from Hacker News

Samsara S-1

by finolex1 on 11/26/21, 6:28 PM with 62 comments

• by davedx on 11/26/21, 7:49 PM

  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).

• by rueynshard on 11/26/21, 7:35 PM

  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.

• by nicolashahn on 11/26/21, 7:25 PM

  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.

• by sjaak on 11/26/21, 8:16 PM

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

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

• by larrywright on 11/26/21, 8:02 PM

  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.

• by moltenguardian on 11/26/21, 10:44 PM

  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.

• by hazemotes on 11/26/21, 7:59 PM

  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?

• by mushufasa on 11/26/21, 7:12 PM

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

• by Invictus0 on 11/26/21, 8:10 PM

  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.

• by nemo44x on 11/26/21, 11:07 PM

  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.

• by tybit on 11/27/21, 4:38 AM

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

• by hizxy on 11/27/21, 4:55 AM

  Truck drivers hate them!

• by bradleyjg on 11/26/21, 8:03 PM

  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.

• by lostmsu on 11/27/21, 3:02 AM

  DDG: Samsara provides equipment monitoring.

• by relbeek2 on 11/27/21, 12:37 PM

  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.

• by swayvil on 11/27/21, 12:08 AM

  Is this for real or is this a metaphor?

• by mrfusion on 11/27/21, 1:02 AM

  Anyone want to share a blurb on what they do?