If we're all gonna eat, someone has to sell

Ken Griffin, founder of Citadel, recently gave a "view from the top" talk at Stanford Business School. Aside from noting that the series should really be called "view from the climb," he made the essential point that entrepreneurs are de facto always selling, and need to get comfortable and good at doing that.

For background, Ken founded Citadel in 1990 and it has become the most successful hedge fund of all time. He was early to applying computer science and math to trading, and Citadel is a market-maker responsible for roughly 1 in 4 trades in U.S. financial markets.

The relevant portion starts at around the 10-minute mark:

Let me tell you how much I enjoyed selling when I was 20: that would be a donut.

My physics teacher who was my partner in Chicago, when he retired he said, "You can have whatever you want from my office." I said I wanted the $10 plaque that was behind his desk which said, "If we're all gonna eat, someone has to sell."

When I was 20 years old and I looked at that plaque, it was like a wakeup moment. It speaks to the importance of what it takes to build a business. You're always selling. You're selling to candidates, you're selling to vendors, you're selling to counterparties, you're selling to customers.

And you just have to get comfortable with the fact that if you're always selling, you know what you're going to hear a lot? "No." "Not gonna do that." "Not interested."...

You're gonna hear "no" a lot, but you need to get accustomed to having to market your ideas, market what you represent, and market what you stand for. Whether it's the people who you want to have work for you, or people who are trying to give you capital, or customers. You need to get comfortable with the art of selling.

I've previously taken a degree of pride in not being comfortable selling. I gravitated toward the product and engineering parts of the business in part because it was all about making the best thing, regardless of how people slang it.

But those product and engineering departments kept their salaries only because there was a sales department doing the hard work of locating likely buyers and convincing them to open their wallets for our solution.

It's a very useful saying: "If we're all gonna eat, someone has to sell."

This is a harsh reality for one-person companies, for which the saying can be simplified: "If I'm gonna eat, I have to sell." This is probably the #1 functional skill I'll have to develop in this new venture.

Based on what it knows about me, ChatGPT suggested The Challenger Sale and To Sell Is Human as books on sales to start with. If you have any other suggestions, let me know.