Life At Samsara

The Samsara Culture Playbook

March 7, 2024

Steve Pickle

Chief People Officer

Get the latest from Samsara

Subscribe now

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 200k crashes, digitize 265M workflows, and reduce CO2 by roughly 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.

cover image

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:

cover image

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

  • Be passionate and proud of every aspect of the customer experience — we build our products and processes used by thousands (internally) and millions! (externally) of people every day. 

  • Demo often and run feedback loops – understand both the big picture and small details from the customer perspective.

Work with urgency, deliver iteratively

  • Work in small teams with clear ownership, they move fastest and are the most fun.

  • Find simple, elegant solutions and iterate quickly.

  • Build for the long term and deliver weeks at a time. 

Work backwards from winning

  • Have a clear vision and reverse engineer success.

  • Create simple solutions as a strong foundation that others can build on.

Keep a high bar

  • Deliver end-to-end experiences you’re proud to show off — go for “wow!”

  • Be an expert in your area, and know the details. 

  • Hire and invest in exceptional people, and celebrate exceptional work.

Be intellectually honest

  • Use objective data to see if something worked; transparently share your results.

  • It’s rare to get everything right–share feedback so we can all improve. 

Have discipline

  • Make hard decisions for long-term benefit.

  • Be deliberate about budgeting your team’s time and energy to maximize impact for customers.

Eliminate bureaucracy

  • Keep meetings short, small, and focused on decisions.

  • The substance of what we do is more important than the form: focus on what really matters and go win.

Solve problems together

  • Bring the right team members in to solve a problem.

  • Redesign things as needed; work together to find new solutions.

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.

Get the latest from Samsara

Subscribe now