Welcome to this week's episode of Startup for the Rest of Us. It's episode 497. I am your host, Rob Walling, and each week on the show, we cover topics relating to building and growing startups using an ambitious yet a sane approach. This week, I'm answering listener questions with my friend and co-founder of Tiny Seed, Anar Volset. Welcome to the show. Hello. Good to be here. Good to have you back. If you've

been listening to the show, even for the past few months, Anar's been on several episodes talking

about entrepreneurship. He has experience. He went through Weicommidator in 2009. The company he

started there was later sold to Google. And he's been on the sell side of many seven and eight

figure SaaS acquisitions. So he's been on the sell side of many seven and eight figure SaaS acquisitions.

So he has expertise.

My go-to for ANR is partnerships, business development, sales, outreach, like cold calling,

cold emailing, and buying and selling SaaS, valuations, pricing.

That's like the high level.

Anything I missed in there? No, I think that's

pretty good. You're making me sound like Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross salesperson, but besides, that's good,

you know? You're going to get booed off the stage here at that startup to the rest of us. People

like, get that guy. But here's the thing. You're also a developer, so you have the cred with the crowd. So you've been writing software for a few

decades. You have a PhD in computer science, which, you know, I'm going to let that one slide.

That's fair. That's fair. Absolutely. We used to when we were hiring at a company I worked at in

LA, we would get folks with a PhD and CS to apply for like a senior developer position and instantly set off a yellow a yellow flag of like

oh can this person actually write code can they ship code do they know what it's like to work

and you know we had to say like if they didn't have work experience and they had just come out

of a master's or a PhD we're just a little concerned about it yeah I get I don't get so much

with master's with PhD I think actually there's like a diminishing return as you start doing PhD. Coming out of, this is a problem, actually, with some of the people I did,

who were in grad school with me and later on. They were like, yeah, like I can't even get an interview

because everyone thinks on this like non-producing just wonk. It comes up with opinions all day.

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