Speed: Why Founder Email Responsiveness Correlates with Success
Sam Altman is the highest-profile startup CEO today. A few years back, when he was president of Y Combinator, he was asked a seemingly irrelevant question: “How quickly should someone answer your email to count as quick and decisive?” In response, he shared a telling observation.
“I wrote a little program to look at this, like how quickly our best founders — the founders that run billion-plus companies — answer my emails versus our bad founders,” he told Tyler Cowen on a podcast. “I don’t remember the exact data, but it was mind-blowingly different. It was a difference of minutes versus days on average response times.”
Sam isn’t the only one with this view. Eric Schmidt, the ex-CEO of Google, wrote that “most of the best — and busiest — people we know act quickly on their emails, not just to us or to a select few senders, but to everyone.”
Jason Lemkin, who sold his startup for $400m to Adobe before becoming a VC, agrees. “On anything important, truly important — you hear back from the best founders in somewhere between 5 minutes and 24 hours…That includes the CEOs of $1B, $5B, $10B, and $20B+ companies,” he argued in a LinkedIn post.
As Sam Altman hinted, data and experience motivate this view. His analysis at Y Combinator isn’t publicly available, but Adam Shuaiba at Episode 1 Ventures recently shared an evaluation of emails from 1,500 seed startups that paints a similar picture.
In the analysis, Adam and his team looked at how long each founder took to respond to the first three email exchanges with the investment team. The difference in median response times between the seed-stage founders who failed to raise a Series A round and those who achieved that milestone was stark. Successful founders were twice as fast at email responses compared to the unsuccessful ones.
Side note: I looked through my angel portfolio, and even though my data is far more limited, there are signs of a similar trend.
What exactly is going on here?
It’s correlation (not causation)
The most significant advantage that startups have over large corporations is speed. Try launching a new product feature in a large business. It will take several months of approvals and possibly years to launch. Yet, when I worked in a startup, we could go from idea to product feature, customer feedback, and subsequent iterations in weeks or a few months.
High-performing startups are agile and have to be doubly so because of the elevated uncertainty in the early stages of company building. It’s better to act fast and learn than to wait and risk losing ground. This is why successful startups are quick to exploit opportunities and unhesitant to confront tough decisions.
Founders who have this philosophy do lots of things faster. Sometimes, but not always, that includes email. Here’s why. They are:
Effective communicators – Email is easier to manage when you are less verbose and don’t indulge in lengthy email threads. The ex-CEO of LinkedIn, Jeff Weiner, advises: “If you want to receive less email, send less email.” In addition, “be precise with your words.”
Masters of delegation – Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com apparently responded to emails very quickly or not at all. However, the more accurate account is that he reviewed all his messages with the help of assistants. He would then delegate items by notoriously adding just a question mark to the top of an email thread before forwarding it to a relevant employee. Whoever received these “?” emails would need to urgently take action on whatever the email required. This is an extreme example, but it highlights how vital delegation is for speed.
High-velocity decision-makers – Strong founders make decisions fast because they recognise that most day-to-day decisions have bounded consequences. These are like Amazon’s “two-way” door decisions. They are easy to reverse. In contrast, “one-way” decisions carry more weight and are difficult to reverse. These choices should take more thought and time. This principle also applies to email.
These are just a few of the reasons why founders who are biased toward speed and action tend to reply to emails quickly.
Nonetheless, even if it’s obvious, I’ll say it: Founders don’t succeed because they respond to emails quickly. Email speed is merely a side effect of their high velocity. Sometimes, the email effect is present, but not always. Ultimately, the startup’s momentum is what matters the most.