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Conversations between the venture investors and operators at Dell Technologies Capital and the people who are building what's next in enterprise technologies.
Lindsay McKinley (00:01):
What it taught me was just do it. Just go for it. This was an idea that Sam, the CEO, and I were really excited about, and it would've been really easy to not do it because the resources weren't there. It would've been really, really easy. This is a great idea, but do, and the attitude that I took, and I'm really proud of myself for taking this attitude, was, you know what? This is going to be really freaking hard, but it has the potential to be amazing. And so I'm going to try to make this happen.
Ronda Scott (00:38):
Welcome to the DTC podcast, a series of conversations between the investors and operators at Dell Technologies Capital and the people who are building what's next in enterprise technologies. Thanks for tuning in today. I'm super lucky to have Lindsay McKinley joining us. Lindsay is an experienced and incredibly creative comms exec and an all-around good human. She also happens to be the director of communications at Samsara, a tech platform for the world of physical operations. We'll talk more about that in a bit. She was the first comms hire at this company, and she led the communications as the company scaled through the pandemic and, more excitingly, through an IPO. And today she's continuing to expand the comms function globally for Samsara. Lots to talk about here. Thank you so much for joining me, Lindsay.
Lindsay McKinley (01:26):
Oh my gosh, I'm so excited to be here. Ronda, I love talking comms with you.
Ronda Scott (01:31):
I think we've been doing this for maybe a decade. We
Lindsay McKinley (01:34):
Have all iterations of comms. Yes,
Ronda Scott (01:38):
Yes. Well, there's a ton of experience to unpack and things to learn from you, so I am excited to get started. Maybe it makes sense just to jump in and hear a little bit about how you got started in comms.
Lindsay McKinley (01:51):
Yeah, yeah. Well, the short answer is I did not want to do communications. That was not my goal in life. I actually wanted to do publishing. I moved to New York City after college, thinking I wanted to do Booker Magazine publishing. I ended up doing stints in both and then got an opportunity to interview at this PR agency, and I decided just to see, just to try it and just see what it would be about. So I went in. I didn't really know what it was, so I actually got a book called The Fall of Advertising and The Rise of PR. I haven't read that in almost two decades, so I can't speak to the validity now, but I read that just so I could have some semblance of sounding like I knew what I was talking about, but I was so impressed by the woman who ended up becoming my boss, Lisa Eggerton, that I just really wanted to work for her, and she was just so interesting in the way that she thought about the world.
Lindsay McKinley (02:48):
So that's really how I got into it. It was a lot of serendipity; I would say. In terms of why I stayed; I've basically stayed in communications just because it feeds the desire that I have. I guess I would say, just following my curiosity; I think if you work in communications, you perpetually need to pay attention to external trends and how they relate to the operations of a business and the business goals that are being set at the C-suite and board level. It enabled me to really embrace that curiosity in a way that I felt it would benefit a business. So that's really why I stayed. I definitely can talk about the different experiences I had in comms, but for anyone who really likes steep learning curves, diving deep and exploring curiosity, it's definitely a field to maybe consider.
Ronda Scott (03:43):
Yeah, I get you on the curiosity point, and especially for those of us who have been in tech communications, I mean, you have to be curious. You're always learning because chances are what you're talking about is brand new to the world, and that's really exciting, and that's what keeps me coming back. So we met when you had joined a company called ClassDojo. So can you tell us a little bit about what they were tackling?
Lindsay McKinley (04:06):
Yeah, so ClassDojo at the time that I joined, was a communication app that connects home and school. It really helps parents understand what's happening in their children's classrooms and have that direct line of communication with teachers. It also helps through a variety of video programming. And these little monster avatars helps kids learn social emotional skills in the classroom via, you can think of it as empathy and growth mindset, and teachers can kind of use these resources to help break those concepts to life. When I first joined, the company was evolving, so it was of making this evolution into more of communication. When I first joined that part of the app and the platform had not yet really been fully built out. So when I joined, it was my job to not just raise the visibility of the company, but to re-message what ClassDojo was and also what it was aiming to achieve for the world. Because when I joined, it was the classic example of letting your customer dictate your message for you. And so what is ClassDojo’s message was basically what teachers called it, which at the time was classroom management because that is a teaching term, not inaccurate, but also not the actual vision of what the company wanted to become. So that was my main role coming in for the first six to nine months.
Ronda Scott (05:37):
And then as one human, one single human you've got with a platform like ClassDojo, you've got multiple constituencies, you've got parents, you've got teachers, you've got school administrators who are actually your buyers, and you have students, the end users, well, one of the end users being maybe the most important end user. How did you, as one person, handle thinking through addressing all of those constituents? Did you sequence them? How did you think about it?
Lindsay McKinley (06:08):
Definitely sequencing. There's another constituent group in there, too, which is policymakers when you regulate Exactly. Yeah. Whenever you do anything regarding children, classrooms, and technology, you'll have eyes on you. So that's really where it came down to speaking with the CEO, and other folks on the leadership team to understand what did the business really need at that moment in time? Because, like you said, there's so many directions you could go, and it doesn't mean that you're not going to go in that direction eventually, but maybe that's not the direction you need to go towards in the first six to nine months. So it was really sitting down with Sam and others and understanding what is the P-zero here. What do I need to focus on? And the P zero was really this re-messaging. The P-zero was building up relationships on the hill and with think tanks in DC and the P-zero was basically mobilizing our investor community. So that's really where I focused. And then as time went on, I started to build that out to the teacher community and the parent community primarily, again, dictated by the needs of the company because we were building out monetization through parents, not schools. And so that started almost the consumer comms brand marketing arm of what I started to focus on a couple years in.
Ronda Scott (07:40):
And so this goes back to my opening comment about you being an incredibly creative communications professional. So this is about the time that I met you, and what really impressed me is that you didn't stay in your lane, and you can't really stay in your lane in a startup, but I mean, you crossed the highway, and you started producing these amazing video content product. Essentially, you kind of moved into product. And before we move on to your next role that came after, I'd love to hear after ClassDojo; I'd love to hear a little bit about how you expanded your role and really flexed your creativity muscle.
Lindsay McKinley (08:17):
Yeah, this was one of the last projects I worked on before I left the company, and it was one of the most exciting because, like you said, it was actually creating content and product in a way. So Sam, the CEO and I were talking about how do we insert Class Dojo in the cultural zeitgeist? How do we create this global moment to rally parents, teachers, and kids together and really have it translate into the parent experience? Particularly because that's the direction the product was starting to evolve. And one of the concepts that we kind of noodled around was the idea of mindfulness. It was mindfulness at the time, still is today, but at the time in 2019 was really exceptionally important externally in terms of attention. And we already had all of this collateral in terms of Dojo, which is made up of all of these monster avatars, and kids love watching videos with the monsters, teaching 'em things like a growth mindset. Can we do the same kind of thing for mindfulness?
Lindsay McKinley (09:24):
So there were no resources internally to really do this. So I worked externally with some consultants and designers and with some of our agency partners in the UK and us to really create this moment; we called it the Mindful Moment. It was meant to be the largest teaching of mindfulness in classrooms around the world, and did partnerships with Yale, different nonprofits like Beyond Stigma, Beyond Shame, which were in the UK, and created video content where over the course of a week for those five days, kids around the world would watch videos in, I think we were in maybe six or seven languages, all about mindfulness and how do you center yourself and ground yourself, and this is for kids kindergarten through fifth grade. So this was the first time they were learning anything around to this, had websites dedicated to it in in-app experiences for parents and for teachers, endorsements from the education secretary in the UK Earned media. Huge. It was really, yeah, it was this really, really cool moment. And what it taught me was just do it. Just go for it. This was an idea that Sam, the CEO, and I were really excited about, and it would've been really easy to not do it because the resources weren't there. It would've been really, really easy. This is a great idea.
Lindsay McKinley (11:06):
And the attitude that I took, and I'm really proud of myself for taking this attitude, was, you know what? This is going to be really freaking hard, but it has the potential to be amazing, and so I'm going to try to make this happen. So I think that taught me a lot about just the go-for-it nature that I hope to bring to every job, but it also was just a really proud moment in terms of seeing the reaction of kids around the world and how meaningful it was for them to learn about
Ronda Scott (11:39):
That. It's
Lindsay McKinley (11:39):
So cool. Important topic. Yeah,
Ronda Scott (11:42):
I mean, this campaign was at this point, four or five years ago, and it still stands out in my mind as one of those things that I watch someone accomplish so much. And so we're five years ago and it still stands out. And so you just alluded to it, you then decided to leave ClassDojo and join.
Lindsay McKinley (12:04):
Yes.
Ronda Scott (12:05):
So, how did you make that jump? Because to be clear, Samsara, a tech platform for the world of physical operations?
Lindsay McKinley (12:12):
Yes. A little different. Yeah. I would say it just continues to go back to steep learning curves. Samsara just had all of the elements of a company that I was looking for exceptional leadership team, great product market fit, real-world impact of the technology that was being created, the ability to create something, and build something from scratch, which I was very interested in. I love building and on top of that, hypergrowth and potential IPO. So yeah, it's all of the things were there, all the things were there, but it was definitely a transition. I'll say that.
Ronda Scott (12:48):
And when you joined ClassDojo, a true startup, 15 people wearing lots of hats, jumping in, and getting your hands dirty, you joined Samsara also as the first comms lead. However, the company was, how many people
Ronda Scott (13:04):
Already? 900.
Lindsay McKinley (13:06):
So, they had waited a fair bit to scale the company before bringing someone in on the communications front. And you and I have talked about this before, but I think one of the most interesting things, learnings, takeaways from that experience is you told me you really needed to find the P-zero when you joined Samsara. And I think one of the most interesting things about you joining a company that already has 900 people, has a very experienced and successful leadership team is you interviewed; you went through the process, you're like, yes, this has all the ingredients for potentially being a magic experience as a comms person. But you had a few learnings when you started, and there was something in there about discovering the true P-zero. So, can you talk a little bit about that?
Lindsay McKinley (13:56):
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I think it's the most important thing you can do when you join a new company. No matter the size, there's only so much you can learn in the interview process. Hopefully, you learn a lot, but once you're at the company, all of a sudden, you kind of see the true picture. Yeah. So when I first joined, one of the first things that I did was just speak to people who had built a comms function at hypergrowth startups before and get advice from folks who have lived that experience. So Sean Garrett at Twitter, who I know, and Julia Blystone at Slack, just kind of understanding from them, what would you do again if you had to do this again, and what would you definitely not do if you had to do it again? And one of the first things that they all said was really understand what is most important for the business.
Lindsay McKinley (14:48):
When I first joined, it was just sitting down with people across the business and understanding what was on their mind, senior leadership, not senior leadership people, just from all functions. And very specifically for Samsara. When I first joined, I was hired primarily to focus on the external side of comms, and within the first month, it became very clear to me that, actually, the internal side is what was most top of mind for senior leadership. And so that just completely rewired how I was thinking about building the function out. And just based on the scale, again, hypergrowth from an external standpoint, it was less about thought leadership, it was less about maybe executive profile building, and it was more about how do I help sales sell faster and recruiting recruit faster? Another piece of advice that I got was just create rubrics to get to know fast because so many things are going to come at you when you first join, asks from people who maybe have been wanting this function for years, and finally, you there, and they can't wait for you to do something.
Lindsay McKinley (15:53):
That, too, maybe at Samsara when I joined social media, was 15% of someone's job on the content marketing team. They could not wait for me to take social media over, which I should, but during the first week, it was probably not the top most of my priorities. So you just need to make sure it's very clear what are the priorities for the company right now And kind of build that cadence out in that plan. So when you do say to have follow-up conversations with folks, it's not, no, I'm not doing it. This is what matters most right now. And I will do those things, and this is a timeframe for when I will do those things. So that I think is really important. And then the third piece of advice I got was just build your team as fast as you can. You're going to need more support than you think you do.
Ronda Scott (16:46):
Yeah, absolutely. And I think to clarify, I don't think any company set out to bamboozle their first comms hire by saying, Hey, we're hiring you for one thing. And then you get into the company, and you're like, whoa, there's all this other stuff.
Lindsay McKinley (16:58):
You want me to be a growth marketer? What? I had no idea. Yeah,
Ronda Scott (17:03):
I don't think anyone's doing that intentionally, but they actually don't know what they don't know. And I think another thing that you have to spend some time on, and as a communications professional, maybe you pick up on it a little bit quicker, is learning the language of the company. It's the culture of the company, but then it's also the language of the company about understanding how questions, problems, and challenges get framed at the company you're at.
Lindsay McKinley (17:26):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think about it for those who are familiar. I think about it a bit like love languages, what's the love language of the company? And it's really important to get clear on what that is because it is how you interact with people internally. It's how you make cases; it's how you push proposals forward. Samsara's love language is data. So that was really a very important insight, and it's something that, luckily, I learned pretty early on, but it's a different love language than I was used to at Dojo and my agency that maybe wasn't the love language. So it is really important. You go in, you figure out the P zero, you figure out how our case is made, how our minds changed. I like asking a question with every executive that I meet: “When's the last time someone changed your mind? And how did they do it?” Just so you can kind of understand what levers you need to pull to make a case as
Ronda Scott (18:32):
Needed. That's so smart. So smart. Did you have to make a case about how to start to build your team?
Lindsay McKinley (18:38):
Luckily, I did not have to make a case around that.
Ronda Scott (18:41):
Hooray.
Lindsay McKinley (18:42):
I think people realize that it should be more than one person, but it also, I mean, it is part and parcel to the plan, obviously. So the first two people I hired, they're actually still both the company, phenomenal comms people. So Andy Rodriguez was hired, she focused on product in a tech comm. So she really was focused on that sales enablement piece and really starting up a product launch motion, external product launch motion for us for the company, and the other Kim Liu for internal comms and building that out. And I still thank my lucky stars about her hire because I managed to hire her, I think, three weeks before Covid. So that would've been a very unpleasant experience, I think, if I didn't have her partnership through that whole timeframe.
Ronda Scott (19:32):
Yeah, that's amazing. How long did it take you to ascertain who you needed to hire first, and how quickly were you able to get them in the door?
Lindsay McKinley (19:39):
So why those two hires is because really what I was aiming to, what I saw as the P zero for the company, really two p-zeros, but one was the internal comms piece. There was a lot to build there: build town halls, build newsletters for the company at a regular cadence, start a cascade process, all that kind of stuff. And that was becoming more and more important because we were 900 people and we were four offices around the world, including one in London. So, how do we create this sense of cohesiveness of what it means to be a samsara? So that was one P-zero, and then the second P-zero was related to the external piece in the sales-enablement and recruiting-enablement. And so, really, I wanted to bring in someone who, on the external side, could honestly just be kind of a Swiss Army knife. My number two would go in and just get stuff done and spiked in product and tech. And so that was Andy. It did take me a while. I don't remember exactly how long. I mean, it took me a while in my memory because I'm sure I was just like, oh my gosh, I just have some support here. It probably wasn't that long. In actuality, it was probably maybe three months or something. But
Ronda Scott (21:01):
Those three months feel like a year and start,
Lindsay McKinley (21:05):
They felt very long. They felt very long. But yeah, that was probably the cadence for that. For Kim, it was probably pretty similar. Honestly, I didn't start scoping that role until a little bit later on, but I think it was probably about three months or so. I would say one thing that I very much believe in, at least for my approach to hiring, is the comms world is pretty small. So I also believe in just doing your own recruiting. I was lucky to have really good recruiters, but I also did my own recruiting, and I just reached out to people myself, and you know what you're looking for. And sometimes it's helpful to convey that to the recruiting team and, at the same time, to just proactively seek out that type of person yourself.
Ronda Scott (21:56):
So let's dive into that a little bit more. When you've been both at an early-stage startup, tiny and then a hockey stick growth startup with Samsara, what were the attributes you were looking for to find success in these hires?
Lindsay McKinley (22:11):
Yeah. Well, I believe very much in hiring for spikes, not deficits; you're never going to find the perfect unicorn. So just be very clear on what the team needs the spike to be because you want complimentary skill sets. So Spike, to me, is both a skillset thing, and it's also a little bit of an attitude I want. I think it's important for the entire team to have cultural norms for the team that everyone jointly lives up to and believes in. But I also think it's helpful to have a bit of a combination between egg breakers and diplomats on a team. You need both someone who's more of an instigator and someone who more softly moves and maneuvers. And I think it's helpful to have both, and I think they can be very complimentary. And so that's kind of how I think about building the team. What is the specific skill set that is needed as the spike, and what is the type of personality that I also want this person to spike in so that they would be most set up for success within this company and with this team? So that's how I think about it. Yeah, I'm happy to go into that more, but just high level; that's how I think about it.
Ronda Scott (23:29):
Well, I mean, I guess I'm personally curious about the egg breakers and the diplomats. If you have a whole team of egg breakers, I mean, can you have a whole team of egg breakers or a whole team of diplomats?
Lindsay McKinley (23:40):
Well, I think with the former, you might not be well-liked, and with the latter, you might not get much done. So I think it also depends on how maybe big the company is. I think if you're at a smaller company, I think egg breakers tend to gravitate towards that a little bit more. In the larger company, maybe teams will have a higher percentage of diplomats. But I do think it's important to have both represented on a team.
Ronda Scott (24:05):
That makes a lot of sense. And to get super tactical if you have to. These are the two questions I ask every interviewee always. What are those two questions?
Lindsay McKinley (24:19):
Oh gosh. Well, I mean, one of those questions is the one I said, which was, “What's a recent example of someone who changed your mind and talked to me about it?” I also asking the question, “What was the last uncomfortable truth you brought up, and how was that handled?” There is a really interesting approach that I think Jeff Bezos has, which is he talks about high-performing companies and teams, and he says that no matter how big a company gets, it's really important for anyone at the company, no matter the level to be able to speak an uncomfortable truth and have that listened to. So I like to ask that question. And sometimes it's illuminating. Maybe they worked at a company where that's not possible, so it doesn't have to do with them and has to do with the environment. But I like asking that question.
Lindsay McKinley (25:12):
I like asking questions that I dig into when I was talking about more of the cultural norms that I like to have across the team at large, no matter what. One of them is curiosity. So I like to ask, “What's something you recently learned that changed your view of communications?” I like to test for resilience. “Tell me your one of the lowest moments of your career and how you persevered through it.” And another area that I just like to dig into a little bit is the ability for someone to be self-reflective. And so I try to make this the last if not one of the last questions, but I like to ask, what is a common misperception that people have about you? So those are kind of the areas that I like to ask around, and that's tough. Those are function agnostic. Yeah.
Ronda Scott (26:15):
Yeah. I'm sitting here thinking, like, wait, what I say in that situation, I don't know.
Lindsay McKinley (26:20):
It's illuminating because there's no wrong answer, right? You're just learning about the person and how the person operates and thinks.
Ronda Scott (26:29):
How they operate, how they think, and their level of self-awareness is really important. And then also how they are able to communicate that back to you on the fly. Because I don't think most of those questions, they're not like, tell me about your strengths and weaknesses. I don't think most people have prepared those exact questions, which is great. They will now answer this.
Lindsay McKinley (26:48):
Podcast. I was going to say, hopefully the next person I interview doesn't listen to this. But yes, it's trying to aim at deeper stuff. I also mean I have a Google Doc on my drive where I just jot down interview questions that I think are good. So if I'm listening, and sometimes they aren't even interview questions, like when I'm listening to a podcast, I go, wow, that's a good question. I'll jot that in there. But yeah, those are some of my current favorites.
Ronda Scott (27:13):
So you've grown your team, and you've strategically hired people who spike in areas that the team and the company really need. And then there's this inkling that something that you thought might happen when you joined the company and a reason why you joined the company is you're going to IPO at some point. So once that started to become real, I'd love to hear a little bit about when did it start to become real, and then how did you start to prepare for it? What were you thinking? I know for companies, it's all over the map. I've worked with portfolio companies where their runway was just a handful of months, and it's like, all right, we're going to do this now. The market's open; we're going. And then there's others who've been very thoughtful about it and engaged 18 to 24 months in advance. And so paint a picture for me. What was it like at Samsara? How much of a runway did you have, and how did you get started?
Lindsay McKinley (28:06):
We had a longer runway than I think most did. We are a very thoughtful company, so that's not surprising to me. But conversations started to kind of swirl around late 2021, so about a year before we iPod. And so we had a period of time where we could maybe try to make some things happen externally before we went into a quiet period. When that started to kick off, I really kind of took the same approach that I did when I first joined the company. I called folks and got intros to folks who had taken companies public. You are someone that I spoke to, folks like John Hallick, who's amazing, talked to Julia Blystone, again, talked to Lulu Servi, talked to our agencies. We were working with Air Cover and FGS at the time, then known as sorry for Benin, and just really started to formulate a plan based off of all of those conversations on ideally what would be the approach.
Lindsay McKinley (29:15):
And I say ideally because that will never be the approach, but build out the ideal plan first, and then you can kind of backtrack. So that's kind of the approach that I took. I would say the most important thing if I had to say the most important thing for any comms person who's going through an IPL, the most important thing is that you need to develop very close relationships with the key stakeholders who you are going to be working with over the next few months if you don't already have them so that you can ensure your strategy is crystal clear and aligned across the board. Everyone has the same goal, which is get out clean. That is everyone's goal. Everyone's goal is we want this company to get out clean. Now, different functions will have different approaches there. Comms wants to build a brand. Therefore, comms is going to have a higher risk tolerance than legal, whose goal is to mitigate risk. So we're going to have different entry points to set goals, but our goal is the same. So make sure that everyone knows that that is your belief, so that if you are pushing people in ways that maybe are uncomfortable, they know that you are doing it, not because you're trying to mess up that end goal, but because you believe that will make the end goal even more successful. So that would be my top piece of advice there.
Ronda Scott (30:55):
Sorry to interrupt, but who, I feel like comms touches every aspect of the company, and we already talked about this. You're involved in internal communications, external communications, executive thought leadership and product launches. What functions would you might not already have a relationship with that you would be strengthening those relationships? You'd need to, alright, it's getting real; let's sit down and have a regular coffee so that we,
Lindsay McKinley (31:26):
Yeah, I would say it's not. Maybe developing relationships is not new. It's going deeper into the relationships that you have. And the two, I mean, besides the executive team, which is obvious, the two most important are legal, and IR and those are the two that we would joke that we just felt like we were all on the same team. And that's how it should feel. It should feel like you are all on the same team because your goal is the same, your functional sense of success might differ, but the end goal is the same. So that would be the thing. And then again, it just goes back to what is the risk tolerance of the company and how can you make a case of a case that needs to be made to do the things that you want to do. And I had to make that case a few times, and surprise, surprise, I did it through data. So looking at benchmarks of companies that our senior executive team would mention in terms of feeling like those companies said good IPOs. So, really just doing some forensics on what did their comms strategy looked like, talking to their internal comms teams, talking to their agencies, just really kind of breaking it down and using that to kind of push forward different proposals that maybe were not, didn't immediately have the positive reception that I would've hoped for, but after making that case, we were able to get them through.
Ronda Scott (32:52):
So smart and just out of curiosity, and to get tactical, when you're talking about you've got your plan, and you're like, no plan is going to be perfect, and every plan is going to change, but what were the big beats of your plan leading the 12-month plan of lead up?
Lindsay McKinley (33:06):
Yeah, yeah. Well, so I think there are different phases that you kind of want to think about. So you want to think about the readiness part. So what is the buildup before listing day and IPO? That can be, I mean, at minimum, it should be a year, hopefully. And that's kind of that phase, like phase one. There's the pre-filing phase, which is really before you actually do the filing right before you go into a quiet period. And so that tends to be maybe a quarter of the time, and then you have the quiet period. And the quiet period can be very short or it could be exceptionally long. It really just depends. So as soon as the S One is filed, that timeframe, that moment until the public flip is really this kind of quiet period phase. And that is the trickiest phase to navigate. And that's where you really do need to have very strong relationships with legal, in particular, to figure out and make sure that everyone is on board with what's happening.
Lindsay McKinley (34:08):
The absolute thing that you want to avoid is for the SEC to critique something that comms did, and therefore, the listing day is delayed. That is the absolute nightmare. But you also don't want to play so close to the chest and toe the line so much that you go IPO, and no one cares, and no one knows about it. So it's this delicate dance, right? And that's a little bit of what I was alluding to before, and then you have a listing day, then it's really important also to make sure that you're planning for that first quarter as a public company. So one thing that we did that our IR team led was making sure for at least, I think it was three quarters, if not four quarters ahead of going public, we did mock earnings every quarter. So I would sit down with different people on the IR team, write, write it as if it was happening, write the shareholder letter, write the prepared remarks, write the mock press release, and we would have board members join a mock earnings call and just really kind of practice that so that the first earnings when we went out the gate wouldn't be the first time we were actually trying to do it.
Ronda Scott (35:25):
Yeah, that's so smart. It's so smart. I would like to ask another tactical question. Going back to the internal versus external, when you're balancing your skillset collectively for your entire team internally versus what could be available externally, did you bring on external help that was specific to the IPO?
Lindsay McKinley (35:44):
We did, yes. Yes. And that, I think, goes back a little bit to the spikes. No one on the team, myself included, had taken a company public before. And if you're going to actually, let me phrase this a little bit differently. Yes, we did. No one on the team, myself included, had taken a company public before. And this is such a seminal moment in a company's lifetime. This is not a moment to; there are no, this is a one-way door. This is not a two-way door. So this is a moment we're actually trying to get the budget for said external help is very rarely pushed back upon. So we already had an agency, aircover, Mike Moore, and a team who are phenomenal and really helping on the media front. And then we brought on FGS at the time known as Sar, forbidden, and really focused them in on the IPO.
Lindsay McKinley (36:40):
And they helped with everything from messaging to materials to media training and really were that partner. And so that I thought was number one, it really helped us in my mind. I think it really helped us have a very, very strong ultimate listing day. But it also was a really big help for me in terms of making those cases to do certain things because they had done this so many times before. It helped in terms of just speeding up that process and making sure that I felt very confident. I felt very confident in the recommendations. You're
Ronda Scott (37:22):
Confident in asking, Hey, this is not their first rodeo,
Lindsay McKinley (37:26):
So Exactly. And you can't rely on that. You can't be like, look, they've done it before, therefore it's going to be great here. That might not be true, but you know what it is? It's additional data points where it's like, look, they've done this dozens of times, this isn't unheard of. And on top of that, this is how it could look at Samsara, because I know this company. And based on those two things, this is a strong proposal that hopefully you can get buy-in around. So I would highly recommend if you are running a comms team and you do not have IPO experience yourself, bolster that arm and make sure that you are not doing this alone. And if you do have IPO experience, you still might want to bolster that. Again, this
Ronda Scott (38:15):
Is
Lindsay McKinley (38:16):
A moment for the company,
Ronda Scott (38:17):
A data set of one here, but how far out from the IPO did you retain the IPO-specific agency?
Lindsay McKinley (38:25):
I believe six months.
Ronda Scott (38:26):
Okay. Yep. Makes a lot of sense. So you've IPOd, you came out clean, you have your execs on TV and all the things that public companies do, talking about their earnings and putting things into context. So all of that seems, from the outside, like it's running as a well-oiled machine, but you're not done yet.
Lindsay McKinley (38:44):
Perfect job done.
Ronda Scott (38:47):
No. You're not done yet.
Lindsay McKinley (38:48):
Not done yet.
Ronda Scott (38:50):
Just recently, I believe you were in Mexico City opening. Was in Mexico City? It
Lindsay McKinley (38:54):
I was.
Ronda Scott (38:55):
Okay, great. Just recently you were in Mexico City opening another office. So you've taken this company from first hire through IPO, now you're doing global expansion. What else do you have going on at Samsara now?
Lindsay McKinley (39:11):
Oh, so many things, Ronda. So many things. Yes. Yeah, I mean, I really like regional comms. I loved being down in Mexico City and getting to work directly with the team. It was just a phenomenal week and event. Opening up our new office. We've been in the country since 2019, so this is the latest of our new offices because we're growing so fast. But I would say that's also an indication of just samsara as a whole. Ever since we've gone public, if anything, we've just accelerated, we're going even faster. So, I think that can be a little bit of a misconception that people might have of working at a startup versus working at a public company. Depending on the public company, those companies might move even faster than they did when they were private. And our CEO, Sanja has a really great way of phrasing this, where he talks about rehiring yourself every year. He creates a job spec for himself every single year based on what the company needs from him now. And basically, he rehires himself. Would he get the job based on what the needs are? So I think that's something that all of us can learn from and just, it speaks to the pace of what happens over in Samsara land at least.
Ronda Scott (40:27):
That's awesome. So it's not getting boring yet. You're not resting on your laurels.
Lindsay McKinley (40:31):
Not getting boring yet. Not getting boring yet. No.
Ronda Scott (40:34):
Amazing. Well, thank you so much. This has been an amazing conversation. We covered all kinds of topics. I've learned a lot. I hope our listeners will learn a lot, and I really appreciate your time today.
Lindsay McKinley (40:45):
Oh my gosh. This was a lot of fun, Ronda. Yay. As always. As always, love talking to you.
Ronda Scott (40:51):
Thank you. Thanks for listening to the DTC podcast. If you like what you heard, you know what to do: like, share, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.