As a technical founder, Sanjit Biswas initially avoided sales. He embraced it only after reframing it as a systems engineering problem—a necessary challenge to solve in order to get his product out into the world and achieve real impact.
Unlike their first company Meraki, the Samsara founders entered the physical operations industry as novices. Their conviction came from identifying compounding technology waves—connectivity, compute, and sensors—and trusting these would unlock future value, even if the exact path was unclear.
The opportunity for Samsara didn't come from one breakthrough. It was the simultaneous maturation of three technologies around 2015: ubiquitous 4G connectivity, powerful handheld compute (e.g., NVIDIA in Nintendo Switch), and cheap, high-quality cameras driven by the smartphone boom.
Instead of streaming all data, Samsara runs inference on low-power cameras. They train large models in the cloud and then "distill" them into smaller, specialized models that can run efficiently at the edge, focusing only on relevant tasks like risk detection.
Samsara didn't start with its flagship AI dash cam. It began with a simple GPS tracker to get a foothold. Then, by listening to customer problems (e.g., accidents), they iteratively built adjacent products, expanding their portfolio like concentric circles from a core use case.
Rather than just replacing drivers, autonomy will allow logistics to operate 24/7 during the midnight-to-8am "third shift." This will dramatically increase the world's operational intensity and create new demand as automation drives down costs and enables services that were previously too expensive.