Another great article by Ben Horowitz: http://bhorowitz.com/2010/08/29/the-right-kind-of-ambition-2/
I hope getting to spend the majority of my time in a sales position won't turn me into a local optimizer :-) Hopefully, if @ldubost does his job right he'll prevent this from happening anytime soon.
As for having the right kind of ambition, my core belief is that putting the team first is actually the best way for an individual to advance towards their own career goals. No one can build a company's success on her own. Getting the team to grow and become better at what they do makes everyone's job easier within the company, especially the sales guy's job.
I wrote about this on our intranet blog a couple days ago, emphasizing the fact that word-of-mouth marketing is probably our most powerful lead generation tool. This kind of marketing only happens when the whole team provides great service to customers. Leads start flowing in and I can focus on closing deals rather than on evangelizing our product. Win-win.