Learn to Sell, Learn to Build

Talking about combining skills, you said that you should learn to sell, learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable. You know, this is a very broad category now, but it's two broad categories.

One is building the product, which is hard, and it's a multivariate that can include design, that can include development, that can include manufacturing, logistics, and procurement. It could even be designing and operating a service. It has many definitions, but in every industry, there is a definition of the Builder. In our tech industry, that's the CTOs, the programmers, the software engineers, and hardware engineers.

But, you know, even in like a laundry business, it could be the person who's building the laundry service, who is making the trains run on time, who's making sure all the clothes end up in the right place at the right time, and so on. Then, the other side of it is the sales side. Again, selling has a very broad definition. Selling doesn't necessarily just mean selling to individual customers, but it could mean marketing, it could mean communicating, it could mean recruiting, it could mean raising money, it could mean inspiring people, it could be doing PR.

So, it's a broad umbrella category. Generally, the Silicon Valley startup model tends to work fast. It's not the only way, but it is probably the most common way when you have two founders, one of whom is world-class at sales and one of whom is world-class at building.

An example of this course is Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak with Apple. Gates and Allen probably had similar responsibilities early on with Microsoft. Larry and Sergey, you know, probably broke down along those lines, although it's a little different there because that was a very technical product delivered to end-users through a simple interface.

But generally, you will see this pattern repeated over and over: there's a builder, and there's a seller. There's a CEO and CTO combo, and venture and technology investors are almost trained to look for this combo whenever possible. It’s sort of the magic combination. The ultimate is when one individual can do both; that's when you get true superpowers.

That's when you get people who can create entire industries. The living example is Elon Musk. He may not necessarily be building the rockets himself, but he understands enough that he actually makes technical contributions. He understands the technology well enough that no one’s going to snow him on it, and he's not running around making claims that he doesn't think he can eventually deliver.

He may be optimistic about the timelines, but he thinks it's within reasonableness of delivery. Even Steve Jobs developed enough product skills and was involved enough in the product that he also operated in both of these domains. Larry Ellison started as a programmer, and I think wrote the first version of Oracle. Arosa was actually heavily involved in it.

Marc Andreessen was also in this domain; he may not have had enough confidence in the sales skills, but he was the programmer who wrote Netscape Navigator, a big chunk of it. So, I think the real giants in any field are the people who can both build and sell. Usually, the building is the thing that a salesperson can't pick up later in life; it requires too much focused time.

But a builder can pick up selling a little bit later, especially if they were already sort of inherently wired to be a good communicator. Bill Gates famously paraphrased this as, "I would rather teach an engineer marketing than the marketer engineering."

I think if you start out with a building mentality, and you have building skills, and you're still early enough in your life, or you have enough focused time that you think you can learn selling and you have some natural characteristics for being a good salesperson, then you can double down on those.

Now, your sales skills could be different from the traditional domain. For example, let’s say you’re a really good engineer, and then people are saying, “Well, now you need to be good at sales.” Well, you may not be good at hand-to-hand sales, but you may be a really good writer. Writing is a skill that can be learned much more easily than, say, in-person selling.

So, you may just cultivate writing skills until you become a good online communicator and then use that for your sales. On the other hand, it could just be that you're a good builder, and you're bad at writing, and you don’t like communicating to mass audiences, but you’re good one-on-one. So then, you might use your sales skills for recruiting or for fundraising, which are more one-on-one kinds of endeavors.

This is sort of pointing out that if you're at the intersection of these two, don’t despair because you’re not going to be the best technologist, and you're not going to be the best salesperson. But in a weird way, that combination back—that Scott Adams skill stack— that combination of two is unstoppable. Long term, people who understand the underlying product and how to build it can sell it.

These are catnip to investors; these people can break down walls if they have enough energy, and they can get almost anything done. If you could only pick one to be good at, which one would you pick? When you're trying to stand out from the noise, building is actually better because there are so many hustlers and salespeople who have nothing to back them up.

When you're starting out, when you're trying to be recognized, building is better. But much later down the line, building gets exhausting because it is a focused job, and it's hard to stay current because there are always new people, new products coming up who have newer tools and, frankly, more time because it’s a very intense, very focused task.

So, sales skills actually scale better over time. For example, if you have a reputation for building a great product, that’s good, but when you ship your new product, I'm going to evaluate it based on the product. But if you have a reputation for being a good person to do business with, and you're persuasive and communicative, then that reputation almost becomes self-fulfilling.

So, I think if you only had to pick one, you kind of start with building and then transition to selling. This is a cop-out answer, but I think that is actually the right answer.