Sahil Mansuri: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think CEOs are full-time salespeople. I mean, think about the job of a CEO, right? Let's start from the infancy, right? Let's start from starting a company from scratch. First thing you got to do if you want to start a company is you have to convince yourself to do it. You got to sell yourself on the fact that you want to do this. This is where most people fail actually. They can't sell themselves. They're not able to convince themselves that they should take this leap. They don't believe in themselves enough to do it. So first you got to be good enough to sell yourself. Maybe that's delusional. I don't really know how to coin that, but let's just say sell yourself. You got to then sell other more talented people than yourself to join you at a time at which you have no money, often no idea, no traction, nothing. They're typically making a lot of money at a well paid... If you hire great founders, they have a choice somewhere to work and you got to convince them to believe in you, believe in your idea, believe in the future that can be. This is the second place where most people fail. Assuming you do those two things, you still got to do one more thing, which is you got to actually sell an investor to give you capital based on typically virtually nothing or maybe very little attraction. Then you have to go and convince your initial customers to believe in you. Because sure as heck no startups product is great. Everyone wants to be like, "Oh we're going to go change the world." But you're not changing the world today, right? You've got 1/100th of the feature set of any of your competitors and all you have is this dream and this energy and this belief and somebody who's willing to take a bet on you. You got to get someone to be willing to bet on you. That's sales. Then if you do all that, then maybe you need to get some press. So now you got to convince a reporter to write about you and you got to be able to do that. Then maybe you need to hire some more people. So you got to convince some candidates to come work for you. I mean, spend my whole day selling. All I do is sales. All any founder does is sales. It's kind of like venture. People misunderstand this. VCs are salespeople. 100% of VC is a salesperson because they're selling LPs to give them money and they're selling CEOs to take their money in exchange for equity. That's the job of a VC. All the analytics, all the data and the this and the that, those are just updating their CRM. The core function of a VC is to sell. The core function of a CEO is to be a great salesperson. Like any great salesperson, you have to balance cynicism with optimism. Great salespeople don't have what I call happy ears. This is a problem that people misunderstand. People think that being a great salesperson is being ever the optimist. That's actually not the case because then you'll waste your time on a bunch of deals that'll never close. people misunderstand. People think that being a great salesperson is being ever the optimist. That's actually not the case because then you'll waste your time on a bunch of deals that'll never close. Great salespeople are extremely pessimistic internally and are great at being able to then still be optimistic externally. Where they're actually trying to disqualify you. They're looking for signals that you're not going to buy and weeding those out, while still at the same time positively spinning you and selling you. That ability to juxtapose is what diverges good from great. Because good salespeople will get misled by customers who tell them they want to buy, but if you would really press harder, you'd understand that they can't or won't or whatever. So you waste your time on a bunch of companies that never buy versus great salespeople know how to prioritize and spend their time properly. The same applies in venture. If you are a CEO who's fundraising, I cannot tell you, honestly Lenny, I can't tell you how many other CEOs I know get constantly misled by VCs where the VC says one or two good things and they're like, "Oh, they're definitely going to invest." As opposed to giving that VC every out to not continue the conversation. If they still are willing to talk to you after that, then that they're for real. I think that being a CEO and being a salesperson are the same job. Different forms of it, of course, different audiences, different products, et cetera. But ultimately they're the same thing. So no, I don't miss it. I do it every single day and I love doing it. I'm learning more and more every day from the failures and shortcomings I have. It's very clear that you love doing it. It's so interesting just to watch the energy when you talk about sales. I rarely meet folks that do sales. So it's really fun to dive into all this stuff. We promised folks five topics, you've gone through four. The last one I wanted to touch on, and you've already talked a bit about this and maybe there's just a quick tidbit to add here is around just how important growth continues to be for companies at this stage. It's easy to be like, "No, the markets are tough. People are going to give us a little bit of a leeway because no one's going to be able to grow." Your point is it's still incredibly important. Is there something you want to add there before we get to our very exciting lightning round?…

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