Date: May 2, 2024
Time: 5:00–6:00 p.m.
Location: Bill and Melinda Gates Hall, Room G01 and online

John Bickett ’02 is the CTO and co-founder of Samsara, a company that enables businesses with physical operations to harness Internet of Things (IoT) data to develop actionable business insights and improve their operations. He co-founded the company with the mission to increase the safety, efficiency, and sustainability of the operations that power the global economy. He is responsible for Samsara’s disruptive technology that makes operating thousands of sensors simple and secure.

Prior to co-founding Samsara, John co-founded Meraki, where he was CTO and VP of engineering. At Meraki, he led the Meraki technical team and built a cloud-based platform that combines analytics, big data, and security that transformed how customers deployed and managed Wi-Fi and networking infrastructure. Originating from his research while a PhD student at MIT, John and his team built integrated hardware, software, and cloud-based services that became the most widely deployed cloud managed edge networking platform. Meraki’s product lines spanning Wi-Fi, switching, routing, firewalls, and mobile-device-management scaled to connect hundreds of millions of network devices across more than 140 countries. After Cisco acquired Meraki for $1.2 billion, John led Meraki as Cisco’s fastest-growing cloud product and one of Cisco’s most successful acquisitions.

John holds a BS in computer science from Cornell University and an SM in Computer Science from MIT.

About the Hatfield Fellows Program

The Continental Group Foundation established the Robert S. Hatfield Fund for Economic Education at Cornell University in 1980 to honor the then retiring chairman, president, and chief executive officer of the Continental Group Inc.

The fund supports the Hatfield Fellows Program, which serves as a major platform for the exchange of ideas between the academic and the corporate communities. The Hatfield Fellows Program is administered by the president of Cornell University, who each year invites one or more distinguished business leaders to meet with students and faculty members and to deliver a major address, the Hatfield Lecture. In 1981, Robert S. Hatfield ’37 inaugurated the Hatfield Fellows Program by serving as the first fellow.