I've been in that exact position - we kept hiring high powered sales guys and expected them to sell a product that was close, but not close enough, to what customers actually wanted.

It's the classic mistake of confusing sales (selling an existing product) and marketing (finding out what people really want).

That's a great point. There is a third branch in the trifecta, which is advertising/PR to tell people about what you have.

Be wary of someone great at advertising/PR but not at market fit. Those are two distinct questions. Often the founder needs to "own" market fit, probably with the help of others, and advertising/PR can be somewhat delegated. However since market fit drives every decision, it can be hard for that person to be anyone else but the founder.

Sales without a feedback loop in it to your devs/marketing people is wasting a very large amount of effort.

Absolutely: the plural of anecdote is not data. But Steve is not marshaling evidence for a proposition here, he's teaching a concept by telling a story to bring the concept alive. That's quite a different thing, and exactly what parables are for.

I don't dispute your overall argument, but:

the plural of anecdote is not data

The problem is that a parable isn't even an anecdote. One of the other posters on here, saying "this happened to me" is an anecdote, and I found that useful.

parable <- propaganda

anecdote <- something that happened, but generalize at your own risk.

data <- often useful, but subject to horrible flaws in interpretation

Oh, you're right. I was thinking a parable didn't necessarily have to be fictional. So I looked it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable

"The word "parable" comes from the Greek "παραβολή" (parabolē), the name given by Greek rhetoricians to any fictive illustration in the form of a brief narrative. Later it came to mean a fictitious narrative, generally referring to something that might naturally occur, by which spiritual and moral matters might be conveyed.[3]"

On the other hand, while the story sounds like a parable, I didn't notice anything in the text that actually implies that it is fictional. In any case, it was highly effective for Steve to get his point across to me. Whether the point is true is another question which I can't answer from experience.

This is a true story. It has been anonymized to protect the identity of the person Steve was advising.

Is the overall argument about is you shot with your blind eyes and miss the target, then you move the target and say you hit it, so you are a great master and never miss a shot.

We've been in the exact same position too!

Now we're at a stage where we do have a repeatable (hopefully highly scalable) sales model, with a seasoned sales guy making sales happen.

But some folks in the company are still on the "customer validation/development" mode :) So not out of the woods yet!

"the early bird gets the worm" v.s "the second mouse gets the cheese". But I think that for the second to be true there must be some trap for the mouse. If you foresee the traps of the future then you can take the cheese.