When I was a CEO (technical founder) I had to learn very quickly that my key job was selling.

While fundraising is also a form of selling, I am specifically using it to mean actually making deals with customers as lead BD as this person described.

After 5 years there is no amount of incentives that would make me do sales. The entire job is manipulating people to work against their own best interest.

People who are sales people for a lifetime will tell you all of this bullshit about how it’s relationship based and it’s really just talking about the customer about their problem and how their problem fits in to your solution or if it doesn’t in the best case then you don’t engage with them and you find a better target submarket etc…

Probably the best sales guy I’ve ever met became a “good friend” of mine when I was CTO for a massive government weapon system.

I went out on his boat he met my kids we met each others families. He went out on his own and found a giant CRT monitor for me, so that I could start ranking up in Tetris after I made an offhand comment about it. He even called me up personally when he left that company because he was moving to a new company and just wanted to touch base and etc. and continue our relationship.

The moment he did not need my business there was nothing to be said.

That is the Peak of salesmanship and if that’s the Peak I don’t want anything to do with it.

So while I understand this person’s story, as an extremely technical person who had to do sales for years, I found absolutely nothing rewarding beneficial or good about it.

I would feel better about being a sex worker, escort or prostitute, because at least there’s no ambiguity as to what’s going to happen.

In a transactional business (You give me money I give you product/service) the majority of the time you’re trying to figure out how you’re getting fucked over, or how you’re gonna get fucked over, or how can fuck over someone and your job is to manage these fake, corporate “relationships” that are trying to constantly reevaluate and renegotiate things.

So my only advice as a technical person is “Don’t join a company before product market fit, and stay as far away as you can from business processes as possible until you don’t have to work for a business ever again”