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> Most companies, particularly most start-ups, suck at sales. "Great engineers, shit sales" is a more common failure mode in Silicon Valley than "sold something couldn't be built." Also, "good at sales" isn't a one dimensional metric. There are different sales processes, some of which some people (and consequently companies) are better at than others.

Bad, derivative products hocked by hopelessly deluded people playing startup accounts for most failures. Over promise and under deliver kills even more.

Few truly good products fail because even a bad sales team can sell a good company to a bigger company that can capitalize on the deal.

Lots of good products fail because of bad sales and marketing. These very forums are a graveyard of "how do I find users?" threads.

onboarding an engineer - even a great one - is notoriously expensive, because they need to understand the product in extreme detail that a salesperson never will - not even close.

there are many good engineers, but they are very difficult to replace. in addition, more engineers does not always translate to faster delivery, so there is a natural limit to how many should exist to build out a specific product.

there are also many good salespeople and they can be trained in much less time and there can be many more of them.

> there are many good engineers, but they are very difficult to replace

These engineers tend to find themselves well compensated. They aren’t representative of most coders in the Valley. Similarly with salespeople, you have lots of meagrely-compensated glorified customer service people and then people with difficult-to-replace relationships.

No, there aren't many good sales people. No, they can't be trained in much less time. And no, there aren't necessarily more of them.

This is probably the most "I'm a technical founder and I have something to say!" thread I've seen here in a while.

Neither you, or your parent comment, provided justification. "There are many good sales people", "There aren't many good sales people". Plain statements, little reasoning. Both worthless.

I think it's disingenuous to say that it's a more common failure mode just because you see more of those failures. More realistically, if an organization has a good sales ability but no product, with some rare exceptions where people are hoodwinked etc., they just don't get to step up to the plate, i.e. They are not given the chance to fail because nothing happens and they don't get funded.