones when they're at a stop sign or a traffic light. Those sorts of things, they all add up, and safety is something that I think we can all appreciate. No one wants to get into an accident. It's not good for you, it's not good for the other person. So that's an area that we've had a lot of impact.
And then efficiency ... Being able to save people time, it means that they can put their efforts to more productive uses. They can have a more fulfilling workday, and maybe they can get home a little sooner. So that's another kind of impact that we're all proud to be part of.
Josh King:
You and I both keep our eye on what's happening in the economy today, and a lot of high-profile tech companies are announcing major cutbacks due to a series of crises that the global economy is facing. Why is Samsara taking the opposite strategy and have been vocal about encouraging investment in this environment?
Sanjit Biswas:
For us, what we're seeing is the work we're doing is especially relevant given everything going on in the economy. Just to get into the details a little bit, fuel prices are still near all-time highs. They've come back down a little bit, but we're still talking north of $5 a gallon for a lot of our customers. So, being able to get sensors out there with real-time information, being able to re-plan your routes, be more efficient in your routes means that you're able to save hundreds of thousands and in some cases millions of dollars on fuel, and that's incredibly impactful to our customers.
So we're starting to see record numbers of customers come and sign up with us, and to serve them well, we need a bigger team. We need to scale our company up. So it's not that we're investing blindly. We're investing based on this feedback loop of having more customers to serve, having more projects to work on, and trying to build more technology to have even more impact.
Josh King:
As we wrap up, Sanjit, you've now led a public company for almost a year. I'm curious how the rigors of being a public company CEO might have changed, (or not,) your leadership style from the years that you've spent running startups.
Sanjit Biswas:
One of my learnings from running startups over so many years has been: You kind of have to rehire yourself every year. So for me this year, it is rehiring myself as a public company CEO. There's a lot of demands on my time. Our customers, as we talked about, I like to spend time with them out in the field. There are technology and development teams that I want to stay close to and make sure we're building the right products. And now we have investors and analysts and other constituents out in the investment community that we also want to spend time with. So figuring out how to balance time has been a challenge, but it's something I'm excited to take on.
Josh King:
It's been about 15 years. Thinking back on our conversation since you were at MIT and took that leave of absence from academia to begin your corporate career, for someone with your drive to succeed and complete what you begin and hire yourself every year, are you ever tempted to go back and finish that PhD in Cambridge?
Sanjit Biswas:
I have to wonder if my mom put you up to asking that question. But MIT gave us I think a 25-year leave of absence. I'm 15 years into it. I'm still technically on leave, so you never know. Maybe I'll go back and finish. But my guess is the technology has changed a little bit in that time.
Josh King:
Well, mom, that was for you. Sanjit, thanks so much for joining us Inside the ICE House.
Sanjit Biswas:
Great. Thanks for having me, Josh.
Josh King:
And that's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Sanjit Biswas, the CEO and co-founder of Samsara. Remember NYSE ticker symbol: IOT. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us, and if you've got a comment or question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or Tweet at us @ICEHousePodcast. Our show is produced by Pete Ash, with production assistance from Ken Abel and Ian Wolf. I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next time.
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