Why Founders Have to Sell: Lessons from Pete Kazanjy - 7/23/2026

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📰 Today's Edition: Why Founders Have to Sell: Lessons from Pete Kazanjy

Most founders hate sales. Pete Kazanjy thinks that's both understandable and catastrophic.

Pete is the founder of Atrium, a sales analytics platform, and the author of Founding Sales -- probably the most comprehensive guide to early-stage sales that exists. He's spent years studying why some startups build revenue engines and others quietly die with a great product and no customers.

I had him speak at our Hustle Fund Founder Summit, and he delivered a masterclass in how sales actually works -- and why founders have no choice but to get good at it.

WHO IS PETE KAZANJY?

Pete Kazanjy is a serial entrepreneur and one of the foremost experts on founder-led sales. He previously founded TalentBin, a talent search engine that was acquired by Monster in 2014. He then founded Atrium, which built software to help sales teams use data to improve performance.

Along the way, Pete noticed a consistent pattern: technically brilliant founders were building great products and then watching their companies die because they couldn't -- or wouldn't -- sell. That observation became the foundation for Founding Sales, which is now something of a bible for early-stage B2B founders.

TIP #1: UNDERSTAND THAT SALES IS JUST MOVING PEOPLE ALONG A JOURNEY

Pete opened with a framework that cuts through a lot of the mystique around sales.

Every buyer goes through four stages:

1. Are they aware of the problem you solve?

2. Is it a priority for them right now?

3. Do they have a preference for a solution like yours?

4. Are they convinced your solution is the right one?

The mistake most founders make is skipping steps -- trying to pitch pricing to someone who doesn't even know they have the problem, or trying to close a deal before the right stakeholders are even in the room.

And in B2B, it's almost never one person. You're selling to a buying committee -- multiple humans who each have their own level of awareness, their own priorities, and their own power to say yes or no. Your job is to bring each of them along that journey individually.

As Pete put it: "It's not a muscular calculation. There's humans involved. It's fuzzy and sloppy." The goal is to raise the organization's collective conviction -- one stakeholder at a time.

The corollary: when you hit a gatekeeper who can say no but not yes, don't try to bulldoze them. Ask: what's in it for them? Run discovery with them. Find the value prop that speaks to their specific role. The blocker becomes a lot less scary when you've actually addressed their concerns.

TIP #2: YOU CAN'T SKIP THE FOUNDING SALES STEPS

Pete laid out what he calls the "founding sales maturity stages" -- and the key insight is that you can't skip a step.

The steps go roughly like this:

• Do we know what problem we're solving?

• Does our solution actually work?

• Will someone pay for it?

• Will many people pay for it?

• Can non-founders sell this?

Most founders want to jump straight to "let's hire a salesperson." That almost always fails. The reason: a salesperson can only scale a motion that's already been proven. If you don't know what problem you're solving, or you haven't proven someone will pay, you're handing a salesperson a puzzle with missing pieces and wondering why they can't close.

The bet in early-stage sales is this: it's easier to get a founder to become a non-zero seller than it is to get a salesperson to develop genuine subject matter expertise in your problem. Founders already know the domain, already understand the customer pain, and already speak the language. They just need to get comfortable with the discomfort of selling.

So you go first. You do the customer interviews. You figure out the motion. You prove someone will pay. And then you hand it off.

TIP #3: KILL THE "WE DON'T HAVE SALESPEOPLE" ANTI-PATTERN

This one comes up constantly, and Pete was blunt about it.

The idea that great products sell themselves -- that if you build something good enough, customers will just show up -- is a myth. Pete called it a "mind virus." And he had a great example: Slack.

Stuart Butterfield famously claimed Slack didn't have salespeople. Pete's friend was literally a Slack salesperson while Butterfield was saying this publicly. And more importantly, while Slack was busy bragging about product-led growth, Microsoft Teams was building its enterprise distribution machine. Slack probably left 24 months of enterprise momentum on the table before the board intervened and gave them a full sales DNA transplant.

Pete's point: look at any company that dominates its market and you'll find a muscular sales operation, whether they advertise it or not. Twilio, Stripe, Palantir -- all of them had salespeople. Palantir just called them "deployed engineers."

The version of this Pete sees kill companies most often is founders who refuse to do outbound. "We rely on referrals." Sure, everyone loves referrals. But referrals don't scale. And if you look at the companies winning in your market, they're doing systematic, aggressive outbound -- not waiting for the phone to ring.

He checked in on one founder who said they didn't do outbound into SMBs. A year later, the company was dead.

CONCLUSION

Pete's message is simple, even if it's uncomfortable: sales isn't something founders can hand off until they've done it themselves first. Not because it's glamorous, but because the alternative is watching a great product die a quiet death.

The companies that win aren't the ones with the best technology. They're the ones that figured out how to move buyers through a journey, proved the motion worked, and then scaled it. And that work starts with the founder.

If you haven't read Founding Sales yet, it's worth your time. It's probably the most practical thing written on this topic.

Until next time,

Dunky, the ''Deal-making” hippocorn

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