Nerds are used to transparency. They add value by becoming expert at a technical skill like computer programming. In engineering disciplines, a solut… - Peter Thiel
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Nerds are used to transparency. They add value by becoming expert at a technical skill like computer programming. In engineering disciplines, a solution either works or it fails. You can evaluate someone else’s work with relative ease, as surface appearances don’t matter much. Sales is the opposite: an orchestrated campaign to change surface appearances without changing the underlying reality. This strikes engineers as trivial if not fundamentally dishonest. They know their own jobs are hard, so when they look at salespeople laughing on the phone with a customer or going to two-hour lunches, they suspect that no real work is being done. If anything, people overestimate the relative difficulty of science and engineering, because the challenges of those fields are obvious. What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy. SALES
Peter Andreas Thiel (born 11 October 1967) is a German-American billionaire entrepreneur, hedge fund manager, venture capitalist, philanthropist, political activist, and author. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Facebook.
You probably can’t be the Google of 2014 in terms of compensation or perks, but you can be like the Google of 1999 if you already have good answers about your mission and team.
In the real world outside economic theory, every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot. Monopoly is therefore not a pathology or an exception. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.
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Like acting, sales works best when hidden. This explains why almost everyone whose job involves distribution — whether they’re in sales, marketing, or advertising — has a job title that has nothing to do with those things. People who sell advertising are called “account executives.” People who sell customers work in “business development.
