Sanjit Biswas 0:00 

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

David Novak 0:22 

You can build fast, you can scale smart, but if you're not solving the right problems, what's the point? Welcome to how leaders lead. I'm David Novak, and every week I have conversations with the very best leaders in the world to help you become the best leader you can be. My guest today is Sanjit Biswas, the co founder and CEO of Sam Sarah. It's a company that helps digitize physical operations and logistics so they're safer and more efficient. This isn't Sanjit first rodeo before this. He co founded Meraki and sold it to Cisco for over a billion dollars. And what drives him is the mindset he calls big eyes, big ears. I gotta tell you, I love this phrase so much, and I just wish I'd come up with it, and you're gonna love it too, because it's all about staying close to your customer. You watch what they struggle with, you listen to what they can't quite articulate, and when you do you uncover the problems that actually need solving. Stay tuned to see how he does it, plus how Sanjit is thinking about AI and his business and the hiring tip you're going to want to use in your next interview. So let's get into it. Here's my conversation with my good friend, and soon to be yours, Sanjit Biswas,

you got to ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange in December of 2021 when you took Sam Sarah public. Now what's a behind the scenes story of that experience that you've never told anybody? 

Sanjit Biswas 1:54 

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

David Novak 2:40 

and you you've built $2 billion businesses with your co founder, John, John bickett, and I want to learn how you two make decisions. So I got to know, how did you decide that you were going to be the guy to push that button and ring that bell and not him?

Sanjit Biswas 2:58 

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

David Novak 3:43 

It's It's something else. See, everything else. That's a great reason why, you know, and you know, I can't wait to really dig into, you know how you're leading at Sam, Sarah, but, but first, Sanjit, I want to take you back a little bit and start at the beginning. What's the story from your childhood that shaped the kind of leader you are today. 

Sanjit Biswas 4:03 

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

David Novak 5:04 

Yeah, that's amazing. You had that insight so early in your life, you know, it's, you know, and you feel like that was driven from your your background with your father, 

Sanjit Biswas 5:12 

I think so. And, you know, it's hard to say where, which influences cause, which decisions and actions. But I was really fortunate that, you know, even back in the 1980s when computers were pretty expensive and hard to get a hold of, we did have one at home because of his work, and he was always around to answer questions, curiosity questions, and I was able to kind of go down the rabbit hole early as a side effect of that of just, well, how does this stuff really work? And, you know, what could you do with it, that sort of thing, fantastic. And this was really hard for me to believe, but I understand that at 15 years old, you were hired by Oracle. What's the key lesson you picked up from that experience? Well, yeah, this is my first job as a summer internship that I got at Oracle. I don't think they knew I was 15 when I interviewed, because it was like a coding interview, and it was, it was all very technical. I think they figured out when I showed up and it was my mom that had to drop me off because I was too young to have a driver's license. So that was, that was definitely interesting. I learned a lot in that first job. I actually still have pretty vivid memories of everything from the code and the technology to the team that I worked with. It was again, the first time really seeing a company. Then this idea that you could get paid to basically do your hobby. It was programming. Was a hobby of mine at that point, and it was really interesting work. And you got to work with really smart people. That was energizing in a really deep way. And you were the youngest engineer to ever be hired there, as I understand that and and you've had a rocket ship career, you know, do you think that really taught you how to deal with people that are more experienced and older than you? And how do you think about that now? Because you're still a young guy, I'm sure you got a lot of guys older than you that work where you Yeah, you know, for me, it's never actually been about age or even years of experience, is actually what do you bring to the table in terms of the discussion? So if it's a technical discussion, what ideas are are you kind of debating or navigating? I think when it comes to business discussions, we have a lot of really young sales people that are very close to our customers. I want to hear them out. So I've kind of learned to ignore the age component of it. There's a lot that comes with experience where there's some wisdom there, but so much of it is the type of experience and your insights and your knowledge. So maybe that was a deep learning from back in my 15 year old days. You know, you then go on to Stanford to get your undergrad, and what impact did that have on the way you think as a leader going to a school like Stanford? Well, first of all, it was an amazing undergrad institution, right in terms of the breadth and the sort of diversity of ideas that are thrown around. One of the things that I loved about Stanford is it is very strong in both the humanities and the sciences, right? So you have engineers, you have people who are just out of this world in the liberal arts, and that balance of sort of numbers and and sort of qualitative or ideas, or you know that that side of things, that balance, is something that I really took away from that experience. And even when I look back, and this is now, 25 years ago, some of my most formative experiences in college were actually not necessarily my computer science classes. It was when I took like a Zen Buddhism class to fulfill a requirement. I thought I was being very clever, because I think that class fulfilled two requirements at once culture and religion or something like that. But just some of the philosophies have stuck with me decades later, and so really thankful that I had that experience and an experience I wasn't expecting to have. I went in thinking, Okay, I'm going to take as many engineering classes as I can, but I'm really glad that I had that sort of well rounded side of things as well. So how do you think about hiring people now, when you think about right brain, left brain, you know, do you look for the balance or, you know, how do you how do you think about that? Well, we want the whole brain. So, you know, there's there folks that are really good at, again, the kind of quantitative side of things, the numbers and the math and so on. But their ability to apply it to understand, how is this going to benefit a customer, or, you know, change their world, that's what makes that engineering innovation relevant, right? So I think that's important on the R D side, and then similarly, on the kind of sales or marketing side, you need to not just have great sort of marketing ideas or a clever tagline or something like that, but you do need to understand what's having an impact. So I think there's a really important balance between those two. I agree. And you know, after Stanford, you made the move across the country to get your PhD at MIT,

David Novak 9:43 

another very good school. And now I got to ask you, you know, when you're surrounded by some of the smartest people in the world, which you certainly were with at Stanford and MIT, what did that teach you about working with and leading other really high performers? So you know what? Do you what do you think is the key to working with people like that?

Sanjit Biswas 10:04 

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

David Novak 11:24 

speaking of Meraki, this was the company that was your first company, and you can almost say that was almost formed by accident. I don't know that may be going a little bit too far, but talk about that. Talk about Meraki.

Sanjit Biswas 11:36 

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

David Novak 13:00 

goes back to your your middle school idea that you have, you know? Yeah, it comes full circle. That's amazing. How do you think you lead differently given your engineering background and perhaps leaders with a different skill set and background? Yeah,

Sanjit Biswas 13:15 

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

David Novak 14:03 

customer experience. You know, when you see these areas that maybe you're not as strong at whether it's sales or maybe it's working with the investment community, I don't know what. You know, we all go through things for the first time. How do you go about sharpening your ax?

Sanjit Biswas 14:17 

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

David Novak 15:27 

that almost takes me my next question, you know, as an engineer, you know, as well as anyone, nothing is perfect on the first try. Okay, it's all about version two, version three and so on. What do you do to create a work environment that embraces that kind of iterative approach?

Sanjit Biswas 15:46 

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

David Novak 16:31 

You know, I've heard you describe your your company culture as shared code. Explain what you mean by that.

Sanjit Biswas 16:40 

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

David Novak 17:21 

Have you gone about really identifying the behaviors or the operating principles that you know that if you execute them, you know you're going to get results?

Sanjit Biswas 17:31 

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

David Novak 18:37 

these eight operating principles, you know, I call them our how we work together principles when I was at young brand. So you have these principles, what do you do to to recognize people who actually execute those principles? And how do you, how do you build your HR system or your compensation system around those? Or do you we,

Sanjit Biswas 19:00 

we try to operationalize them in a few different ways. So at the very beginning of the process, which is the interview process, we actually interview based on those operating principles. So behind the scenes, we kind of assign, you know, different principles out of Hey, see if you can figure out how they built for the long term, like ask them for an example of that, or how they adopted a growth mindset, or something about them, their customer centricity, those are things you can filter for at the beginning, and then, like you said, it's what you recognize and what you reward is also really important. So we ask for nominations. So we have different awards and different teams, and we'll try to align those with the principles so SO and SO adopted a growth mindset. Here's an example of how they picked up a new skill, or, you know, something like that. And then what we talk about at call it a town hall, like a, you know, a broadcast meeting that goes to 1000s of our employees. That's also important, because that sets the tone that says, Okay, that's really important to the company.

David Novak 19:55 

You know this better than most. Obviously, you know the best solutions are. Are almost always the simplest ones are the ones that you can simplify. Can you tell me a story of where you've you've pushed the team to eliminate unnecessary complexity?

Sanjit Biswas 20:10 

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

David Novak 21:21 

That's cool. I love that. And I want to get to samsara in just a second here. But, you know, I want to go back a little bit to Meraki. You know, what do you think were one or two, the one or two smartest strategic bets that you made that really helped the company scale?

Sanjit Biswas 21:40 

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

Koula Callahan 23:05 

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David Novak 24:03 

You know, it's interesting. You know, you mentioned earlier you didn't know how to sell anything, and when you're starting a company like that, you know, how did you really get the company to learn how to sell? I mean, you know, you got all these guys that could make all this stuff that nobody could understand. But how did you get the make the strategic shift to really drive sales?

Sanjit Biswas 24:25 

Well, I think most engineers are driven by a love for solving problems. They want to see their their hard work, have impact, and so they want to see their technology used. In other words, when we connected those two dots, that sales basically translates to customer impact. People using your stuff. Everyone got into it, even engineers who had no interest in selling. Everyone wanted to see, okay, what's the customer using? Like, did they turn that feature on? Like, wow, this thing's getting like, you know, 1000s of users, that kind of thing. So connecting that feedback loop to the engineering teams and not making sales a bad word or something, a different team does. Was, but we're all in this together. And by the way, those sales, those dollars that come from, those revenue dollars get reinvested right back in the company, means we can build more product, right? And so going back to this idea of being ambitious, we felt like, well, okay, if you want to build a lot of stuff, you're going to need more than a handful of people. You're going to need a sustainable, you know, R and D effort. The way to do that is not necessarily raise more and more venture capital, it's actually go get your sales engine running so and have a reasonable set of margins and all that stuff. So you have a sustainable enterprise that you can keep reinvesting in for for a long, long time.

David Novak 25:35 

And so you build this Meraki into a billion dollar business. It's your baby. You know, when you, when you talk to entrepreneurs, it's like, you know, I mean, they're so passionate what they built, and it's their baby, and you love it like a child. There's no question about it, you know. But you end up selling it to Cisco. How hard was that you to do? I mean, you know, take us through how you made that decision.

Sanjit Biswas 26:00 

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

David Novak 28:18 

How do you feel when you walk into Starbucks, did you see your imprint

Sanjit Biswas 28:23 

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

David Novak 28:31 

Yeah, that's cool, you know, How'd you figure out, Sanjit, you know, you sell the sell the company, I think, for $1.2 billion so, you know, that's that had to be exciting, but How'd you figure out what you wanted to do next?

Sanjit Biswas 28:45 

Well, at the beginning, we just spent our time making sure that we integrated the products well inside Cisco, so there was no plan to do anything next. But, you know, within a few years, it was pretty clear that this this was working right, like the products were growing at an even faster rate than they had before. So that was excellent to see. And at the same time, Cisco said, Hey, you guys have done a great job with this. Are you interested in their headquarter down in San Jose, California, we're in San Francisco. Do you guys want to come down to San Jose and take on some more of the business, like some of the other parts? And that didn't feel like it fit for us, because, you know, we're not professional operators in the sense of, we come in and we run your business that you've already got. We're builders. We want to build something from scratch. And so we said, Okay, well, that's probably not for us, but it's not like we left with the here's the next idea we want to pursue. For context, John and I basically hadn't really taken time off, you know, Meraki was an intense experience. So first thing we decided to do is, like, take a real vacation. And I remember, for me, personally, we just had our first child, so had a, you know, baby around that kind of thing. So I was just thinking, like, I'm just going to take a little bit of time to reset. You. And my initial thinking was actually to go back to academia, because the two of us left without finishing our PhDs. We were all but dissertation. We were just like, right there at the finish line. Long story short, we realized academia wasn't going to be for us, or at least I realized it wasn't going to be for me, because the feedback loops really long. It takes months to find out if your paper gets into a conference, and then, you know, it's really hard to see people use your stuff. So, you know, I figured that out the hard way. Actually wrote a paper, got into a conference, etc. John was, he's way smarter than me. He's like, I knew that wasn't going to work for us kind of thing. But after a couple of months, we kind of went back to our our kind of curious selves outside of it. So we were just kind of curious about the world. Found ourselves really fascinated by the world of operations, and that's ultimately what led us to start samsara. Was that same curiosity that got us excited about Wi Fi a decade earlier, got us excited about operations, because we were just wondering, like, how does all this stuff

David Novak 30:58 

work? You know, I've heard you say, take the time to get bored, you know, I think that's where a lot of great ideas come from. You know. Say, more

Sanjit Biswas 31:09 

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

David Novak 31:56 

tell me about Sam, Sarah, give me a snapshot of the business you lead today.

Sanjit Biswas 32:01 

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

David Novak 32:57 

sure you probably know this Sanjit but, but you're what they call a duo corn. You know, you're someone who has built not one but $2 billion businesses from the ground up. You and You know, Sam, Sarah, you've grown an extremely rapid level. What is it about how you show up as a leader that's helped make this possible. I mean, if you're going to try to define, you know, the the a couple of differentiating things that you do, you know, what do you think it is? Those are big businesses you've built?

Sanjit Biswas 33:33 

Yeah, you know, it's really hard to pinpoint, but I've kind of thought about this over the years of well, and I've studied leaders like your listeners have, right? Like I've listened to so many podcasts, I've read so many books. And one interesting takeaway is, everybody needs to figure out their own authentic style or form of leadership, right? And so, you know, there are things that that we have natural talents at, and I try to, like, focus on, like I said, the product side and the customer side. And then there are things that you're not so talented at. And for me, sometimes it's actually communication, like, I'm great in terms of a one on one communication, like, I enjoy getting to know people, but communicating with 1000s of employees is actually really tough because you can't read their faces, you can't engage and interact with them. So that's the kind of thing that as a leader, I've had to try different ideas and iterate a little bit. But again, leadership is really a personal sort of fit, like everybody's got their own leadership style, and then it's also a contextual fit, like the way you lead a tiny company, a startup that has a dozen people, versus the way you lead a company with 1000s of people is a little bit different. You kind of have to figure it out along the way. So for me, that's been a big takeaway. What was the

David Novak 34:47 

biggest thing you figured out Sanjit went from going from 12 to 1000 and what did you have to what was that thing that you know, you had to learn, maybe the hard way

Sanjit Biswas 34:57 

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

David Novak 35:46 

So you double, triple the size of the company. What process did you put in place to really get the culture seated with everybody? I mean, because you're right, you're bringing every people in from meta, Google, you know, all these great companies,

Sanjit Biswas 36:00 

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

David Novak 36:55 

be back with the rest of my conversation with Sanjit Biswas in just a moment. You know, I love how Sanjit develops his strategies by looking at customers needs, and it reminds me of another fantastic way to approach your strategy, and that's by using war games. This is an idea that UPS CEO, Carol Tomei shared with me, and I think it's something every leader should have in their toolkit.

Carol Tomé 37:17 

I love war gaming as a part of strategy, so the first time we did it, everybody thought I lost my mind. But what I asked the team to do was to assume the personality of one of our competitors and to attack us and to tell us what the attack plan was. So they did, and the attack plans were super scary and really thoughtful. So they attacked, and then I said, Okay, now assume the persona, or return to your UPS persona and fight the attack, because by fighting the attack, it actually created opportunities for initiatives and growth. It's a really, really clever way to think about strategy.

David Novak 37:56 

We just released my conversation with Carol Tomei on YouTube. So subscribe to The HAL leaders lead channel or find it wherever you get your podcast. It's episode 118 here on Hal leaders lead. You know, something I know you push your team on is, is discipline. You know, define that in SAM Sarah terms and how you lead that way as a CEO.

Sanjit Biswas 38:19 

Discipline has, many different forms, but it's ultimately about for me, it's at least about sustainability. So if we take financial discipline, for example, there's always a temptation to spend a little bit more aggressively, whether it's like on product development or marketing campaign or something, but if you overspend, you're not going to be able to do that over and over and over, which means that, like, what worked for you this year, you probably can't keep up for five or 10 years, because at some point your your finances wouldn't, wouldn't tie right? Would? They wouldn't make sense. The same thing, by the way, applies to the way you build product. Like, sometimes you can duct tape something together and throw it over the fence and that might like, you know, help in the short term, but it's going to blow up on you a little bit later. Doing that right thing for the long term benefit is, for me, at least what it means to have discipline. So it's just something that I've seen play out so many times. It's a lesson I've learned the hard way. And so I just want to make sure everyone else is able to save a little bit of that, that sort of pain, and just benefit from that.

David Novak 39:17 

What's a big growth opportunity that you see for your business right now, and how are you attacking it and getting the organization galvanized around it?

Sanjit Biswas 39:26 

Well, for us, we're very focused on artificial intelligence and really how it can be practically useful to our customers now, AI is a very buzzy concept, but I think it's buzzy because of its potential utility. Like it's basically this idea that now the computer can give you leverage on intelligence like it can think for you and for a lot of our customers, they are short staffed, like they could always use some more headcount, you know, whether it's to help improve their safety or help fill out tax forms or whatever it is. So this idea that AI or the computer could. Help with those tasks is really profound for us as a company. We've been very successful with products that that have little bits and pieces of AI, but we're now infusing it across the board, bringing that to market, educating customers on what's possible, and then actually making it happen is something that we're all focused on as a company. It requires real effort and rethinking how we do business internally, like, how do our internal processes run when we take the benefits of AI, it requires really kind of hitting refresh mentally, and it's a big effort for us. You know, you've mentioned

David Novak 40:32 

customers over and over in this discussion, and you know, you're an engineer, and engineers are not necessarily supposed to be customer focus, but you definitely are, for sure, you know, what rhythms do you have to stay connected to customers?

Sanjit Biswas 40:47 

Well, for me, it's a treat to be able to interact with customers. And that's actually one of the best side effects, or benefits of scale, is we have customers all over the world, in every potential industry that we want to serve. And so you get to go on site on these like, fascinating on site tours, right, and see how their operations run. So that's what gives me a ton of energy. It also gives me a lot of new ideas for what other products we can build. So when we get on site, I always tell people, like, big eyes and big ears, like, let's see how these operations really run. Let's listen to where those pain points are, because sometimes people can't say, I need a product that does x, but you see them doing something in a difficult way over and over, and then you say, Well, if we could build you technology that just did that for you, would that be great? And they'll usually say, yeah, absolutely. So I love it in terms of helping me understand what problems need solving next. And you see that usually the patterns become really clear if you can get out there. So kind of back to kind of practicality. For me, I just try to get on the road, maybe not every other week, but every third week, I'm just out there trying to see it for myself, and then share that information with everyone that I can inside the company. Big

David Novak 41:58 

eyes, big ears. I would have ripped that off, and I would love that. I told everybody that, you know, what's the best example you could share where you had big eyes?

Sanjit Biswas 42:08 

Oh, well, lots of examples, you know, one of them that takes me back to the very early days of the company, when we started samsara, we didn't know that the products that we've brought to market today would be the product. So we had some ideas of, okay, technology could help operations. So we started with a very simple set of products. One was, like, a temperature sensor, and I remember taking it out to these beta customers, and we'd say, like, you know, please install them. The big eyes part was, you know, they'd be doing the install. But then on their screen, you could see the system they were using to run their operations. So this is 2015. Is only about 10 years ago. They were still running IBM mainframe systems, like green screen systems that you'd recognize from like the 80s or earlier. They were still running in place, and that's how they were getting their orders. And it's just, it's because it's what worked, and then what they were using to track their vehicles was either, if they had technology, it was something that looked like Mapquest from the 1990s or it was a whiteboard that had, like a list of where everyone was That was big eyes because, you know, we were there to install temperature sensors. But you look over at their office and you're like, Well, what's that system doing? What's with that whiteboard? That's how we figured out what the real product should be. It was, was okay. It seems like that's a more important problem than knowing what the temperature is.

David Novak 43:26 

Great example, how about big ears?

Sanjit Biswas 43:29 

Big ears would be kind of similar, like you'd actually listen to when, when, you know, in operations, people often just come by the operations manager director's office, knock on their door and say, Hey, we just had a wreck over, you know, in Idaho, can you take a look? We got to figure out what happened there. You would just actually hear what happens in the meetings in terms of interruptions. And when we would demo the product, the big ears part is we would hear, we'd actually hear people say, wow, like you just under the breath, and that's when you know you've got a feature that's differentiated. It's useful. But you know, no amount of like reading market research reports tells you that you do one demo and you, you know, the room silent, someone says, Wow, that's when you know you got something good.

David Novak 44:17 

I love it, you know. Tell me about your 7020, 10 model, as you think about investing back in your business,

Sanjit Biswas 44:25 

yeah, this is really related to, you know, if you're fortunate enough to get to some scale, you can invest in multiple R and D projects. Then there's a question of which ones, right? 7020 10 basically, is a reflection of time horizons. So, you know, a lot of r, d that we do, it's based on immediate needs that customers have, that's like the this, this year, next year, kind of stuff that's the 70% and that might be an integration or a new app, or it's like something that really needs to happen today. The 20 would be stuff that's a couple years out and that might be related to. Uh, you know, recently electric cars started becoming more common in operations. They're not the most common, but they're out there, and we could see that pattern that we need to be compatible with that. So we invest in that out of the 20 bucket, and then the 10 would be things that are really speculative. And this is kind of like the stuff that, if it pays off, it could be a really big deal, but there's not, it's not obvious that this is going to work, and in fact, it's, it's probably more likely than not it's not going to work. And so it's the kind of risky set of of ideas that might be beneficial five to 10 years out. So for us, it was AI that we've been investing in now for for over five years. It's now really kind of come into vogue, but we were experimenting with in a deep way, because we knew how useful it could be, even though it wasn't something customers were asking for, which is, I need AI. Nobody ever said that, but we saw the transformative potential.

David Novak 45:52 

Yeah, that takes a lot of courage and conviction to go in that direction when people are waiting to see if it's really going to happen. How do you muster that up as a leader.

Sanjit Biswas 46:00 

Well, I think you have to have your own conviction, right? That if we build this, I believe, based on my experience, based on my interactions, that this is going to be valuable, and this is going to make a difference. So that conviction, I think, does come from experience, and that kind of big eyes, big ears kind of concept, and then sometimes, again, it's this willingness to take a risk, but then also change your mind, say, Hey, we got that wrong, or we need to do it a little bit differently. And like I was saying earlier, I've, I've learned a lot just by doing a lot of it is, is getting to the point of, okay, we're going to try this, and if it doesn't work, we all, we're all going to, like, say, Okay, that was a beta test, and we learned from it. Now, let's try this other thing,

David Novak 46:41 

it's really interesting. You know, you might have started out with sort of an academic goal, but that's you're, you're not like that at all as a leader. You're not, you're you're like, Hey, you can't read this stuff up, you know. Let's make it happen and see what happens and adjust. You know, which is great, yeah,

Sanjit Biswas 46:55 

absolutely. By the way, I just have to say, a lot of great academic research is done the same way. So it's interesting how many parallels they are. There are between product building and company building and in great like practical academic research. Now, if you're a theoretician, that's a very different thing, but there's a lot to be said. It's almost like a lab science, right? Like this kind of idea of being experimental, yeah, good

David Novak 47:19 

point. You know, a lot of people, Sanjit, they want to be successful. And I'm curious, you know, what's something that you've had to sacrifice to achieve what you've been able to achieve in your career so far?

Sanjit Biswas 47:33 

That's a great question. You know, I think a lot of what and entrepreneurs say this all the time, the intensity of of the startup life and the kind of entrepreneurs journey is really high, right? So the highs are high, the lows are low, and some of the sacrifice is that kind of idea of free or unstructured time, because usually when you're working on something that's interesting, it just kind of grows to fill, fill the space, right? And so that's why I was talking earlier about, well, sometimes you got to really clear out your mind a little bit. But for me, maybe one sacrifice is just from, like, pursuing hobbies. And, you know, people ask, what are you doing outside of work? Well, I've got three kids, so that really takes up almost all my time. And for me, it's about kids, and the work that I do don't have, you know, I don't have, like, a great pickleball or golf game or any of that kind of stuff going because for me, like, those are the two things that drive my life, at least at this moment. So maybe the sacrifice is that kind of free time or hobby space, but I love the work, so maybe that actually filled the hobby side of things. Yeah,

David Novak 48:37 

that's what you said earlier. You When You're 15, you didn't know that you could actually get paid doing what you love. That was that was pretty good to be able to do. That's your hobby. You said it is. You know, Sanji, this has been so much fun, and I want to have some more with my lightning round of questions. Are you ready for this? Let's do it. Okay, what's what three words best describe? You curious

Sanjit Biswas 48:59 

if I can get a double word, hard working, focused.

David Novak 49:02 

If you could be one person for a day beside yourself, who would it

Sanjit Biswas 49:06 

be? I'm a student of history, so I would probably find I'm very curious sometimes what you know, what life was like 10,000 years ago? It's a weird thing to wonder about, but it's not a famous person. I would just be kind of curious, and maybe it wasn't so great, but I would love to see it. What's your biggest pet peeve when people aren't in the details to kind of like, gloss over things east coast or west coast? Oh, that's a tough one. Having lived on both, I gotta say the weather's better on the West Coast, so I would go west coast.

David Novak 49:37 

What's your go to order at buy right Creamery.

Sanjit Biswas 49:43 

So that's a local ice cream shop here in San Francisco. They have, it's not all the time, but they have a pretty awesome, like, like, Bourbon pecan kind of thing. So I'm a sucker for that. It's it's sweet, but it's good.

David Novak 49:56 

Okay, you get two front row tickets to anything you want. We're. Where are you going and who are you going to take with

Sanjit Biswas 50:02 

you? So I'm not a big sports guy, like I couldn't tell you even what season it is, whether it's football or basketball, but something that I look forward to every four years are the Olympics, because it's really just incredible, just the level of excellence that these athletes have. So something we're looking forward to at the next Olympics, which is here in the US is actually bringing the kids and getting, you know, the tickets early and doing all that kind of stuff. So if we can get front row tickets to any of those Olympic sports, I think it'd

David Novak 50:29 

be amazing. What's the one thing you do just for you?

Sanjit Biswas 50:33 

You know, it's funny, I still like to tinker. And so, you know, in sometimes those tinkering ideas turn into products. But whether it's, you know, just trying out, like a new AI model, or checking out a chip or something like that, that's my idea of fun. So that's something I do, just for me,

David Novak 50:50 

besides your family, what is your most prized possession?

Sanjit Biswas 50:54 

I'm not a big possessions guy to be honest. You know, I got it like, this isn't surprising, but like everybody else, I'm amazed by, like, how useful my phone is, but that's not like, the most expensive or special thing.

David Novak 51:12 

You know, if I turned on the radio in your car, what would I hear?

Sanjit Biswas 51:15 

Well, right now, I'm in a 80s throwback mode, so you'd probably hear, you know, some like whatever, best of the 80s. It's cheesy, but it's good music, and my kids find it hilarious.

David Novak 51:26 

What's one of your daily rituals, something that you never miss?

Sanjit Biswas 51:31 

Something I try to do every day that I'm home like here in California, is do school drop off. And it's funny. It's not like the most glamorous thing to do, but it's a great excuse to just hang out with the three kids in the back of the car, and they'll, they'll just tell you things in the car that you won't get at the dinner table, and that kind of thing. That's

David Novak 51:49 

great. We're out of the lightning round. Thank you very much for that. Okay, I've got a few more questions here, and I'll let you go. You've obviously been enormously successful on many fronts, but and you've obviously made a lot of money. Now, you made a ton of money. How much did making money drive what you did? And you're doing

Sanjit Biswas 52:09 

well, I think if you, if you sort of step back and look at the pattern, like I said earlier, we John and I started out as PhD students, you don't typically go get a graduate degree to make money like you do it because you're curious about something, or you love the science. And for me, like that, that was really and still is so much of what drives me. The money has been a really fascinating kind of side effect. And we went from being grad students with no money to being entrepreneurs that had successful exit Ultimately, though, we're still doing the same things we were doing 20 years ago, which is tinkering around and building things and having fun, in that sense. So now, like, money makes a lot of other things in life a lot easier. You're not stressing about your house payments and things like that. And in some sense, it lets you kind of be in that same mode that we were in when we were in our early 20s. So anyway, that's kind of my reflections on that whole side of things.

David Novak 53:03 

Yeah, you and your wife, hope started the Biswas Family Foundation in 2023 what's the larger mission that you and hope are pursuing?

Sanjit Biswas 53:14 

The Family Foundation is something we've it's kind of the side project, but it's a reflection of our interests. So my wife is an infectious disease epidemiologist. That's a profession not a lot of people had heard of until 2020, and now everybody knows what an epidemiologist does. So she's kind of got a public health background. I have an interest in, like I said, engineering and AI and so on. So what we're doing with the foundation is at that intersection of AI and health, this idea that, you know, with the newer technologies that are coming out, it may be possible for everyone to have a doctor in their pocket. It may be possible to discover entirely new therapies and treatments, whether it's for cancer or other kinds of disease, using a lot of data. So we're helping fund ideas that are kind of high risk, high reward, and not in the lab science kind of mad scientist way, but more of like, well, could an AI really detect, you know, that form of cancer just from imagery, or from, you know, an ECG or something like that. So that's a lot of what we're doing right now is helping seed fund a lot of these kind of ideas that are on the frontiers of science that could ultimately have a huge impact for human

David Novak 54:24 

health. Oh, that's really powerful. And thank you, and hope for really focusing on that, and really appreciate that. You know, I'm curious, Sanjit, you know, how do you lead at home

Sanjit Biswas 54:36 

in terms of keeping the kids on on track or

David Novak 54:38 

or just leading? You know you've got to you've got a partner, and hope you've got your kids. I mean, when you come home, what's your leadership philosophy? Or do you have one?

Sanjit Biswas 54:48 

Well, for us, we've got pretty young kids. They're elementary school age, so a lot of it is being present, which, as a CEO, there's always demands on your time, right? Like. Someone's always sending you a message, or, once you put, you know, respond to an email or something. So I try to really make a big effort to be present as a leader at home and then again, engage, right? So hear what's going on in the kids world. Like fourth grade is way more complicated than I remember, by the way, right? Like there's lots of relationships and interactions and things they're learning there's no substitute for being present in that way. Like it's not something that you know your spouse can tell you, okay, like there's something really special about being there. So for me, it's about the same way that I lead at work, which is showing up on the front lines. I like to show up on the front lines even with the kids

David Novak 55:40 

you know, you mentioned at Stanford, you took a Zen Buddhism course, you know. And you mentioned being present is, you know, do you spend time on the idea of spiritual growth and being present and focusing on the now? Is that, you know? Where does that fit in your

Sanjit Biswas 55:57 

life? Yeah, I do. I think it's just even that awareness of it now, like you could, you have people who go become monks and spend all their time focusing on that. That's not a kind of place I am in life right now. But for me, this idea of sort of being present in the now is really important. And then also, something else I took away from the Zen practice is this idea of beginner's mind, which, the longer you sort of do a job, whether it's being a parent or, you know, being a CEO or being a founder, the easier it is to kind of fall onto old habits, right? Like, oh, I can kind of do this in my sleep. There's something really special when you're fully present and when you approach things with a complete beginner's mind. And I try to make sure I do that as often as I can. It's not the easiest thing to do, but it actually kind of like opens up your thinking

David Novak 56:48 

quite a lot. So what do you what do you see as your unfinished business? Now? Sanjeev

Sanjit Biswas 56:54 

unfinished business? Well, I think my mom would tell you my academic research career is still unfinished business because I never finished the PhD. I think I'm, I'm firmly over that, especially because that research is like, 20 years old, but, but for me, the unfinished business is like, I just feel like there's not enough hours in the day if you want to read and be curious. And so something I still do every night is I, I try to get a couple of pages of reading in because there's always something that you kind of want to tug on, the threat of

David Novak 57:24 

last question here, what's one piece of advice you'd give to anyone who wants to be a better leader?

Sanjit Biswas 57:29 

Well, I would say, just do it right. You have an idea of what it means to be a better leader. Start operating that way. And that's actually, it's easy to say, but it's hard to do, because sometimes you get sort of racked with anxiety of like, Should I do it this framework or that framework? A lot of it's kind of a gut feel. And again, you kind of learn by doing. So for me, the advice I'd give that person is, dive in. Just go for it. Well,

David Novak 57:56 

I have to tell you, shanji, after reading about you and watching a lot of things that you've done, and hearing your thoughts on business, I knew I would have a lot of fun with this conversation, and I want to thank you for your time. Want to thank you for what you're doing in the world to make the world a better place. And you're one heck of a guy. Oh,

Sanjit Biswas 58:18 

thank you, David, thanks for having me on

David Novak 58:22 

you. Great leaders move fast and scale smart. But what sets Sanjit apart is how closely he pays attention. He doesn't assume he's got the answers, but he watches and he listens, and because of that big eyes big ears mentality. He finds the problems that actually need solving, and that's the takeaway here, big eyes, big ears. And it isn't just a catchy phrase, it's a discipline, it's a curious mindset, and it's a great way to become more innovative and customer focus. So this week, find one place to observe more and talk less, sit in on a customer service call, Shadow your team in the field, ask your frontline people what's working and what's not, because when you pay closer attention to what's really happening, you get the kind of insights that can take your business and your leadership to the next level. So do you want to know how leaders lead? What we learned today is the great leaders lead with big eyes and big ears coming up next on how leaders lead, you're going to want to fasten your seat belts and make sure your tray table is in its full upright and locked position, because I'm talking with Bob Jordan, CEO of Southwest Airlines. So be sure you subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss it. Thanks again for tuning in to another episode of how leaders lead, where every Thursday you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I make it a point to give you something simple on each episode that you can apply to your business, so that you will become the best leader you can be.