Founder’s First Rule: Sell

Credit — Gengarry Glen Ross: We won’t go as far as being sales douches, but you need to close investors, customers, and partners.

It might come as a surprise to you — especially in today’s build-centric startup world — that being able to create, is in fact, not the marquee quality of a great entrepreneur. Before you go reaching for your pitchforks and torches to burn me at the stake, keep an open mind and hear me out.

These days, there is a lot of love to go around for engineers who can spin out a quick prototype, and justly so. For without implementation capabilities, ideas will forever remain fanciful (or torturous) dreams. There, now that we’ve paid due respect, let’s proceed.

Now, more than ever before, we are in no short supply of talented and skillful builders and creators. Skill acquisition is at the fingertips of all who wish to attain it, in large part, because of accessibility to knowledge and the venues available for training (barring extenuating circumstances). Formal education, learning apps, meetups, seminars, books, workshops, and bootcamps abound. And still, many smart builder-entrepreneurs continue to fail at rearing successful startups. Why?

To be sure, there are plenty of extrinsic challenges that plague a startup (or any business for that matter). But in this article, I will be focusing on the native qualities of an entrepreneur, and more specifically, talking about selling (or lack thereof).