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Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast.

I'm Sonal and I'm here with Mark Cranny, who heads up our sales and market development

team, Lars Dahlgard, and Ben Horowitz.

And today we're talking about the why, how, and when of sales, everything from how to

structure your sales organization, depending on what you're selling, to when to bring on

your first sales hire. Sometimes the very thing that makes founders start a company, they want to change

the way things are done, can backfire if they're applying it to establish processes that work,

like sales. Or maybe you're rightfully worried about how to compensate salespeople, especially with

commissions, when others in the company also contribute a lot to

making that product to sell in the first place. So how do you approach this tension? How do you deal with

jealousy around commissions? And why shouldn't founders reinvent how things work when it comes to sales,

especially when that mindset is a very thing that's made them start a company in the first place?

We kick off the conversation with how some technical founders sometimes approach sales. Well, I think that a lot of technical founders just don't have any experience

with sales. And there's an awful lot to it that I think that if you kind of just sit in your

room and, you know, theorize, you're going to get very, very wrong. And we've seen many founders

have theoretical models for how they would like sales to work. And those have tend to be,

been like extremely unsuccessful. Because, you know, there's a lack of kind of practical grounding

and like what it means to sell something, you know, not just to an individual, but to a large complex organization with a very, I would say, hard to understand decision-making process.

Cranny, I once heard you say, I think the best line I ever heard you say about this is that

selling to a large enterprise is like getting a bill passed in Congress. And it's probably one of

...