Welcome to Decoding Sales, a podcast. We're an engineer. That's me, Alex, and a salesperson.

That's me, Peter. Talk about the art and science of sales as it relates to life and business.

And after our last episode that Peter took solo, thank you, Peter,

I am back again. Of course. Wasn't the same without you. I, you know, you can never go back.

So this is a really exciting episode because we are going to talk about a topic that I think is

a little bit controversial. We are going to debate design partnerships. So Peter, this came up before the call

you were talking about VCs love to give people advice on getting their first sale, first enterprise

sale, and they give some advice that you sort of disagree with. So I want you to just kind of lay out

the standard model and what's wrong with it.

Yeah. A little debate.

So yeah, this has happened several times actually over the last few months where I meet with the startup founder that's VC backed.

And they're explaining to me the difficulties of trying to figure out product market fit on the B2B side.

And in parallel, they're also mentioning that they're talking to a lot of companies and being

purposely open-minded about what they could build and have it be experimental, sometimes

free, sometimes like just enough price or cost to cover their own like internal resources

to get their first customer across the finish line.

But I think that's dangerous to say, hey, we're going to do a free to cheap design partnership

because in my experience, B2B companies don't invest a ton of might or internal resources behind things that are experiments.

And so that's the core thing I'm grappling with right now with founders.

And I think it also is cultural.

You know, you know, I work with a lot of Asian founders, minority founders, and founders

who have felt like the other or an outsider,

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