My quick stab at FA:

Pros

- Revenue growth and gross margins are really impressive

- Big sales and marketing spend that seems to be effective at growing top line

- Costs under control - loss from operations decreasing with an obvious path to profitability while still scaling up very fast

Cons

- "We face intense and increasing competition", combined with

- $55B total addressable market

Assume Samsara manages to reach 20% market share of this market, that means they will be able to grow a maximum of 20x after IPO. Compare this with TSLA who had $15M and grew to $31B (2000x). Probably not the best comparison, and TAM is growing too, but it makes me wonder how much further this company can grow? And at this growth rate? It is quite a niche industry (IoT).

IoT will definitely continue to grow, and with it will likely come opportunities for Samsara to reach that 20% market share.

Also, I don't think any company's growth can be really fairly compared to Tesla's.

It also notes a 21% CAGR from 2021-2024 for the TAM, so their growth ceiling may be higher than it looks initially.

Samsara's founders also previously started and sold Meraki to Cisco for $1.2 billion. Pretty rare to have founded 2 unicorns in ~15 years.

I believe it simply shows they have understood their market(s).

Simply.

Interviewed with them back in 2017. Was very impressed with what they were doing and the apparent talent of their team. Didn't get an offer because I hadn't leetcoded enough but left a good impression on me.

Having interacted with members from Samsara’s team nonprofessionally, I also hold them in high regard.

There is a beautiful movie by the same name. Go see it if you haven’t!

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0770802/

I've never heard of them EXCEPT for the fact that for months I saw their ads before every video I watched on Youtube. I kept wondering why I was seeing them because it's a product that I clearly have no use for.

Ive always wondered why companies do that. I've gotten adverts for Airbus and Lockheed Martin but I can assure you I am in no position to buy a fighter jet.

Some of it is about improving their public perception. We get a bunch of ads in Australia from mining companies trying to let everyone know they are digging up materials for renewable projects and not just coal.

Maybe bad targeting or perhaps brand recognition. The conversion model works. It is about convincing as many individuals this is a reputable company so that when the person signing the check asks around nobody bats an eye.

Brand awareness. After exhausting predictable growth channels, companies pay money to stay in society’s top-of-mind. I think the best example of this is Coca Cola but tough to compare to LM/Airbus.

Imagine paying money so people think you’re legit/respectable. Companies have tons of money so they spend on this.

You never know, 2022 might be your year.

Are you in Washington DC? I heard the ads around there can get wild.

Improve brand awareness pre-IPO, it’s like clockwork.

The best piece of advice I heard for reading financial reports: start at the bottom, read your way up. All the juicy stuff is hidden in the bottom (like losses), while the pretty, extrapolated ARR graphs are up at the top.

Not bad, although I assume you’d want to grab the standard financial statements on your way to the last page for some context. The important thing is to actually read the report, and bring a lot of context to the read from your other studies so you can make a better decision (or improve your contextual knowledge for the next report.)

Saṃsāra, in both Buddhism and Hinduism, is something to be escaped. The connotation is either downright negative or at least sobering. Why name your company this?

I'm Indian and I had the exact same reaction. It's like naming your company Dukka. Or maybe it's more like the Sanskrit Maya, which I suppose is not a completely negative term (but can be in certain Indian philosophical-theological discourses).

EDIT: My mother just pointed out to me that Samsara can also mean "talk", which is exactly what it means in my native language, malayalam. I've just never seen it spelt out that way. If that's the meaning they're going for, it's actually quite apt!

It could be the “rebirth” of the Meraki platform - I don’t think the cofounders are malayali so while a Malayalam word seems more apt, i think it’s less likely.

The Malayalam word for “talk” is “samsaram”.

Dukka can be “work you do” so we do work and that’s not surprising. That’s our condition here.

Yes, kind of baffling name choice? I suspect they totally misunderstood the concept as a replenishing / refreshing cycle rather than the self-perpetuating nature of suffering.

Or perhaps they are more to privvy to the depth and flavor of Buddhism than the average HN commentor. Nagarjuna says that samsara is nirvana and nirvana is samsara.

Similarly, Saraha says: “Here in this body are the sacred rivers: here are the sun and moon as well as all the pilgrimage places… I have not encountered another temple as blissful as my own body.”

In short, the gravy is all gravy.

Nagarjuna said some apparently-odd things. Startling statements like that can be used to help gain realisation of emptiness (rather like koans). He used reasoning to attack conceptual thought.

> Saṃsāra, in both Buddhism and Hinduism, is something to be escaped

In other words it is something you have to deal with, you can't just ignore it. It is not something to be ignored. A company that helps us deal with Samsara is great.

And here if it is IoT and makes it easier to deal with "things" it allows us to escape the trouble of managing them.

Once you IPO your material worries are gone and you can move into the next circle.

Per Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sa%E1%B9%83s%C4%81ra):

> Popularly, it is the cycle of death and rebirth.

Maybe it is because there is a "popular" definition that the casual observer wouldn't interpret as something to be escaped? Western audiences often borrow words and concepts from other cultures, that often have deep meaning behind them, and reduce them to some shallow commercial one-liner that their audiences can latch onto.

I guess I have a different question about a company picking such a name - is it appropriate ethically? It feels like they've co-opted a term that has a particular cultural and religious meaning, will probably mispronounce it in all their marketing, will popularize a shallow understanding of this term rather than the deeper source material (as has happened with terms like karma, yoga, and other such popularized terms of Hindu origin), and also place a trademark on something that has always existed as a free to use concept. I recognize that one of the founders is Indian, but it still doesn't sit well with me.

> Saṃsāra (संसार) is a Sanskrit/Pali word that means "world"

I am not a Buddhist, but is "the world" something to be "escaped"? I can't find a matching definition for it to imply escape.

Samsara is not just “world”... The etymology is Sam/Sara, “through/motion” and the idea is that it refers to an endless going-through-the-motions, an endless cycle of dying, and re-dying, and being reborn as a slug and suffering as slugs do, and re-dying, and being reborn as a human and suffering as humans do, and re-dying, and being reborn as a god and suffering as gods do,and re-dying. You've “been there done that” for anything that you now think is some great aspiration for this life.

A proper translation of “Samsara, Inc.” might be “Weariness, Inc.” or “Ennui, Inc.” ... It's not just the world, but the world with specific reference to this way that everyone is just going through the motions.

In buddhism, "the world" is material, personal, and full of suffering. It is something to let go.

Doesn't this accurately describe IoT implementations?

You're looking at transcending the physical, while simultaneously being trapped by and having to deal with its messy realities.

Seems a pretty apt metaphor.

The physical world, yeah.

The specific aim or mission depends on the school, but the focus in Buddhism is always on escaping duhka ('modern/societal ills') in an attempt to break or transcend the cycle.

Maybe, some people prefer nirvana.

"Nirvana" means extinction - the same word is used to refer to snuffing out a candle. I learned the fourth Noble Truth as "Nirvana is bliss"; but I never figured out how to unpack that.

> 153. Through many a birth in samsara have I wandered in vain, seeking the builder of this house (of life). Repeated birth is indeed suffering!

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/dhp/dhp.11.budd....

I happen to have this as a tattoo actually. A relic from my Buddhist days.

Read this thread carefully and you’ll understand. It’s marketing genius.

I wouldn’t have remember the name of the company. But thanks to you and your fellows here I will. I can even tell a story around it.

Samsara, more like Sansar (संसार) means World. One may want to escape the world but there is no negative connotation that I'm aware of.

I'm a Hindu and speak Hindi.

Samsara is the correct Sanskrit (more like Samskrta) pronunciation and the original meaning is the endless birth and death cycle caused by attachment.

The Hindi vernacular Sansaar indeed means the physical world just like Samsara in Kannada (and other Southern languages?) means Family. Both the world and family are due to attachment.

You market to your customer, the purchase of their product will be approved by a C-suite Yama, not the mortals stuck in Samsara.

In Arabic too, it means trying to mediate to get commission.

that's a really impressive growth rate and amount of revenue. never heard of them!

Their main customers are in blue-collar industries (transport, utilities, etc.), so they are pretty unknown outside that world.

Great to see a startup figure that works out. Underserved in many ways as are small business. Lots of opportunity out there for a founder that is willing to learn about “the other half” and the opportunities to add efficiency to these types of businesses.

I listened to Sanjit speak at HackMIT several years ago. He is a really brilliant man and a real innovator. I'll definitely be investing in this IPO.

Really excellent numbers. Anyone there before their Series C (and probably many even up to D) is going to make life changing money. Congrats to the builders of this company.

Anyone else surprised that they managed to get the IOT ticker? I would of thought that would have been taken already.

Truck drivers hate them!

Another case of a company “going public” but insiders retaining total control. I guess we’ll have to wait for the next market crash to get rid of these fake public companies.

> we’ll have to wait for the next market crash to get rid of these fake public companies

Given the lack of evidence for founder-controlled companies underperforming the market, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Particularly if the business is not reliant on outside capital (e.g. Uber under Kalanick, who was ousted despite having super-voting privileges).

How was Kalanick ousted when he had super-majority voting?

I know he was scandalous, fostered a toxic and sexist culture, and was abusive to employees, but how did he get removed if he had all the power?

A significant number of publicly traded companies — and not just new ones in tech - are tightly controlled by founding shareholders who have special shares. This is not an unusual practice even for public companies.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with taking your company public and retaining troll through special shares. Anyone who is able to do that massive built a pretty great company, otherwise the market would not support it.

> Anyone who is able to do that massive built a pretty great company, otherwise the market would not support it.

In a normal market, I suspect many of these would not be supported, or would at least have to take a big discount to PE. But we are in the era when money pours into doge coin. You can’t conclude anything in such an environment.

DDG: Samsara provides equipment monitoring.

I interviewed with them in 2018 for a position within there industrial gateway/plc group.

There product was neat but certainly not revolutionary, they completely missed the mark on understanding the factory automation and controls space.

They only wanted controls engineers to write in a text based scripting language, and required all data to go to the cloud.

I was perfectly clear with them about why I had concerns for the product and obviously didn’t get the job, though now it appears to be hurried in there products page.

I guess they realized what I told them a few years later.

Is this for real or is this a metaphor?

Anyone want to share a blurb on what they do?

AI assisted fleet management for utilities, waste etc. Not sure if they're in the reefer space. they basically have their own physical sensors installed on clients' assets and do fancy stuff with all that data.