Sanjit Biswas on Product-Market Fit, Sales and Building Samsara for the Long Term

Sanjit Biswas tells Harry Stebbings that his first technology project brought his California high school online in the early web era. Unable to obtain a student roster, he typed names from a yearbook and helped make email and the school newspaper accessible through browsers. The project taught him how differently people use technology and the value of making it approachable.

Biswas describes this as an early example of doing unscalable work with limited resources. At MIT, he and co-founder John Bicket later installed antennas on roofs for a research network. As a company grows, however, a founder must stop doing some beloved tasks personally and build a process others can operate.

He periodically “rehires” himself by writing a job description for what the company will need in the coming years and comparing it with how he spends time. At Samsara, he says, this means continuing to meet customers and shape the long-term product roadmap while stepping back from every product review or quarterly business review.

Biswas and Bicket began Meraki as researchers who expected to become professors. Becoming a CEO and managing engineers for the first time felt uncomfortable. He treated the startup as a large project, worked backward from its next goal and learned through trial, error and listening.

Meraki began technology-first, with an idea for large wireless networks and community Wi-Fi. Investors challenged the lack of a clear business model. Although customers paid and revenue grew, the financial crisis made the need for a clear return on investment more apparent. At Samsara he says they began instead with the customer and a scalable problem to solve.

Meraki initially bootstrapped to nearly $1 million in revenue. The team raised venture capital partly to finance hardware manufacturing and to hire people at salaries above graduate-student levels. Biswas says they could have grown more slowly, but investors found them and offered another path.

He acknowledges repeating a technology-first mistake at Samsara: a machine-vision product for inspecting factory lines worked technically but required customized installation and lighting. It did not fit the company’s repeatable, plug-and-play model. The experiment ran for a year or two and was relatively small, he says.

For product-market fit, Biswas advises showing early ideas to customers and listening for an unmistakable reaction: a user asks to see something again or calls a colleague over. He treats that as an early signal, not proof of a complete product. He also values customers’ willingness to pay as evidence that a business problem matters.

Stebbings warns that arbitrary user counts can be mistaken for fit without retention or usage. Biswas says fundraising pressure may lead founders to declare fit too early. He prefers honest feedback, including customers proactively asking whether they can buy what they have seen.

Samsara’s first major product tracked vehicle fleets by GPS. Customers then repeatedly asked about dash cameras that worked with the same system, so the company built a safety product when the first line was around $10 million in revenue, according to Biswas. The products can be bought separately but provide additional context together.

To decide whether to follow customer requests, he uses an approximate 80/20 rule: build for needs relevant to a broad share of customers and partner on specialized requests. A grocery delivery requirement may not apply to construction or local government, while repeated requests across industries and geographies can justify a platform product.

Biswas rejects the description of himself as a sales savant but says founders have a sales advantage: they understand how the product is built and can discuss a customer’s problem dynamically. Direct contact also informs a roadmap years ahead. It remains valuable at scale, although one founder cannot visit every customer or industry.

During the pandemic he used video calls to meet customers across locations without losing days to travel. Later, he resumed on-site visits and brought colleagues from different functions, including people operations. He shares photographs and notes internally so teams can understand customer environments and ask further questions.

Stebbings asks whether educating traditional physical-operations customers is too difficult. Biswas frames it as partnering with customers on change, recalling fleets that once planned routes on wall maps. He says accumulated experience can help guide later deployments, including driver-reward programs. Claims that products save lives or transform safety are his company perspective, not independently established outcomes in this interview.

He describes midmarket sales cycles as often under a quarter and major accounts as taking six months to a year. Samsara demonstrates a product, lets customers trial it and then negotiates. He says sales efficiency improves as representatives ramp and processes align more closely with how customers want to buy; these are company-specific observations.

Sales representatives may take a couple of quarters to ramp while learning customer industries and building a pipeline. When hiring, Biswas generally gives more weight to experience with a similar deal size and sales motion than with the exact industry. He distinguishes rapid transactional selling from longer consultative enterprise sales.

He describes sales hiring as a continuous expansion of a direct-sales model rather than a one-time burst. Stebbings argues every function works better in person; Biswas says a small startup benefited from sharing a room, but flexible work expanded Samsara’s access to talent and brought teams closer to customers across time zones.

Biswas estimates the available talent pool expanded many times when hiring beyond the Bay Area. He says the gain outweighed reduced team communication bandwidth for Samsara and reports improved sales productivity over time. The estimated multiple is his judgment, and the interview does not establish that remote work alone caused the productivity change.

As a company grows from dozens to thousands, he says hiring becomes more specialized but the quality bar should remain high. Great candidates can come from unexpected industries. He favors a team where many people perform well and share knowledge, rather than relying on one celebrated individual.

His hiring mistakes include choosing a person whose experience fit a much larger company but not an early startup, and moving so quickly that references were missed. He looks for effort, collaboration and practical problem-solving. An individual contributor need not enjoy managing people, he says, but still must work constructively with others.

Biswas sees the CEO as a chief allocator of capital, especially the time of employees. Meraki often focused on the next survival and revenue milestone; at Samsara the founders planned for much greater scale. He says research and development should fund current products while also planting ideas one to three years and further ahead.

He considers taking product and geographic risks a strong allocation decision. Samsara began its safety-camera work when the first product had roughly $10–15 million in annual recurring revenue, and later entered Mexico and Western Europe. He says safety became its largest revenue product; that is a company claim at the time, not a guaranteed trajectory for future experiments.

Previous experience and trusted colleagues helped the founders move faster the second time, Biswas says. But he cautions that repeat founders are a selected group who chose to do it again, and that investors should not exclude exceptional first-time founders. Long-term bets are uncertain even when the team has relevant experience.

His weaker capital-allocation decision was continuing the machine-vision experiment after signs that manual installation would prevent scale. He says the cost was in the single-digit millions and that staff moved to other AI and camera work. A product can work for individual customers yet still be hard to sell profitably as a repeatable product.

People decisions can be less obvious than technical failures. Biswas uses a “keeper test”: if a person were leaving, would the manager try to retain them? He says a poor fit does not mean the person lacks worth or ability, and the individual may also recognize the mismatch.

After Meraki’s sale, Biswas says financial security reduced worry for his family. He and Bicket could fund Samsara’s seed stage themselves, allowing them to move without raising a seed round. He sees money in the business as a way to reinvest revenue and fund further products rather than as an end in itself.

The CEO role began to feel natural when he recognized that his job was to lead the whole company, not just act as engineer or salesperson. He continues to work on allocating time to strategy three to seven years ahead. As a parent of young children, he values face-to-face time and activities that teach curiosity, creativity and persistence.

On AI, Biswas expects well-capitalized companies to have advantages in infrastructure while startups can compete in applications through fast feedback and creativity. He predicts frontline work will remain important and that AI may change more back-office jobs, with potentially more fulfilling work emerging. These are forecasts, not established employment outcomes.

He says Samsara has used AI in dash cameras for years and describes potential applications in workflows and risk detection. As its CEO he has a commercial interest in those products; the interview does not independently quantify their effectiveness. He also discusses his admiration for Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and lessons in direct communication from investor Doug Leone.

Biswas offers impressions of electric-vehicle adoption in Norway, China and the United States, including slower uptake for heavy trucks. The percentages and causes he mentions are not sourced in the interview and should be read in the context of the 2023 conversation. He says public-company reporting consumes around 5–10% of his time and requires calendar discipline.

Looking ten years ahead, he hopes Samsara will offer many applications for physical operations as vehicles, robotics and AI evolve. His estimate of the economic scope of those operations and his product vision are forward-looking claims, not independently verified market sizing or a prediction of actual company results.