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Comment by someguydave | Hacker News Reader

So, basically "real" entrepreneurs are salesmen?

A real entrepreneur is able to be or to get salesmen, engineer, finance guy, a marketing guy, etc...

An entrepreneur is someone able to start a company and in a company, you need more than an engineer to build a device, you also need a guy to sale theses devices, a guy to market it and a guy that able to get the capital and do the balance sheet.

Usually finance can be done with time or a mortgage, so we ignore that one pretty often but if you can only build, well if you don't learn the other skills or never find someone to fill theses skills for you, then you can't really start a company, can you?

you're asking this question in a thread about Mark Cuban... yes, 100% salespeople

That’s depressing. So Nikola Tesla was a loser poser but your local slimey used car salesman is the ideal entrepreneur?

Not all salesmen are slimey used car salesmen.

I mean... how does history not already tell you this? Nearly every person we remember as a historical figure was able to "sell" something to get there. The typical exception to this is the person who did something interesting, but someone else sold it for them after they died.

In the eyes of their lifetimes and most of history, Edison won the Tesla v Edison battle nearly 100%. Edison was a vastly better salesperson.

If you ask the average person who Nikola Tesla was today, they'd probably say something about the car company. Elon Musk sells the name Tesla better than Tesla himself ever did.

If your idea of success is obtaining money or changing hearts and minds, you better learn how to sell (or I guess you could devise a spectacularly dangerous weapon).

I suppose the question at the root of it is: can you determine someone's "entrepreneurialness" completely by looking at their total profit (or maybe total revenue)? Or is there more to it than that?

For instance, Tesla's ideas were used extensively by others to make money. Is the fact that he personally didn't capture that revenue with is own account take away from his "entrepreneurialness" score?

Inventor =/= Entrepreneur. Tesla was an amazing inventor and an objectively bad businessman.

Nikola Tesla as a brilliant engineer and scientist. At one point he was even one of the wealthiest in NY, he didn't get there by being a "loser poser" he got there by making sales after he created his invention. The first installation of AC generators in Niagra falls didn't get there because he accidently fell into it. Make no mistake, Tesla had to be damned good at sales and engineering to get someone to put so much money up and take such a huge risk on Tesla's AC technology. Don't get me wrong, it helped that he had patents, but there was definitely sales involved.

Salespeople...but, yes.

Salesman is not the preferred nomenclature. Please, salespeople.

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