This season will feature conversations with key decision-makers who have to support the journey to a platform or any ecosystem. We will talk to C-suite executives, board members, investors, and others who must be brought into the platform journey.
In this episode, Avanish and Lara discuss:
Host: Avanish Sahai
Avanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and has served as a Board Member of Hubspot since April 2018 and of Birdie.ai since April 2022. Previously, Avanish served as the vice president, ISV and Apps partner ecosystem of Google from 2019 until 2021. From 2016 to 2019, he served as the global vice president, ISV and Technology alliances at ServiceNow. From 2014 to 2015, he was the senior vice president and chief product officer at Demandbase. Prior to Demandbase, Avanish built and led the Appexchange platform ecosystem team at Salesforce, and was an executive at Oracle and McKinsey & Company, as well as various early-to-mid stage startups in Silicon Valley.
About Lara Caimi
Lara Caimi is the President of Worldwide Field Operations at Samsara. Lara brings nearly 25 years of experience to Samsara, where she is responsible for leading Sales and Customer Outcomes. Before Samsara, Lara was Chief Customer and Partner Officer for ServiceNow, overseeing nearly 2,500 global employees across organizations including customer success, professional services, and channel ecosystem. Previously, she served as ServiceNow’s Chief Strategy Officer. Before joining ServiceNow, Lara was a partner at Bain & Company, where she advised technology companies on growth and go-to-market strategy.
Lara holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics and English Literature from St. Olaf College, a MIB from the University of Sydney as a Fulbright Scholar, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
About Tidemark
Tidemark is a venture capital firm, foundation, and community built to serve category-leading technology companies as they scale. Tidemark was founded in 2021 by David Yuan, who has been investing, advising, and building technology companies for over 20 years. Learn more at www.tidemarkcap.com.
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00:00 Avanish: All right. Welcome, everybody, to another episode of The Platform Journey. Absolutely delighted to have Lara Caini on the podcast today. Lara is the president of field operations at Samsara. Had a stellar career, which I’ll ask her to talk about. I think there’ll be some amazing insights from someone who has really been in the C-suite and has advised a lot of C-suites on both their platform and their ecosystem journey. Lara, welcome to The Platform Journey.
00:32 Lara: Hi, Avanish! Thank you so much for having me. It’s awesome to see you again and to have this conversation.
00:39 Avanish: Fantastic. So let’s just start with that. Again, you’ve had a pretty spectacular career. So let’s talk a bit about your own personal background and some of the things that you’ve done, and you’ve done it across a set of companies, both as an executive, as a board member, etc. So let’s talk a bit about your personal journey.
00:56 Lara: Sure. Well, like you, and like many others, I started my career in management consulting at Bain & Company. I think I suffered from what a lot of people did out of undergrad, not really knowing what you wanted to do, but wanting to work on big, important problems, probably earlier than you were qualified to do so.
01:14 And so, I went into Bain, and I thought, gosh, I’ll be here two years, and two years turned into I think 17 years. And the reason I stayed, like I think so many, is I continued to get opportunities to get promoted to the next level, to take on something new, right before I felt like I was ready for it. So it always felt like I was continuing to learn and grow, continuing to be challenged.
01:43 And so I had a great career there. And really, interestingly, I spent most of my career in tech, but I didn’t start out that way. I didn’t have a background in it, didn’t know much about it. My first project, actually, at Bain was for Safeway, the grocery store. And I was working on the project, and I was like, geez, this is a 2% margin business. So hard to do anything new or different with that kind of margin structure.
02:13 And then I got a chance to work in tech, most of which was local in the Bay Area – because I was in San Francisco, and I didn’t have to be on airplanes, which was a plus. But it was like, these margins are amazing! Look at what these companies can do! You know? And so I’m so glad I ended up on that path, because it’s been a great journey.
02:33 So I’m at Bain, I’ve been there forever, my husband’s there, my friends are there. We all had kids at the same time. I was never going to leave.
02:42 Avanish: Family business.
02:42 Lara: Family business, you know? It was a good thing. But I got this headhunter call, and I usually ignored them, but this one was like, oh wow. It’s ServiceNow, and it’s working directly for John Donahoe. And John had been the CEO of Bain before he was the CEO of PayPal and eBay, and so he was well respected. And I was like, geez, I don’t have time for this, but I’m going to do it.
03:04 So anyway, I interviewed, and it turned into a job offer, and I had just an amazing career at ServiceNow. I came in as the chief strategy officer, and I quickly became the person that could build and fix stuff. So I gathered a handful of functions in addition to strategy over time.
03:22 I started in 2017, and at that time, ServiceNow only was a billion-and-a-half revenue company. And it had really just pivoted to be… I think you and I started around the same time, actually.
03:35 Avanish: Very close. Very close.
03:37 Lara: Yeah. And it really just pivoted to be a multi-product company. And so my strategy team had to formulate the path to 10 billion, which we estimated would happen – I think pretty correctly – by 2024. And as part of that, I got to work with the go-to-market teams, got to work with the product teams, and really think about what other products we should be in, what other markets, when do we build vertical expertise, how does the ecosystem evolve, all of those big questions.
04:04 It was super, super fun. I had a great time. And then John, my boss, my mentor, was like, I’m headed out of here. I’m going to Nike, and you’ve got this new boss. Meet Bill McDermott. So overnight I went from one super-famous CEO to another super-famous CEO. And it was such a great learning experience for me. Because both of these incredible leaders, totally different, and also totally authentic to who they are as humans, leading this company. And I got to learn different leadership lessons from them.
04:44 So that was so great. And we could probably do a full podcast on lessons learned from different leadership styles. Because now I work for a founder, and that’s totally different too. But when Bill was there, he said, “You know, Lara, I think you could be a CEO one day, but you’re going to have to run a number first.” Which is a very Bill McDermott thing to say.
05:04 And he’s like, “So I’m gonna… I don’t know what that is, but I’m going to find a way.” And Dave Schneider, who I know you know well, who I absolutely love, decided to retire from being an operator and went to Coatue. And so they split his world in half. And Kevin Haverty, who I also know you know really well and I love, got all the sales parts. And I took everything else.
05:27 So everything post sales, as well as the partner ecosystem. None of those functions, by the way, had I ever run before. Or knew anything about. And so I came in and had this amazing job of getting to transform every piece of that. There were a bunch of things: professional services, customer success, ecosystem, training, CX. And all of those things needed different levers.
05:53 And I was able to build a new product. It was the first subscription revenue customer success product that ServiceNow had ever had. And at the time, it became the fastest-growing product ever. Now the AI product has taken over that mantle. But it was such a fun run.
06:09 And so, by the time I left in 2023, the company was 7.5 billion, and I’d watched this incredible change. But I had gotten to the point where I had done all those big… I love learning and growing. I think that’s the theme of my career. And I had turned all the big knobs, and I was looking around – what’s next? And I thought about what Bill said, you could be a CEO one day. Well, if you’re going to be a CEO of a software company, you either need to run revenue or you need to run product.
06:43 And I wasn’t getting to do either one of those things. And I didn’t see a way to control my own destiny at ServiceNow, to be able to do that, short of the company buying something and running a division or something, which ServiceNow has never done, as you know. And so I started to be open to looking at the next opportunity. And Samsara came along. I had known – there’s a bunch of ex-ServiceNow people there and on the board.
07:08 And a couple conversations turned into more conversations. And I started as the president, now seven quarters ago. So I’ve been here seven quarters now. I’ve been at Samsara for seven quarters, and I’m the president of field operations, which means that over 60% of the company reports up through me. Which is everything pre-sales through post-sales, including revenue operations, partnerships, all that kind of stuff.
07:40 And I was really brought in to take the lessons from ServiceNow and think about how to scale Samsara past that billion-dollar revenue mark, and to create the foundations for a multi-billion-dollar company. And so, in these seven quarters, the stock price has gone from 19 to I think it peaked at 50-something. It’s around 45 – I don’t know what it is today. Mid to high 40s.
08:04 And my goal has been, first of all, building foundations to scale. So the company grew very, very fast. It’s only nine years old, and very fast-growing. And so a lot of the core systems and processes were kind of built for a $10 million company, not a billion-dollar company. And so there’s a lot of foundational work.
08:28 I had to come in and build the first pipeline models. Do we have enough pipeline to hit the number? Do we have enough sales capacity to hit the number? A lot of foundational stuff. And then, thinking about how does this business need to evolve in the future? So we need to be more enterprise ready. So what is that going to take? We need to continue to have more contribution from international markets. We need more products. We have to sell higher up in the organization, etc.
08:51 So that’s been the journey of Samsara. And then the last one was Confluent. I joined the board of Confluent before they went public. So I think I’ve been on the board for a year or so now. And that has been also a totally different learning opportunity for me. Because that pre-IPO to IPO process is fascinating. It’s just a super interesting time for a company. And these days it’s rare to even get to that point. But I learned a ton through that.
09:27 And then, what does it take to start maturing as a public company and needing to report earnings every quarter, and have predictability, and have that kind of model. And so that’s been really fun. As well as just thinking about, I’ve been an operator for so long, being a board member is completely different, as you know. You’re more of an advisor, stepping back and asking questions. You don’t want to tell them what to do. Because I certainly don’t love it when board members try to tell me what to do.
09:55 So it’s been great. I’ve been very privileged to feel like… At the end of the day, I feel like I’ve just learned a lot at every step.
10:05 Avanish: What a fascinating, absolutely delightful journey. And again, your success and your approach to these things begets success. So congrats on that.
10:21 Lara: Thank you.
10:22 Avanish: Now you’ve been, as you just described, you’ve played a substantial role at ServiceNow in the journey from a billion to ten, and again, amazing working with your team there. And the fact that those dates were pretty far in the future, but the company hit those dates, is pretty awesome.
10:38 But driving the business, the platform, the ecosystem strategy, and now you’re building some of that at Samsara, how has your thinking evolved about that process? You talked a bit about the discipline and some of the core building blocks, but talk a bit about how your thinking has evolved, as someone who has advised a number of companies as well on that growth journey of all those processes.
11:04 Lara: Yeah. So I think we can almost separate out the platform journey and the ecosystem journey and talk a little bit about the platform first. So, again, being at ServiceNow over that phase, from ’17 to ’23, was just incredible learning. And the business evolved so much during that.
11:26 I remember coming in and thinking, oh my god, this company feels like a teenager in a grownup body. How is it… [Laughs] You probably remember this. How impossibly is it so successful for so many things? It seemed so rickety, you know?
11:41 Avanish: [Laughs] Yep, yep.
11:41 Lara: And now it’s one of the most respected software companies out there. And so, but I think it’s worth defining how I think about platform. Because everyone wants, I feel, to be a platform. And I think people will use that in their marketing. Every company claims to be that, but they aren’t. And there are actually multiple definitions of what it means.
12:07 I think it’s like, what is the outcome that you want? Why do people want a platform? Well, it’s because you have the ability to maintain high growth rates over a significant period of time and grow at scale. And in order to do that, there’s a bunch of stuff that needs to be right. And I think very few companies actually get it right. And not only have the right strategy, but have the right execution to actually make that real.
12:34 So let me talk about ServiceNow as an example. ServiceNow is a platform because, foundationally, Fred Luddy built it to be such.
12:47 Avanish: As a technology.
12:48 Lara: As a technology. As a technology, right. It was built to be a low-code, no-code platform for people to get work done.
12:57 Avanish: Yep.
12:57 Lara: Well, at the time, nobody knew how to sell that. It was before low-code, no-code was even a term. And no one knew how to sell it. And so it was like, how are we going to make it easier for people to understand? We’re actually going to put an application on this platform, and that’s going to be the first thing we sell.
13:12 And so I think they were super wise to make that first application, ITSM, because it was an existing market, a distinct spend category. And the competitors were on-prem, clunky, BMC, CA, stuff like that. And so ServiceNow came in with a born-in-the-cloud, SaaS-based, and customers were delighted.
13:37 But what happened was that customers actually started to understand truly the power of the platform. And ServiceNow, at the end of the day, is just like, a human or a machine can make a request to do something. And then there’s a series of logic and workflow and data that then automates that work, resolves that request, and gets it done.
13:58 And so, well, that’s not different from HR, HR case management, or customer service management. You can use it externally. Or even security, which was super interesting. Because it’s actually a machine asking for something. Oh, there’s all these risks. Well, ServiceNow, because it started in IT, you had all this data on IT assets. So you knew what these threats were linked to in the CMDB. And which one actually needs to be resolved first, because which one’s the riskiest.
14:24 Avanish: Right. What’s the consequence?
14:27 Lara: Totally. So anyway, that allowed for many, many different products to be commercialized, based on this product platform, over time. And because there was an ecosystem, the ecosystem could then build and extend their own applications on that platform as well.
14:49 So I think it’s a good example of – when I think about a platform – one that really works. Because it clearly has, and it’s had those financial results that I talked about as well.
15:01 I think what’s interesting is, it’s not enough just to have that. There are so many things that you have to do right and so much execution that goes into that. You have to figure out how to move from one product to multiple products. How do you sell those effectively? How do you not forget about your core along the way, and keep making sure that that’s monetized and you don’t end up with a leaky bucket in your core. Because, boy, that makes it harder.
15:25 How do you sell to different buyers? How do you sell up to start selling to the C-suite? You have to expand geographically. The ecosystem’s role definitely evolves over time. You have to mature your systems and processes. So there’s so much stuff that has to go right. And, once you get a certain scale – I ran post-sales – that renewal number ends up being bigger than the net-new number.
15:51 And so, gosh, if you have a leaky bucket of customers, it becomes very hard to maintain growth at scale. So you have to get very good at understanding your customer needs, keeping them happy, and making them renew and expand over time.
16:03 Avanish: Yeah. I think that coordination of growing, retaining, making sure that the retention is with success, not just because someone re-upped it. They’re actually using it, and so on. I think there are some fascinating elements of the platform journey where that all comes together. And I think you’ve described it super well.
16:23 So, having said that, what are the signals you look for? If you were to recommend internally or to someone else, when is a company ready? You talked a bit about Fred Luddy, when founding ServiceNow, it was actually as a platform technology. But, like you said, many other companies think about it. I’ve always said not everybody should be thinking about it, and they should really start with the why. Right? Why do you really think this is something that…
16:51 What are some of the signals you look for, when you say, hey, it’s the right thing to think about, and then all the steps you described taken after that. What are your signals around that?
17:03 Lara: You could probably go into every single element and have a thesis-level conversation on this kind of stuff. But the shorthand for me was a lesson that I learned from Frank Slootman, actually. Who was still on the board when I joined ServiceNow. And he talked about – and I think is out there, so he’s talked about this in different places – but the phases of a software company.
17:28 And I like that analogy. Because I think it actually creates categories that give you a sense of the rough timing of when things happened, at ServiceNow anyway, to kind of frame that. And also, as I think about that analogy to Samsara, there’s elements at work, etc. So I think it does work a little bit.
17:46 So Phase 1 of a software company is zero to $100 million. That’s when you’re looking for product market fit. You’re looking for your ICP. Who am I selling to? And for ServiceNow, we talked about it, it was discovering that ITSM is actually the app to sell, and that’s how we sell this platform. For Samsara, it was rethinking traditional telematics. It was leveraging all those technological tailwinds from 4G, 5G, Moore’s law with affordable silicon, etc., to create a much better option versus what old, clunky competitors were doing. Built on a modern tech stack, etc. Way easier to install, etc.
18:29 So that first phase, you’re kind of in product-market fit. You’re doing a better market job. The 100 million to a billion, this is where you have to continue to make great products, and you want to start to demonstrate that platform vision.
18:47 And so, for ServiceNow, that was moving out of ITSM. And for them, it was kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall, following customers, building out the things that customers had started to do. CSM. HR. Security. ITOM was the first thing that they had built out, because it’s so adjacent to ITSM.
19:05 Samsara moved from telematics and then moved into dash cameras, which is now the largest product. And then starting to track other assets, outside of vehicles. As well as creating some software-only elements that automated workflows, automated forms, for that front-line worker.
19:27 And so, from a go-to-market perspective, this is where you have to lean in and really scale as much as possible. So you’re investing in marketing. You’re investing in sales. You’re learning to sell these new products. You’re maybe starting to plant the seeds for an ecosystem. Scaling to new geographies and markets, which, as you know, that takes several years to get those flywheels moving.
19:49 Avanish: And you don’t always get those right.
19:50 Lara: You don’t always get those right. And they’re costly. They’re really costly. So I think you have to be super thoughtful about that. So that’s that kind of phase.
19:58 And then, once you get to that, you’re kind of at this critical mass. Phase 3 is like 1 to 5 billion. And this is where you need to continue to evolve, to maintain growth at scale. That’s what separates the good from the great. That’s how ServiceNow has gotten to the market cap that they have.
20:19 If you had a $5 million deal last year, you have to figure out how you find several of those for the next year. Or start landing $10 million deals, or $15 million deals. So in order to get those much, much bigger deals, of course you have to have the market there. But you have to keep evolving the product portfolio. You may have to start investing in sales specialists. Which the bag is getting more complex. ServiceNow had to do this.
20:46 But you also have to continue to monetize and grow the core. And if the core starts to shrink, that’s a real problem. ServiceNow I think did this really beautifully through pricing and packaging strategy, where they would basically continue to innovate in the core, so they continued to invest in those core product teams. And they’d fence that innovation in a pro SKU, etc. And so a lot of the growth in those days would continue to come from the core products, but just selling the pro version, selling the plus version, whatever it is. Which I think is super important, to continue to have a fair exchange of value for that innovation investment.
21:24 And then, I think, in order to get somebody to sign off on a $10 million deal or a $15 million deal, that’s, in many cases, going up to the C-suite. So you have to start being more and more relevant to the C-suite. And in order to do that, you kind of have to speak their language. And so that’s when companies start investing – ServiceNow, Salesforce – invested in verticalization oftentimes. And we’ll talk about this probably in a little bit. But that’s where the ecosystem can really help you. Because they have a lot of those relationships.
21:53 And so that’s that phase 3. Maintaining growth at scale. That’s a hard thing to do. And very, very few companies get it right. I think there are less than five companies with over a billion dollars in revenue who are growing north of 30%. Or even 25%. It’s a very small number of companies that can do that.
22:21 And then Phase 4 is you’re a giant. Five to 10 billion. You need massive nonlinear deals, creative structuring, different financial models, all that stuff.
22:29 Avanish: Yeah, totally. And again, echoing what you said, I was at that journey and those inflection points at Salesforce, at ServiceNow, and on the board of HubSpot. And I think that framing is really, really important. Which is, it also comes with that transition from single product to multi-product to platform.
22:48 And exactly to your point, getting the specialist organization. Getting the mix of people who can really address different sets of needs. It’s a strong opportunity, but it’s also a tough transition.
23:04 Lara: Right. Which is why I think not that many companies do it. Few have the market opportunity, and few have the execution ability. You really need both. It’s rare.
23:14 Avanish: Exactly. So you alluded to this, but I want to double-click on this, because I think it’s a really important point. Sometimes I say, look, a platform strategy and an ecosystem strategy are two sides of the coin. They kind of have to coexist. But there is a sequencing. There are elements of investments, etc., that have to be aligned around that.
23:34 Talk to me a bit – how do you distinguish those? And give me a little bit of your tone and color on that.
23:42 Lara: Yeah. I think that is true. At the highest level, I think that’s totally true. But I think the way the ecosystem strategy, what it is and how it evolves, can be very, very different across different companies. Based on a bunch of different factors: Who is the customer or the buyer? What’s the infrastructure stack of that company? Where do you play in this? Where does your product play? What is that win-win-win equation that I know you’ve talked about before, that I always think about? What’s the win for the customer, the win for your company, the win for the partner?
24:18 And of course those phases. Where you are on that growth and maturity will change. And so I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all strategy. But I do think the general statement is true. As you progress through those stages, your ecosystem contribution gets bigger and more important over time.
24:38 So if I just give you the examples of the companies that I know, how I feel are different across that… ServiceNow I feel like has that classic enterprise SaaS ecosystem. And you know this, obviously, super well. It includes the GSIs. You’ve got the Accentures, the Deloittes, etc. You’ve got small regional players, many of who, by the way, gobbled up along the way by those GSIs.
25:03 Avanish: Which is proof that a system works, right? I mean, that’s part of the signals you actually see. Hey, if there’s a roll-up happening, it means that there’s an interest in that space.
25:14 Lara: I think that’s a really important point. Service providers influence others. And then tech alliances. The Adobes, the Microsofts, etc. Samsara is much more of a vertical technology than ServiceNow. It sells to physical operations customers, and it sells to line-of-business buyers, not to IT. And for Samsara, it’s not just software. There’s hardware as well. Even though it’s monetized as software, there is hardware.
25:46 And so if you think about it, the services work is very, very different. At ServiceNow, you’d sell a project, and you could never demo the technology. It would take six months to get it live in a lot of services work. The multiplier on services to software is like 3x or 4x. And so that’s just very, very different.
26:11 At Samsara, you can, across let’s say a fleet of 30,000 vehicles, you can get that stuff installed in like 60 days. And the installation and the setup of the software isn’t the hard part. It’s getting the vehicles in one place to do it that is the hard part.
26:27 Avanish: It’s actually the physics of it.
26:28 Lara: It’s the physics of it. Totally. And so, it’s very, very different. So you don’t have services partners that can create massive businesses around this, because it wasn’t designed to be complicated like that. Now maybe over time, as more software products are released, etc., there will be a different role. Again, that would evolve as the company evolves.
26:50 But what’s super interesting is, if you think about the win-win-win equation, insurance companies are actually, at this point in the journey, probably the most important partner for Samsara. Because, if you think about it, the value proposition that we’re selling, the ROI, is how do you keep these businesses more efficient, safer, more sustainable. And safety is obviously a huge part of what all of the companies want. Also, it’s what your insurance company wants.
27:23 So that’s been a really, really interesting partnership. And there’s lots of different models around that, etc., with lead gen, subsidies, etc., where insurance is a partner that certainly wasn’t a big deal at ServiceNow, as an example.
27:40 And then Confluent, which is the other company I know well, is an infrastructure technology company. And it’s fundamentally built on public cloud infrastructure. Which was super different than what ServiceNow was, when we were there. And so there’s a natural partnership between the public cloud companies and Confluent. But at ServiceNow, you remember, it was almost like a third rail.
28:02 We built our own infrastructure. It was custom made for exactly what we need, etc. It’s way more efficient.
28:10 Avanish: You can never run it anywhere else.
28:11 Lara: Never run it anywhere else. It was religious, I think. And it was probably a five-year journey to actually get ServiceNow to run in the public clouds. And really that was, again, based on this kind of win-win-win. There were so many customers that had these bit commits on public cloud. How do I burn down some of that commit, be able to leverage ServiceNow in that environment? And so they had to do the engineering work, do the go-to-market work, etc.
28:43 But now I think the biggest deals that ServiceNow is doing are in partnership with these public cloud companies. Which is another example of how this evolves over time.
28:57 Avanish: And how relatively quickly it does sometimes.
29:00 Lara: Yeah. Totally. And so, totally different types of partners. But if we go back to the phases that we talked about, I think there’s an analogy for the partner ecosystem. And I think ServiceNow, because it’s the most mature, has the best example. ServiceNow – and Samsara, frankly – started as a very direct company. Direct sales, direct sales. And so Phase 1, when you’re in that product market fit phase, you actually view the ecosystem as your enemy. Because your competitors, your legacy competitors, actually have relationships with different ecosystem players. And they’re selling against you.
29:39 And so, there’s all of this emotional baggage that your sales force has. Which is just like, ugh, I have to get around these guys.
29:50 Avanish: They’re going to screw up my deal.
29:50 Lara: They’re going to screw up my deal. And then Phase 2, that’s when ServiceNow really started to win partners over. And many of them started to build small practices around ITSM to begin. And I would say it was proactive on the partners’ part. It was very much like ServiceNow was enabling a ton of that. It was helping to build momentum. It was putting a lot of investment into the ecosystem, was doing all of the work that you need to drive that.
30:22 But then, by the time you get to Phase 3, that’s when you really start to see that flywheel really moving. And partners are truly elevating you. And that’s where your partners are introducing you to additional buyers. They have deeper relationships with HR. Deloitte knows HR way better than ServiceNow knows HR, right? So they’ve got this vast scale, these vast relationships. They’re expanding deals. They’re opening up deals.
30:48 And I think that’s when you have this culture shift. And Dave Schneider, I think this is one of the most… He’s so brilliant in so many ways. One of the most brilliant things that I think he did was invite partners to the sales kickoff. And I honestly don’t know… We don’t do that at Samsara. I don’t know other companies that do…
31:05 Avanish: Most companies don’t. Most companies don’t.
31:07 Lara: And what’s amazing is, it’s like, we’re all in this together, guys! Learn about our latest innovation. Learn about how we’re enabling the field. We want you enabled. We want to sell side by side. I mean, it’s such an incredible message, to really keep that motion spinning.
31:26 I think there is a really good analogy of, to your point, that these kinds of things evolve together.
31:35 Avanish: Yeah. And I love your comment about the insurance category, for example, at Samsara. And I think the implication of that to others is, it’s not always a linear, hey, here’s the four pillars or buckets of tech partners and RSIs, GSIs, and resellers, and so on. It’s thinking about what matters to your customer, first of all, and your business. So I think that’s a brilliant insight in terms of that this exercise has to be strategic and think it through, rather than just try to do the same as someone else did.
32:10 So we talked about the phasing, the opportunity, the scaling. We all know it’s not easy. So let’s look at a bit of the downside. What are some of the challenges? What are some of the – in the experiences you’ve had – what are some of the things that you’re like, I wish this were different, but it is how it is, and you just have to overcome those challenges?
32:35 Lara: Yeah. I think all of the failures stem from not getting that strategic foundation right. Like you said, you have to have the win-win-win. It has to make sense for the partners. Because they are just rational businesses allocating their scarce resources, like any other rational business, on what’s going to drive their results.
32:54 And the same for you. If you’re spending a bunch of money investing in the ecosystem, and your sellers aren’t seeing results from it, don’t see benefit, it’s going to be very hard to maintain that investment over time. And then, for the customer, it’s got to have that one plus one equals three outcome. It has to be better for them as well.
33:15 And so you need customer intimacy to do that. You need partner intimacy to do that. And you need a bit of strategic framing for your own business. So that, to me, is the biggest table-stakes thing that you have to get right.
33:29 I think sometimes… What I discovered at Samsara was, early days, there would be money thrown against the wall for different kinds of partners. And it’s like, I have to totally redo this program. Because it just doesn’t have the win-win-win characteristics. And you’re literally throwing money out the door at that point, which nobody can afford to do that.
33:54 But once you find that win-win-win, then it just goes back to the humans. And I feel like every major transformation just goes back to the humans, you know? And you’ve got to figure out how to bring the humans along with the change. And I talked about Dave Schneider inviting the partners to sales kickoff.
34:15 You need the sellers to understand not just the longer-term strategic value. Because you can ask somebody to be a good soldier, and this is good for the company. But for a seller, what’s in it for me? How is this going to help me meet my quota? How is my paycheck going to be bigger because of what this partner is bringing to me? And you have to have the data to prove that. And the storytelling.
34:40 Storytelling is an insane superpower. [Laughs] And so you’ve got to show the data. Okay, here’s how many deals are being sourced by partners for the field. Sourced is such an important metric. This is how, when partners are involved, deal size is actually getting bigger. Close rates are higher. You’re selling higher up. You’re mapping to higher parts of the company. Deal cycles are shorter.
35:11 And then you’ve got to tell the stories. You’ve got to bring people onstage and let them tell the stories of their great win and the role the partner played, and tell their friends, and it’s all of the Change Management 101 of getting people to buy in.
35:28 Avanish: So here we’re in 2025 doing a podcast. And not only did we not mention AI, you actually mentioned people. Amazing.
[Laughter]
35:38 Lara: Maybe my downfall, I don’t know.
[Laughter]
35:42 Lara: I still think humans will be around. Will play a role.
35:45 Avanish: I’m crossing my fingers. I hope so. So in that answer you also covered some of the key success metrics. So I think those are things that everybody has to be on the lookout for. The impact, deal cycles shortening, access, storytelling. Again, some of it is basic, but what does surprise sometimes is how often people forget the basics. So it’s great to reaffirm that.
36:12 Lara, as we get to the end here, any words of guidance? You’ve been at the forefront of a lot of these transitions. You’ve seen it in different sizes of companies. Any words of wisdom for someone like you, maybe embarking on a similar journey elsewhere?
36:29 Lara: Yeah. There are so many things, but I think there are two ground truths that I think need to be true for some of the success that we’ve talked about, those outcomes. And the first is that it really all starts with the right products and the right market. From back to my path to 10 billion strategy days, you need to have the product market fit and enough differentiation from competitors that you have a right to win.
37:00 And then you need the big enough market opportunity. The size of the prize has to be big enough to make it worthwhile. Because it takes a lot of effort to get these things right. So you have to be laser focused on that. Not just for those market extensions, but also for your core.
37:21 What I think happened at ServiceNow and what’s happened at Samsara is, imitation is the highest form of flattery. And as your company finds success, competition, copycat companies, they will crop up around you. You need to continue to innovate and maintain that advantage in your core products and market. So that’s a super, super important one. And I think one that ServiceNow did really brilliantly over the years.
37:49 But the second one… And this one I’ve really reflected on over time. And that’s where the phases are interesting as well. Once you get big enough, you kind of get this flywheel of success. And that creates momentum for your company that’s really hard to stop. Because you have the customer relationships. Customers love you. You know folks. You’ve got a ton of data from the installed base – I’ll say the word AI. You should be investing in AI and being able to leverage that data asset.
38:27 You have financial power. You have way more money to invest than any startup that’s coming up. And you have brand recognition. So you have all of these powers that are there. And as I think about, at Samsara, when we think about entering a new market – I talk about there’s all these kinds of startups out there in physical operations land – we’re able to leverage our customer relationships, and get in there, and sound excited, understand their business needs. So we can build the right product. We can iterate on that with them and get their feedback along the way.
39:03 Compare that to a startup. That doesn’t have those relationships. Doesn’t have that benefit of the access, the trust, the financial power, all of that stuff. It’s super different. And when you wrap that with a platform vision, an ecosystem, you have this kind of unfair advantage that creates a very, very long runway for these companies to be able to succeed and build really big, enduring companies over time.
39:33 I think it’s obvious, and then you start to sort of recognize the power of it, and you’re like, wow, it’s a superpower.
39:42 Avanish: It’s happening. Lara, I cannot thank you enough. What a great set of insights. And I know we could probably have talked for a lot longer. But I really, really appreciated it. And great to see you again. And keep on trucking.
39:55 Lara: [Laughs] Well, it’s great to see you. Thank you so much for having me.
Avanish:Thanks, Lara Caimi, president of field operations at Samsara, for joining another leg of The Platform Journey.