If You Are All Going to Eat, Someone Has to Sell Quotes May 17, 2026 5 min /quotes/someone-has-to-sell/ A short line from a video my friend Steve sent. "If you are all going to eat, someone has to sell." A reflection on why sales is the oxygen of every business, and why I plan to make it a hiring requirement at my next venture.

My friend Steve recently sent me an Instagram video with a raw, no-nonsense line that stuck with me: "If you are all going to eat, someone has to sell."

It wasn't flashy. No fancy graphics or hype music. Just a straightforward truth that made me pause and think deeply about business, startups, and what actually keeps any organization alive.

In the business world, the statement is profoundly simple and profoundly important. We celebrate visionaries, product builders, marketers, and culture architects, but we often downplay the one function that turns everything else into paychecks, growth, and impact.

Someone has to sell.

You can build the most elegant product, assemble an all-star team, raise funding, and design a beautiful brand. But if no one is out there having real conversations with potential customers and asking them to buy, the whole thing eventually starves.

Sales is not optional. It is the bridge between value created and value captured. It is the reason anyone gets to eat, literally or figuratively.

I have seen too many smart founders and teams quietly fail because they treated sales as someone else's problem. "We're product-led." "Marketing will drive demand." "Our solution sells itself." These are comforting stories until the runway ends.

Many of us were raised to believe that selling is pushy, manipulative, or somehow beneath "real" work. Bad sales experiences have tainted the profession for a lot of people. But ethical, value-driven sales is the opposite of sleazy. It is service. It is listening intently, solving genuine problems, and having the courage to ask for the business.

Every legendary founder has sold. Every thriving company has people who wake up every day focused on revenue. The best teams do not hide from sales. They embrace it as a shared responsibility.

This quote has shaped how I think about building teams going forward. If and when I build my next venture, every single employee will be expected to be a seller.

Culture starts at hiring. In future interviews, candidates will not just answer behavioral questions or walk through their résumé. They will do two things that matter more than almost anything else.

1. Pitch the company's product live to a panel of interviewers, as if we were real prospects.
2. Come to the table with at least two qualified prospects they have already identified and reached out to. Real people or companies who could genuinely benefit from what we build.

This will not be for sales roles only. It will apply to engineers, designers, operations, customer success, everyone. When every person on the team understands how to articulate value and has skin in the revenue game, alignment improves. Empathy for customers goes up. The "someone has to sell" burden does not fall on one or two people carrying the entire company on their backs.

Will this filter out some talented people? Probably. The ones who join will be builders who also understand how businesses actually survive and thrive. That is the kind of team that wins in the long run.

Ideas are cheap. Products are buildable. Strategy is plentiful.

Revenue is oxygen.

If everyone on your team wants to eat (good salaries, benefits, growth opportunities, shared success), then someone, and ideally everyone, has to sell.

Steve, thanks for sharing that video. A short clip with a long lesson.

Time to stop romanticizing the "build it and they will come" fantasy and get real about revenue. Build companies where the entire team owns the harvest, not just the planting.