Bad, derivative products hocked by hopelessly deluded people playing startup accounts for most failures. Over promise and under deliver kills even more.
Few truly good products fail because even a bad sales team can sell a good company to a bigger company that can capitalize on the deal.
there are many good engineers, but they are very difficult to replace. in addition, more engineers does not always translate to faster delivery, so there is a natural limit to how many should exist to build out a specific product.
there are also many good salespeople and they can be trained in much less time and there can be many more of them.
This is probably the most "I'm a technical founder and I have something to say!" thread I've seen here in a while.
These engineers tend to find themselves well compensated. They aren’t representative of most coders in the Valley. Similarly with salespeople, you have lots of meagrely-compensated glorified customer service people and then people with difficult-to-replace relationships.
Like software engineering. And like writing software, some people are better at it / enjoy it more than others. Software engineers and good salespeople are very well compensated because they're hard to replace.
> I have seen a lot of companies stating how important is sales, and how unique they are. It can't be true for all companies. It is like everyone thinking that they are above average, it is just not possible.
Most companies, particularly most start-ups, suck at sales. "Great engineers, shit sales" is a more common failure mode in Silicon Valley than "sold something couldn't be built." Also, "good at sales" isn't a one dimensional metric. There are different sales processes, some of which some people (and consequently companies) are better at than others.
> If your product is software, literally it is impossible that sales add more value than the engineering organization that builds the product
You're conflating how essential a step is to a process with how valuable it is. Mediating those factors is how difficult it is to replace the parts in the step. Consider, for example, an automobile assembly line. It would be incorrect to assume that just because the vehicle is useless without an engine, it is impossible for anyone to be more valuable than the person who mounts the engine.