Founders should be the ones doing sales in the beginning to learn how to effectively communicate with customers and understand their problems.

Founders should learn how to do sales themselves rather than relying on others to solve their sales problems.

Founders should not hire a sales team until they have learned how to do sales themselves, as this knowledge is necessary to recognize what effective sales look like.

Founders need to be technically competent and understand that they may have to become salespeople to successfully market their products.

Great founders engage with future customers even before having a product, as this helps them understand user motivations and gather honest feedback.

Founders have unique advantages in sales: passion for their product and deep industry expertise.

The best founders optimize for learning by getting in the trenches with their customers, which helps them understand pain points and develop better products.

When advising founders, I emphasize the importance of building a framework to figure out how to do more sales faster, working backwards from sales goals to understand the necessary actions.

Founders are encouraged to gain firsthand experience in customer-facing roles, such as working in call centers, to better understand their users' needs. I think the best way to deeply understand someone's problem is to do the job directly, like a medical biller did by working in the field while developing software.