Earlier this week, Samsara began trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker symbol IOT. While our true success will be measured in decades, I’m so grateful to our customers, employees, investors, and partners who helped us reach this milestone today. It takes a team, and this is a great one!

I reached out to other founders and CEOs who had been through this process and was universally given the advice to try to pause and absorb all that’s happening. And so I took some time to reflect on how we got here and why I believe Samsara is still only in the early days of an incredible opportunity.

With Samsara, it really feels like we are in the right place, at the right time, with the right team. Samsara has been the combination of exciting technology, a world-class team, true partnership with our customers, and some amazing luck.

It was only six years ago that John Bicket, Samsara’s co-founder and CTO, and I were hanging out, talking over brunch about how it was finally becoming possible to connect sensors to the internet. We’d just finished a long run building Meraki, a cloud-managed networking company that now powers millions of networks worldwide. After selling Meraki to Cisco we decided we weren’t really ready to do something new—we’d heard great things about taking time off and were ready to give it a try! But within a few weeks, we started tinkering again and discovered some tiny circuit boards that got our imaginations running.

We took those little boards, figured out how to connect them to the cloud, and then couldn’t stop thinking of all the possibilities. We’d meet up every day and talk about potential uses—we saw how these sensors could be everywhere. It was even more exciting than what we saw with WiFi when we started Meraki back in the mid-2000s. 

John and I firmly believe true impact is about solving real-world problems. And what we saw was cloud and connectivity taking off in the consumer world (video calls, streaming TV shows), but not for the companies that power the world’s infrastructure and our economy. 

And so we decided the biggest impact we could make would be to focus on physical operations —transportation, energy utilities, logistics, construction, and more. These are the organizations that keep our world running and yet have been overlooked by the technology industry.

We spent our first year building alongside our beta customers. By 2016 we had a real customer feedback loop going. And we haven’t stopped since.

Our decision to focus on these industries has never felt more important than it does today. Far from the hidden world it once was, our supply chain has now become a main topic of every conversation. For our customers, this spotlight has led to an increased need for real-time visibility, which makes the operational insights and data analytics Samsara provides even more critical. At the same time, many of our customers are addressing macro changes, like changing driver demographics and the need to prepare for a sustainable future.

With our technology, Samsara is able to help our customers navigate these challenges successfully. In just a few short years we’ve helped improve safety on roads and in warehouses, saved people hundreds of thousands of hours by digitizing their paperwork, and used data to save millions of gallons of fuel and prevent countless tons of CO2 emissions. That is amazing work—beyond what any two of us as founders or a handful of early employees could have done.

Which is why I want to say a heartfelt thank you to all those who helped us along the way.

To our tens of thousands of customers: thank you for all your feedback and guidance. We are here to innovate on your behalf—you all have joined us at the drawing board, given us invaluable input, and helped create the products you see today.

To our partners: thank you for helping shape our platform and making it more than we could have done alone.

And to the Samsarians around the world who shared their creativity, passion, and talent with us: thank you. You have shaped Samsara’s culture, product, and success, and this new phase of our history will bring even bigger opportunities for impact and growth.

To all of you, our extended Samsara team, I want to thank you for everything you’ve done to make this exciting milestone a reality. It’s truly an honor to be part of this effort.

While I’m excited about today, I’m even more excited for Samsara’s next chapter. We now see even more new technology and opportunities to push the boundaries of what’s possible for our customers, and I’m sure as we continue to dream into the future we’ll be able to help companies transform in ways we can’t even imagine today. 

This is an exciting time for us all. Our IPO is the moment where Samsara lifts off the runway—I can’t wait to see where this amazing journey takes us next and the tremendous impact we’ll have together. 

Congratulations, everyone!