Life At Samsara

The Samsara Culture Playbook

March 7, 2024

Steve Pickle

Chief People Officer

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Since Samsara’s founding in 2015, we've held a core belief: Our people and culture are central to our ability to innovate, build, and make a meaningful difference for our customers. 

Today, Samsara helps tens of thousands of customers digitize their physical operations to be safer, more efficient, and sustainable. We have been solving our customers’ toughest challenges and making a real-world impact. Together with our customers, our teams have helped prevent an estimated 200,000+ crashes, digitize 230 million+ workflows, and reduce CO2 by roughly 2.3B pounds.* 

To ensure that we continue to innovate, build, and deliver for our customers, we are intentional about our culture. Our culture hasn’t evolved by chance. We’ve been deliberate about articulating what we’re building and what we stand for–the “whats” of our culture–in our mission, vision, and values. We've also articulated how we work together to achieve our goals—the “hows” of our culture—through our operating principles. These elements make up what we call the Samsara Culture Playbook. It’s a playbook that has underpinned our success and will guide us as we continue to grow.

What We’re Building For: Our Mission and Vision

Samsara’s Culture Playbook starts with our greater purpose and ambition defined by our company mission and vision:

Our mission is to improve the safety, efficiency, and sustainability of the operations that power the global economy. Millions of people work to ensure our communities run smoothly every day. Construction workers who build our cities. Truck drivers who deliver our goods. Maintenance workers who keep the water running and the lights on. These jobs can be hard and hazardous. We want essential work to be safer, easier, and more environmentally sustainable for all workers, companies, and communities involved.

Our vision is to have the world run on Samsara by building the system of record for physical operations. That means building products to collect and connect data across our customers' operations and using AI to find and deliver insights—improving our customer’s operations and creating a powerful, data-driven platform to improve the world of physical operations globally.

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Change the Way the World Operates with Samsara

What We Stand For: Our Values

Beyond our mission and vision, we are guided by five core values that define our beliefs and what we stand for:

Focus on customer success. We build relationships with our customers, look to solve problems, and deliver a great customer experience.

Build for the long term. We are building an enduring company that makes a positive impact on the world. The digital transformation for physical operations won’t happen overnight, and we are committed to working at a sustained pace to help make it happen.

Adopt a growth mindset. We are curious and have an entrepreneurial spirit where we seek out new challenges, embracing lessons learned along the way.

Be inclusive. We create an environment where people can bring their whole, authentic selves to work that reflects the diversity of the world we are helping to improve.

Win as a team. We win together, celebrate together, and support each other. We all operate with trust and respect and are excited to build and contribute to Samsara’s community.

Learn more from our team about what living our values means at Samsara:

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Living our values at Samsara

How We Work Together to Achieve Our Goals: Our Operating Principles

Finally, in addition to being clear about what we’re building for and what we stand for, we know it’s important to be clear about how we work together to achieve our goals and live our values. Samsara’s Operating Principles lay out the ways of working together that have made us successful from the very beginning.  There are seven operating principles that we cultivate and expect from all Samsarians:

Sample the customer experience. Our customers are at the core of our mission. Be passionate about every detail of their experience. Run customer feedback loops and check that everything works end-to-end. If something is not right, understand the root cause and help fix it.

Have a bias for action. Set ambitious timelines so we can meet the needs of our customers. Ruthlessly prioritize, simplify, and get started. Iterate with feedback and get things done so we can keep building more.

Work backward from winning. Define success 1-3 years out, and reverse engineer that success. Align cross-functionally. Be clear about who is doing what. Communicate frequently. Be transparent about progress, get help, and give help when needed.

Have discipline. Do hard things for long-term benefit. Use experience to make tradeoffs with limited resources. Think and act like an owner.

Be intellectually honest. Test your hypotheses with data, and transparently share the results. Insist on debate, welcome disagreement, and ensure respect. Decide based on the facts, and fully commit once a decision is made.

Keep a high bar. Do your best work, sweat the details, and go for wow. Hire and invest in exceptional people and celebrate exceptional accomplishments. Underperformers hold the rest of the team back—we give direct feedback to those not meeting the bar and hold each other accountable.

Solve problems together. We’re one team—step up to help each other. The best ideas can come from anywhere. Invite new perspectives, build trust, and welcome differences. Expect some things to be “red” in anything ambitious, and work together to fix things.

Scaling Samsara’s Culture

By being declarative about what we’re building for, what we stand for, and how we work together, the Samsara Culture Playbook sets the foundation for our continued innovation, growth, and scale. We will be welcoming thousands of new Samsarians in the years to come and touching the lives of thousands more of our customers. Our culture will set the tone for our success and the success of our customers. The Samsara Culture Playbook helps accelerate us on this journey.

If you are looking to innovate and create and are as energized as we are by Samsara’s mission, vision, values, and operating principles, we hope you’ll consider joining our team. Check out our open positions here and follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram to learn more.

*Footnote

  • Crashes - October 2022 - October 2023

  • Workflows - Stat from FY24

  • CO2 emissions - Estimate based on year-over-year reduction in idling rates per monthly available hours for a cohort of 2,500+ Samsara customers observed during Q1-Q3 CY22

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