What's up everyone? This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew.

Welcome back to Founders Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you the business builder,

the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business,

a team, or a new product. Today, I'm talking about sales as a superpower. Let's hop into it.

Sales is the number one career skill, and it's not even close. I feel full conviction in saying that.

And the reason I feel full conviction is because I feel like we've been taught our whole lives

to think of sales as a second class skill. Memes have been made out of snake oil salesmen.

People frown upon sellers being only focused on money and nothing else. When you hear the word

sales, what do you think of? For many of you, it'll be someone with a headset in a boiler room,

style office, or a spam collar trying to sell you on a free trip to the Caribbean, or a scene

from Wolf of Wall Street. It was the same thing for me in college. When I went to the University of

Michigan and I was in the business school there, sales wasn't explicitly frowned upon, but it was

just never talked about. There was no sales class in our core curriculum. The most sought after jobs

weren't sales jobs. They were investment banking or consulting jobs. And if anyone ever said

that their job was in sales, they would get a classic, oh, that's awesome in a disingenuous

high pitched voice from other students. But if there's one lesson that I have learned from building

a business over the last five years and advising dozens of people on their careers, no skill.

And I mean, no skill is more important than sales. Everything that we did to get

morning brew off the ground was sales. We had to sell our first employee on taking the leap from

a steady corporate job to join a known name startup. Think about how hard that is when you don't know

if your business is going to be around next week. Yeah, you're trying to convince someone to

bet their livelihood on your company. We had to sell investors on why they should put their

...