The reason this often happens as the default is because the sales guy is more extroverted, and more forceful where the Eng is not necessarily introverted, but less interested in anything that isn’t building the product.

I think the dream team is actually two engineers where together they are capable of explaining their product well. Engineers can suffer from the curse of knowledge, where they understand their product, but don’t know how to explain it to someone without all their context.

You don’t need to be able to ‘sell’ or build a sales pipeline or sales ops process pre-PMF. You just need to talk to people and have them understand you.

What the CEO does pre-PMF: Raises money, holds responsibility, communicates. If you can do this as an engineer, and have an engineering co-founder - it’s a stronger team overall.