# Saying yes to everything: How customer obsession built Samsara | Kiren Sekar (CPO)

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/in-depth-1318680/saying-yes-to-everything-how-customer-obsession-built-samsara-kiren-sekar-cpo
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/in-depth-1318680/saying-yes-to-everything-how-customer-obsession-built-samsara-kiren-sekar-cpo.md
Podcast: [In Depth](https://stenobird.com/podcast/in-depth-1318680)
Published: 2025-09-11T11:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/FRCH1739327654.mp3
Audio file: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/FRCH1739327654.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/in-depth-1318680/episodes/saying-yes-to-everything-how-customer-obsession-built-samsara-kiren-sekar-cpo
Duration seconds: 4137

## Resource

Kiren Sekar is the CPO of Samsara, a company that brings real-time visibility, analytics, and AI to physical operations. Before Samsara, Kiren was an early leader at Meraki, which was acquired by Cisco for $1.2B. In this episode, he walks us through Samsara’s origin story: from hardware hacking in a basement to scaling a cross-industry IoT platform. He shares how early customer feedback loops led to the company’s first product, why starting with the mid-market was a deliberate choice, and how Samsara kept a startup mindset even as it scaled. In this episode, we discuss: Lessons from Meraki’s acquisition by Cisco How Kiren hires for intrinsic motivation Why Samsara was built for operations industries The early hardware prototype and the Cowgirl Creamery insight Building broad vs. niche from day one The shift from founder-selling to a scalable sales motion Organizing product teams around revenue vs. experience How Samsara uses LLMs and AI today What Kiren learned from longtime co-founder Sanjit Biswas Where to find Kiren: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kirensekar/ Where to find Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson References: Cisco: https://www.cisco.com/ Clay: https://www.clay.com/ Cowgirl Creamery: https://cowgirlcreamery.com/ IBM: https://www.ibm.com/ Meraki: https://meraki.cisco.com/ Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/ Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/ Samsara: https://www.samsara.com/ Sanjit Biswas: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjitbiswas/ Uber: https://www.uber.com/ Timestamps: (01:27) Meraki’s growth and acquisition by Cisco (03:25) The "evaporating" exit strategy from Meraki (04:42) Identifying the IoT market gaps (07:38) The early keys to success at Samsara (09:39) What does…

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