Heard a VC say "founders should stay in their lane" and it ticked me off

I was at a networking event last week in Austin and overheard some VC telling a group of first time founders that they should stick to product and leave sales to the "hired guns." That rubbed me the wrong way because as a B2B founder myself I learned sales the hard way by picking up the phone and talking to 50+ prospects before I even had a real product. If I had handed that off to someone else early on I never would have understood what my customers actually needed. I think VCs say stuff like that because they want founders to scale fast but they forget that early stage B2B is all about founder led sales. Has anyone else ignored that advice and found it worked out better for them?

2 comments

2 Comments

wood.john10d ago

Yeah I just read a book called "Founder Led Sales" by a guy who runs a SaaS company and it basically said the same thing you're feeling. The author argued that founders who skip the early sales grind end up building products nobody actually wants because they're too removed from the real conversations. I remember him talking about how he sat in on his first 200 sales calls personally before hiring anyone, and that's what let him nail the product market fit. Seems like that VC you overheard is stuck in an old playbook where sales is just a transaction, not a learning tool.

miles27710d ago

Man I saw that same play out with my buddy who started a CRM tool. He spent his first six months doing every single demo himself, even when he had barely five customers. He told me the biggest thing he learned was how people actually talked about their problems, not how he assumed they did. When he finally did hire sales people, he had a whole script built from real conversations, not guesses. The hires he made actually worked out because he knew exactly what kind of personality could handle those calls. Most founders I know who skipped that part are still trying to figure out why nobody wants their product.