I’m an engineer turned founder and CEO. The most important skill I’ve learned — by a wide margin — is sales.
Not the used car dealer version. Not “sell me this pen.” Not the pushy closer who won’t take no for an answer.
The sales I’m talking about is closer to therapy than persuasion. Half of it is getting people to talk. The other half is actually listening. Without that reframe, I wouldn’t have a business.
Why Engineers Resist It
I avoided sales for a long time. Most first-time founders do.
It feels sleazy. Like you’re bothering people. Contributing to spam. You don’t like getting cold emails — why be the guy sending them?
There’s also a deeper thing. Engineers solve problems with logic and systems. Sales feels like the opposite: subjective, messy, human. You can’t debug a conversation the way you debug code.
That misconception kept me away the longest. I thought sales meant convincing people to buy things they didn’t need. Turns out it’s closer to figuring out if they have a problem you can solve — and being honest about it when they don’t.
What Shifted
There wasn’t a single moment where it clicked.
I started sending cold emails because I had to. The company needed customers. Nobody was going to find us on their own. So I wrote a short email, defined who I thought had the problem, and hit send.
The early calls were rough. I sucked at them. But here’s the thing I’ve seen over and over: if you suck at sales and still close a deal, you might be onto something. The product is doing the heavy lifting.
Over time, the shift wasn’t about getting better at talking. It was about getting better at listening. What are they actually struggling with? What words do they use to describe the problem? What makes them lean forward versus check out?
Early-stage founder sales is less about closing and more about learning what the market needs. That feedback loop is something no amount of product analytics can replace.
Everything Is Sales
Here’s what I didn’t expect: sales doesn’t just help you close customers. It helps with everything.
Investors. Hires. Partners. Hell.. even your mom so she stops worrying about you.
The best YC founders I know — if they’re not selling, they’re coding. That’s the whole job description in the early days.
The fundraise. The recruiting call. The partnership meeting. The customer demo. The all-hands during a rough stretch. Every one of those is a sales conversation. Once you see it that way, sales stops feeling like a separate function. It’s just the default mode of being a founder.
How to Start When You’ve Never Sold
No curriculum. No 30-day plan. You learn sales by doing sales. But here’s roughly what I did, and what I’ve seen work for other technical founders:
Start with a hypothesis. Define who you think has the problem you solve. You’re not committed to it. You’re testing it.
Write a short cold email. No one owes you their time. Don’t send a novel. Make it simple, direct, easy to respond to.
Send it manually first. Don’t automate your first outbound. You need to feel the responses, see what clicks, gauge the metrics closely. Automation comes later.
Listen on the calls. You’re not there to present your deck. You’re there to ask good questions and shut up.
Do enough reps. Most founders who give up simply haven’t done enough reps for the math to kick in. 20 cold emails isn’t enough. You need volume before the patterns emerge.
I spent 30 minutes one week building an outbound campaign to validate an idea. That same week I had meetings booked with product directors at Fortune 100 companies and a potential pilot with a big tech company. Cold outbound is messy, but the ROI on those first reps is absurd.
The Resistance Is the Point
In my experience, building a company is more marketing and sales than building product. Most engineers don’t want to hear that. I didn’t.
But that resistance is useful information. If you can push through the discomfort — send the email, book the call, learn to sell — you have a structural advantage over every technical founder still hiding behind their IDE.
Don’t know how to sell? Sell. Sounds circular. It’s the whole answer.
Eventually, you stop thinking of it as “doing sales” and start thinking of it as talking to people about problems you care about solving.
That’s the conversion. Not a dramatic moment. A gradual shift from “I’m an engineer who has to do sales” to “I’m a founder, and this is what founders do.”