Why I joined a hardware start-up?
This post was originally published on Medium on September 2019
Growing up in India, I saw the radical transformation that connectivity brings. First, cable television changed the 90s in India (yes, thats when cable TV entered India), followed by Internet in 2000s and ultimately the smartphones in 2010s. India provides such a massive information impoverished landscape, that each inflection point is magnified for its impact and accelerated in its adoption.
When I moved to the USA in 2015, a country over-flowing with information, I knew the secret to my American dream will be finding a similar inflection point in the local economy. By 2016, I was convinced the inflection point is not going to be about information exchange between humans, but between machines to humans and machines to machines.
I decided to dig deeper during my time at Stanford, spending two years between the computer science and business school. Early on, I put together a group of students with experience and interest in hardware, to write a thesis on state of industry and scope out emerging opportunities for start-ups. I wanted to learn about the industry and start my venture 2.0 in the hardware space. While we never really made considerable progress on the report, we had a lot of meaningful conversations with interesting entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. The common theme was
“ Don’t do hardware unless you are Andy Rubin or Tony Fadell, its a graveyard of entrepreneurs”
“Most people are chasing the cool new technology, the economic value chain is ignored, and thats where the money is “
The first motivated me but lack of knowledge gnawed at me. Our group did yield some results, 4 out of 5 people ended up in hardware, 1 started his own company and I gotta be an early seed investor in one.
On a personal front, I really believed in this hardware story, and wanted to find a way to chase it.
And here’s why I believed in it
The personal computer revolution started in 1980s, and took 30 years to reach 1.5 billion units worldwide.
The smartphones boom started in 2007/08 and it took almost 10 years to reach ~3 billion smart-phone users in the world.
Phones and computers are capped by number of people. There are more things than people. I own 2 bikes, a car, an oven, a fridge, dishwasher etc. All of them will be connected within the next decade.
Similarly, things I consume, from clothes to food follows a complex but antiquated supply chain to reach me. As business’s adopt technology, they will have sensors and cameras guiding every bit of this logistical supply chain.
Thus, as we make our operations “smarter”, our household goods “smarter” and our commute “smarter”, our energy consumption “smarter”, we will have 10x the devices connected to internet than we have phones and computers combined.
I predict, there will be 30–40 billion connected devices in the next 10 years i.e. 10x that of smartphone and 100x that of computers in its first decade.
Why now?
Three different technology phenomenons makes this the perfect time for this technology to scale and become main steam.
Cheap connectivity: with the advent of cheap connectivity (Ubiquitous Wifi, LPWA, cheaper cellular speeds, LTE-M)
Power efficiency of devices: Koomey’s law is finally making devices power efficient to run on AA batteries
Scaling and business model: Hardware manufacturing has become plug-and-play and Hardware SaaS (H-SaaS) is going to dominate 2020s.
If 40 billion devices will be coming online in the next decade, I am not going to sit on the sidelines. I want to participate in every capacity I can. As an employee, investor and entrepreneur — if I can, I want to be involved in every possible way in shaping this future and being a part of it.
How did I become a part of it?
With limited knowledge on the industry, I wanted to join the industry with few things in mind
Find a company run by people/engineers with experience in hardware
Find a company past the Series B stage (my previous company was about 50 people, and I wanted to learn from scale)
Find a role that is closely involved in creating the product
Find a business model I want to emulate (H-SaaS)
This advice on choosing the industry first (Hardware IoT) and then find a a company which is scaling fast, and paying attention to the disruptive business model of the company was given by Andy Rachleff. I will continue to owe him for this and many other life lessons.
What did I learn/gain?
I found all of the above at Samsara, an IoT company run by ex-Meraki founders and engineers, which had found product market and while the team was 400 people, it was mostly sales folks hired to scale rapidly. Product-engineering was combined just over 50 people, so I had enough room to come in and make an impact.
In the the 18 months I spent at the company,
Built hardware products: I have built few hardware products from scratch with an amazing set of engineers. I got my name on a patent filing.
Hyper-scaling lessons: We expanded the company to 10 countries from just 1, opened 2 new offices, and hired a 1000+ new people. We scaled revenues, with our quarterly revenues exceeding our annual revenues from a year ago. I got the opportunity to do the same for the product-line I led, where I grew it from early traction to a double digit million$ ARR business contributing 12% of company revenues.
Hiring: Hyper-growth requires people and process. Going from a start-up to a mostly well run 1500+ people company in approximately a year is a management lesson few can get. But the most interesting part of hyper-scale has been hiring. I did almost 10 interviews a week to keep our hiring engine running at full throttle. Interviewing almost 300+ candidates from top silicon valley companies and ivy league colleges helps you develop an instinct for exceptional talent.
People: Success attracts the successful and vice-versa. The last 18 months I have spent time with an insanely talented set of engineers, operators and sales professionals . The valuable friendships, connections and lessons will far outlast anything else I have or will gain at Samsara.
And not just Samsara, I had the good fortune of investing in two very early stage IoT companies (one I mentioned above). The ring-side view into these start-ups, the struggles and wins of these founders has given me a lot of empathy and perspective on starting up in this space.
I write this as a reminder to myself on why I am on this journey and why I would love to invest in hardware companies. If you are passionate about this space, feel free to reach out.
