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Silagadze: Technical founders' early sales leadership hires fail almost 100% of the time

Mike Silagadze · 20VC: Why Virtually All Companies Hire The Wrong Way, Why EdTech Is The Most Brutal Market & How To Scale Your Sales Team for Engineering Founders with Mike Sliagadze, Founder & CEO @ Top Hat · Mar 16, 2018 · at 17:06

Mike Silagadze, Founder and CEO of Top Hat, discusses sales execution and scaling mistakes for early-stage technical founders on 20VC.

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“There's one mistake that almost every young founder makes, engineering founders in particular, honestly, almost a hundred percent of the time is at some point they decide, you know what, we need to start figuring out sales. And then they correctly assess, well, I don't know anything about sales. So what I'm going to do is bring in someone, you know, with a bit of gray hair and experience under their belt in order to help them figure out sales. And almost 100% of the time that ends up not working.”

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