Nat Friedman: belief

Transcript context

…Other than that, I mean, we talked about this a little bit, but what has been the impact of developers being more empowered in organizations, even ones that are not traditionally IT organizations? Yeah. I mean, software is kind of magic, right? You can write a for loop and do something a lot of times. And when you build large organizations at scale, one of the things that does surprise you is the degree to which you need to systematize the behavior of the people who are working. When I first was starting companies and building sales teams, I had this wrong idea coming from the world as a programmer that salespeople were hyper aggressive, hyper entrepreneurial, making promises to the customer that the product wouldn't do, and that the main challenge you had with salespeople was like restraining them from going out and aggressively cutting deals that shouldn't be cut. What I discovered is that while it does exist sometimes, the much more common case is that you need to build a systematic sales playbook, which is almost a script that you run on your sales team, where your sales reps know the processing to follow to like exercise this repeatable sales motion and get a deal closed. I just had bad ideas there. I didn't know that that was how the world worked, but software is a way to systematize and scale out a valuable process extremely efficiently. I think the more digitized the world has become, the more valuable software becomes, and the more valuable the developers who can create it become. Would 25-year-old Nat be surprised with how well open source worked and how pervasive it is?…

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