16 ms·

I Write Letters to CEOs

449 points by henryjones 8y ago

mykull 8y ago
This is some real ball-fondling born-into-privilege nonsense. I could write to CEOs too, but I wouldn't be so impressed with their boilerplate social interaction, and the predictability of it is why I won't.
- derpittyderp 8y ago
  I don't think it's a case of being born into privilege. From another blog post on the same site: "I graduated from college with six figures in debt and no savings or investments. My first job out of college paid $400 per week. I ate dollar-menu fast food every day until I got sick and landed in the hospital. I paid $650 a month to live in a dank basement, ridden with bed bugs, and I slept on a mattress strewn on the floor. I hated my life."
  - mykull 8y ago
    Where's the part about not having a safety net? Rich, secure people love to tout their riskless efforts as perilous when they did it voluntarily with no potential for long term negative consequence.
- dang 8y ago
  This breaks the HN guidelines. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - mykull 8y ago
    The substantive part is that nothing they wrote back to him, and nothing he wrote in this article was substantive aside from a vague claim about how CEOs who respond (with junk) are better CEOs.
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  i don't agree with your opinion, but don't think you should be silenced for having an opinion it is always really refreshing to receive a response from anyone that is semi human. i'm in sales, and 99% of my outreach attempts end in silence or rejection to form a personal connection with someone who is running a multi billion dollar business that could very well go bankrupt if mismanaged, well, its interesting to share ideas with them
- asdsa5325 8y ago
  It sounds like you have a born-against-privilege problem
yeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
> From the time that I mailed my letters, the compound annual return of the respondent group is 8.97% greater than the non-respondent companies. Neat.
iamwil 8y ago
...Well, that is until everyone tries writing them.
wgerard 8y ago
> the compound annual return of the respondent group is 8.97% greater than the non-respondent companies. That's actually interesting, because I could easily explain away the opposite result: CEOs who waste their time responding to personal letters aren't focused on improving company performance. For example, there's some potential negative correlation between time spent playing golf and company performance [1]. Granted, even if this were statistically significant you can think of explanations why it makes sense: "These CEOs have thought so deeply about their business that responding to these letters is trivial", or "Being forced to answer these questions is beneficial for the CEOs business acumen". Of course the most likely explanation is that the correlation is just spurious and the two things are unrelated. Still, would be an interesting study! 1: http://www.businessinsider.com/ceo-golf-rounds-indicate-poor-performance-2014-11 http://www.businessinsider.com/ceo-golf-rounds-indicate-poor...
- auntad 8y ago
  I'd suspect a valid correlation that's not a causation. If a company is generally doing well, presumably the CEO isn't under as much stress and doesn't have as many firefighting responsibilities as those whose companies are doing poorly. Hence having the time to write a letter to a stranger. Maybe those underperforming companies will bounce back and you'll find a (much delayed) response in the author's mailbox a few months down the line!
  - bluGill 8y ago
    I think the correlation is real. The type of person who writes to a CEO is likely to do other things for the company. For instance they might be a undercover reporter researching a story. Responding to the letter can give the company free press, which can be far more valuable than the time a personal letter takes. Likewise, many companies have a comments toll free number. Almost nobody will call them (who has a comment about their toothpaste), but it turns out the type of person who does call those numbers is likely the type of person who tells all their friends which is the best toothpaste, and so it is important that whoever answers that phone is an expert on what makes their toothpaste great. (honest answers are important - this type of person already knows their stuff so lies will hurt) Also, CEOs often know they have trouble connecting with their real customers. If a real customer writes, that is real information that they cannot easily get in any other way. A good CEO will pay attention because what one person writes 100 others think but don't say at all. All of the above are things that make a CEO who doesn't respond under perform.
winter_blue 8y ago
How do some of these CEOs have the time to respond so throughly to random letters? Is it possible that someone is ghostwriting for them?
- baxtr 8y ago
  I work a lot for these guys. The larger companies have whole teams responding to these kind of emails. They triage incoming emails and then the team can send the emails on their own on behalf of the C-level exec.
  - addflip 8y ago
    Exactly this. Tim Ferriss had Frank Blake, the old CEO of Home Depot, on his show where he discussed this. Super interesting. https://tim.blog/2018/03/15/frank-blake/ https://tim.blog/2018/03/15/frank-blake/
    - icelancer 8y ago
      I am listening to this podcast literally as I type this, and it frustrates me to no end to hear Frank's story and how much he cares about customers, and how shitty Home Depot is now. Their customer service is atrocious and their reps are poorly-trained to help with technical tasks. I fear Frank's decrees were not carried over after he left office (2014).
  - acou_nPlusOne_t 8y ago
    Anything i get in CC - i automatically delete- some CEO i heard about. Sorry, but personal emails from a CEOs perspective are noise. And just that noise. Even if you want to know about interesting things in the noise, you use dedicated people to filter out.
    - acou_nPlusOne_t 8y ago
      Look at them downthrodden downvotees, living in the hopes, that the king notices the messages encoded into the folding of his toilett paper.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
megamindbrian2 8y ago
This is awesome. I've written Jeff Bezos dozens of emails, I should write a blog post on it. Most of them complaints that some time get directed to the right forum and a proper response, a few of them praise, and a few of them completely insane or mean that I assume are ignored or caused some secretary to ask for a vacation.
- tomcam 8y ago
  I wish I had as much spare time as you
  - megamindbrian2 8y ago
    Time is a concept, it's not something we have or lack. I spent a year working over 4,500 hours and recorded every task down to the hour and still never felt productive. I got a lot done and wrote thousands of lines of code, but it's of no use to anyone now.
  - megamindbrian2 8y ago
    “I annoy Jeff Bezos weekly and he still doesn’t want to be friends.” https://medium.com/@megamindbrian/i-annoy-jeff-bezos-weekly-and-he-still-doesnt-want-to-be-friends-ef40e6e86686 https://medium.com/@megamindbrian/i-annoy-jeff-bezos-weekly-...
ordinaryperson 8y ago
Years ago I wrote a letter to Paul Raines, then the CEO of Gamestop. Mainly I complained how terrible the store experience was. Whereas Apple stores feel like an avant-garde museum Gamestops feel like the inside of a Chuck E. Cheese circa 1987 -- games everywhere, no real organization, no marketing of individual titles or genres, it's just grabbag nonsense of plastic container after plastic container. Days after I sent the letter, his secretary called me and scheduled a phone call for the next day. Paul could not have been nicer. He said he appreciated the criticism and offered to have his district manager tour a location with me so I could share in greater depth my concerns. I declined (too busy) but was obviously taken aback with his generosity and patience. Sadly, he passed away in March of this year from brain cancer at the very young age of 53. He had no real incentive to respond to an angry letter from a random customer, but he went way out of his way to at least listen to me (even if the stores haven't improved much). R.I.P. Paul.
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  this is an incredible story and has personally made an impact on me i didn't know paul before he died (on my birthday even), but because of your comment, i researched his story i work in sales, so rejection and silence are very frequent. it is rare for anyone to connect through writing or through voice, and quite often i feel like nobody desires to brainstorm and have fun thinking about ideas in a low pressure environment i wish you well in life and i hope that we can both live every day to the fullest-- because not all of us have the luxury of time
  - douevenshiftbro 8y ago
    How do you make the ( without a shift key?
    - medecau 8y ago
      you mean the parenthesis?
      - 8y ago
hajrice 8y ago
When I was a teenager, I wrote to Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, telling him how he's had such a huge impact on me, and how he's very inspiring to me. He responded that I buy one of his two books.
- Xavdidtheshadow 8y ago
  I worked for a startup that was acquired by Salesforce. Pretty soon after it was all official, they sent over 200 signed copies of his book. This is especially notable because they weren't signed by him - just by random other SFDC employees. It was a nice gesture, I guess.
  - make3 8y ago
    I that's pretty weird tbh
    - joering2 8y ago
      I don't know if you sensed it, but both hajrice and Xavdidtheshadow were sarcastic in their posting :) At least what I take from it, good CEO would answer you with "thank you" or whatever, as Benioff is know to be more of a Ellison / Jobs type of asshole CEO, rather than let's say polite Elon Musk, so hajrice made fun that instead, Benioff asked him to buy his book in order to just squeeze few extra bucks from someone that admires him :) Xavdidtheshadow was pointing how creepy it is to get forced to receive someones book with their signature that actually is being signed by someone else. Both their responses made me laugh, thanks guys :)
      - alien_at_work 8y ago
        >let's say polite Elon Musk Uh... where do you get this impression? My impression is that Musk easily fits in the same bucket as Ellison / Jobs / Bezos
        adventured 8y ago
obblekk 8y ago
> CONSIDER INVESTING IN RESPONSIVE COMPANIES No. As he notes, the sample size is ridiculously small. It's simply too likely that he got lucky with 1 or 2 companies in his "respond" group. e.g., if he wrote these letters in the the early 90s and Buffet responded, he's immediately skewed his returns up because Buffet outperformed the market SO much in the 90s. That's likely luck, not replicable skill. Otherwise, interesting article and the 1/3 response rate is surprisingly high.
- make3 8y ago
  maybe CEOs that are less negatively stressed by current affairs feel more free to answer him.. obviously this doesn't scale though
- xapata 8y ago
  You can easily do a statistical signicance test to estimate if the effect is non-zero.
  - asdsa5325 8y ago
    Which will still mean almost nothing, since past performance doesn't guarantee future results.
    - shanghaiaway 8y ago
      You basically just claimed that data analysis as a whole is invalid.
      - skolsuper 8y ago
        It's a valid point, this is post-hoc data analysis so you need to be careful of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy
wallflower 8y ago
I got my first job in the tech industry by writing a thank you letter. Many years ago I met the CEO of a tech company at a networking event for recent college grads that they hosted. Like a job fair but with a twist. Having read Brian D. Krueger's excellent "College Grad Job Hunter" [1], I had business cards prepared. This was long before Moo.com so they were printed out on my Deskjet on Avery pre-perforated card stock. I went with my ill-fitting suit and mismatched shoes/belt, and I was talking to someone from a small tech company and I got a tap on the shoulder, "Our CEO would like to get a picture with you." Having miniscule networking mojo and knowledge, I actually followed the PR person without excusing myself. We took the photo, and I asked if I could give him my business card. He said yes, and he gave me his. The next day, I wrote him a letter. I honestly wrote how I liked that this networking event was not the usual deal but more like a classy cocktail event and a great opportunity to meet other companies in a less-networky, relaxed atmosphere. I thanked him and the company for hosting it. I ended up later getting hired by his company (I was invited to apply, someone called me) and worked there for many years, as I learned the art and trade of software development, starting from nothing and someone who managed to bluff their way through the interviews. [1] https://www.amazon.com/College-Grad-Job-Hunter-Entry-level/dp/1598695479 https://www.amazon.com/College-Grad-Job-Hunter-Entry-level/d... (highly recommend this, written from the perspective of the hiring manager)
- ChristianBundy 8y ago
  Why didn't you excuse yourself?
  - wallflower 8y ago
    It was a "deer in the headlights" moment. What happened, happened and I am not proud of it. When I heard "The CEO wants a photo with you", I was completely pattern interrupted with the current thread of what I was doing talking to whoever it was (keyword: CEO and keyword: you) and just System.exit(1)'d (e.g. left with the PR person). I didn't realize that I'd not excused myself properly until after the photo op was done. As a tangent, on the topic of social niceties and navigating a party situation: If you ever need to get out of the awkward "I've been talking with this one person and I really want to exit the conversation", you never want to say "It was nice meeting you.". What you want to say is this: "I'd like to go meet those people over there. Come with me." This is genius (and I learned this from a social genius) because it gives the person a choice. If they don't want to go with you, you are golden. If they go with you, you've developed your own little temporary group of 2.
whack 8y ago
This part is pretty amazing. > From the time that I mailed my letters, the compound annual return of the respondent group is 8.97% greater than the non-respondent companies. If anything, I would have expected the opposite. "Successful companies are more busy, and have less time to write letters to strangers. Failing companies love to spend all their time justifying themselves." Glad to see that hypothesis disproven. If the above correlation does hold across larger sample sizes, I wonder if hedge funds will start using it to identify profitable trades. Send anonymous letters to the executives of public companies, and weight your investments in favor of those who reply. At some point, the executives will wise up and start replying to everyone. But you could make a nice pile of money before that happens.
- jfoutz 8y ago
  From my vague systems experience, it makes sense. If everything works, you have time for random nonsense. You want a sysadmin that’s playing video games all day, because everything is in great shape. Not a constantly stressed , jaded, angry admin. I know nothing of being a CEO, but if the CEO is bored, the company is probably in great shape.
vortico 8y ago
Because of this post, CEOs around the world are receiving 3x emails today. Haha, just kidding. It's actually the opposite. The reason CEOs respond is because they get much fewer emails from customers than you'd imagine. They get their typical solicitations, internal meeting emails, external business discussions, but the customer emails can be interesting and more insightful than any internal letter could be. If you put time into it and write your letter which doesn't require a huge time investment to response (i.e. avoid dozens of specific questions and allow the discussions to be open-ended), you might get a response. If any human is contacted by another of our species, it's intrinsic to want to respond. Being a CEO doesn't remove that desire. Yes, you might be bothering them a bit if they sacrifice family time, but that's their own problem/choice!
- xster 8y ago
  How does one even discover the email addresses of CEOs (or board members)? It's not like they're searchable online and guessing common formats only gets you so far.
  - vortico 8y ago
    LinkedIn is a good place to start. Curriculum vitaes if you can find them. Asking around. Some CEOs of smaller companies than WD-40, typically startups with a younger age group, give them out in the About page of their website. Sometimes you can just guess (e.g. jeff@ some large used book company .com). Every time you discover one of these email addresses, you think "I could have guessed that on my first try."
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - aantix 8y ago
    Is it even legal anymore to cold contact a CEO in Europe?
    - elygre 8y ago
      Why wouldn’t it be?
bradknowles 8y ago
One thing I would like to highlight here — writing a letter to a CEO is not just sending an e-mail message. Try writing an actual letter and printing it on real paper, and sending it through the real-world post office. Don’t just dash off an e-mail message.
- lozf 8y ago
  I feel this could be optimised further: how about emailing the CEO's secretary a PDF, and asking them to print it (on heavy but plain paper), put it in an envelope and deliver it with the rest of CEO's mail.
rmason 8y ago
My late father had great success in writing CEO's and receiving a direct reply. But I think times have changed because I've done it a few times and never had any luck. There's a local automotive specialty repair chain in Michigan. My family has always done business with them. When they opened their first store which was in Detroit my grandfather took a picture of all the cars lined up. They were giving away two gallons of free gas which was apparently a pretty big deal in the nineteen twenties. My dad met the CEO at some business function and sent him a copy of the photo and they put copies in every one of their dozens of stores. I've always had excellent service at our local branch. A good friend of mine asked for a recommendation so I sent him there. He received horrible service and a botched repair job which they refused to fix. I was embarrassed so I wrote the CEO. I mentioned my father so it would be clear to him who was writing. I didn't want anything for myself, I just wanted him to do right by my friend. I never received a reply and moved my personal business to a competitor. I've also probably told two dozen people the story. The store changed managers and the new guy is driving business away. My letter should have tipped them off to problems but they ignored it.
- exelius 8y ago
  I’ve had great success with e-mailing CEOs. I have engaged in (respectful) debates with them, and on more than one occasion they have come around to my point of view enough to actually implement changes at their companies. Most CEOs are actually dying to know what their customers think of them. The hardest part of being a CEO at a major company is getting honest feedback without someone blowing smoke up your ass, so most good CEOs will make time to read direct feedback. Customers rarely have a political agenda the way a CEOs direct reports might. That’s why I think these companies perform better. A responsive CEO is more interested in hearing the unfiltered voice of the customer. That’s a mindset that carries through to all parts of the business.
bunkydoo 8y ago
I write letters to many different people, none really respond showing me that this is a thoughtful yet ineffective means of reaching out to people nowadays... Interesting thoughts nonetheless
- magnat 8y ago
  Are you a nigerian prince?
erikb 8y ago
This looks like a lot of fantasy confidence. For instance, even if you are quite rich, it's unlikely that Colgate-Palmolive would consider you really an "investor". And of course if you write something to the CEO his 10+ PR team will respond to you, maybe even with something that is signed by the CEO. But do you really think the CEO sits down to discuss shower thoughts about product ideas with you? If you think that would make sense at all, you don't understand how big companies work. The big company is in the later phases of a snowball effect. It's a huge thing that rolls by itself and can't really be redirected, stopped or sped up by anyone. A CEO knows that. He's mostly concerned about internal politics and external representation. He's not really doing anything like develop new products. Companies like Apple that move from one big product line to another are very, very rare. So, what you get is a PR letter that can contain some insights into their current strategy. But nothing of real value. It's unlikely that such a response contains anything one could learn.
- scandox 8y ago
  I think you're wrong. Powerful people are very often influenced by chance encounters, by mere happenstance. I've seen it a hundred times: decisions (or at least discussions) driven by accidental meetings on planes or trains. Something overheard at the pool or in a bar. It's because these guys know at some level that they're in a closed chamber, away from the reality that underlies their corporate activity and if they think they've suddenly been given an authentic glimpse of something, unmediated by their lieutenants then they find that extremely novel and exciting. They're just human beings. Often they're very interested in people in general.
  - mathgenius 8y ago
    > at some level that they're in a closed chamber I actually think it's the opposite: really successful people get there because they are more vulnerable. At least in my experience, whenever I met someone like this, they always seem way more responsive and open than the usual joe.
    - what-the-grump 8y ago
coupdejarnac 8y ago
When I was in 4th grade in the '80s, I wrote a letter to the CEO of Atari. I was a stockholder(maybe 5 shares, ha), and I was concerned that Atari could do a few things to make their games more enjoyable. I received a really nice letter in return that addressed my concerns, and a bunch of promotional material was included. In retrospect I wish I had written more letters and perhaps built up correspondence with someone high profile.
- user9182031 8y ago
  You were trading stocks in the 4th grade?
  - coupdejarnac 8y ago
    Dad was stockbroker.
krmmalik 8y ago
I didn't write a letter but I did write emails to executives at Blackberry and Nikon. I felt I had strategies that could help them. I never got a response. So I'm wondering what it is this guy is doing that is promoting a response. Maybe it is just the fact that it's a letter and not an email, or the letters are written by someone in the PR department and not the actual CEO? I would love to reach out to CEOs and have an actual conversation with them even if my ideas are way off the mark.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  I think he's made sure to put all the legal safeguards in there; normally companies will throw any idea they get from people right into the trash without paying attention to it, because (and this has happened in the past) if they then run with it, the sender will sue them for stealing their idea without compensation.
hackathonguy 8y ago
I’ve had similar experiences with CEOs of large tech start ups. I’ve learned that when an email is clear and concise, the response rate astonishingly high.
known 8y ago
I once wrote a letter to Top CEO. And I got a reply from his Lawyer.
- RankingMember 8y ago
  Shouldn't have "written" it with each individual letter being cut-out and pasted from random magazines/newspapers. ;)
  - known 8y ago
    I wrote to Carly Fiorina suggesting that all HP devices should embed Skype/Whatsapp type of software
Bromskloss 8y ago
I would like to know what the ideas he wrote about were.
bitofhope 8y ago
A friend of mine in high school tweeted to Mikko Hyppönen (CRO, F-Secure) and invited him with us for a beer. A few weeks later we met with him in Helsinki over a pizza and discussed cybersecurity, arcade games, politics, pinball and miscellaneous topics. It was fun. Sometimes contacting high profile individuals is all about making the step of reaching out.
- joncrane 8y ago
  That's super cool, and also VERY Scandinavian (culturally).
  - workinthehead 8y ago
    Finland is not Scandinavian.
    - kwhitefoot 8y ago
      I wonder why you were downvoted for a simple statement of fact.
mindhash 8y ago
I once wrote letter to Decathlon, the largest sporting goods retailer. I complained about store and lack of empathy at stores. Next day I received call from store manager. Who offered me a 100$ gift voucher if i return to the store :)
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martin1975 8y ago
I wrote a letter to Wal-Mart's CEO about 10+ years ago to apologize for switching the barcode from a less expensive Sony Walkman to a more expensive one because I didn't want to pay more. I was in college, about 19 years of age (mid 90's), and at the time felt that if I could get away with this, it's ok. And I did. Little did I know this act would gnaw on my conscience for many later. I asked them what could I do to make it right after so many years. Soon after he received my letter, I got a call from the CEO's secretary to let me know he read my letter and that he forgives me and that there's nothing I need to do. Since I didn't expect the call, I was taken aback and moved to tears while I was talking to her. I expected some wrath and punishment for what I'd done. Instead, I experienced forgiveness. Now if I could only quantify how much software, movies and music I've bootlegged while I was a student, I would probably write those CEOs a letter too, but I can't even remember it properly so I can quantify it. It wasn't a lot, and I mostly bootlegged because I thought it was "cool" to be visible on IRC #warez and what not... never really used or resold the software, just mostly did it cause I got to hang with the cool crowd. Given I'm a software engineer for nearly 20 years now, I don't bootleg anything anymore... music, videos, apps.. and if I do, it's only because there's no trial for some of the apps. If I end up using the app, I pay for it or if I can't afford it, usually an employer will pay for it if I/we need it.
- kwhitefoot 8y ago
  This is one of the most encouraging posts I have read for a long time. Shame there is no way I can vote it to the top.
ikeboy 8y ago
Would be interesting with the actual letters and responses

449 points by henryjones 8y ago

This is some real ball-fondling born-into-privilege nonsense. I could write to CEOs too, but I wouldn't be so impressed with their boilerplate social interaction, and the predictability of it is why I won't.

derpittyderp 8y ago
I don't think it's a case of being born into privilege. From another blog post on the same site: "I graduated from college with six figures in debt and no savings or investments. My first job out of college paid $400 per week. I ate dollar-menu fast food every day until I got sick and landed in the hospital. I paid $650 a month to live in a dank basement, ridden with bed bugs, and I slept on a mattress strewn on the floor. I hated my life."
- mykull 8y ago
  Where's the part about not having a safety net? Rich, secure people love to tout their riskless efforts as perilous when they did it voluntarily with no potential for long term negative consequence.
dang 8y ago
This breaks the HN guidelines. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- mykull 8y ago
  The substantive part is that nothing they wrote back to him, and nothing he wrote in this article was substantive aside from a vague claim about how CEOs who respond (with junk) are better CEOs.
anoncoward111 8y ago
i don't agree with your opinion, but don't think you should be silenced for having an opinion it is always really refreshing to receive a response from anyone that is semi human. i'm in sales, and 99% of my outreach attempts end in silence or rejection to form a personal connection with someone who is running a multi billion dollar business that could very well go bankrupt if mismanaged, well, its interesting to share ideas with them
asdsa5325 8y ago
It sounds like you have a born-against-privilege problem

yeeeeeeeeee 8y ago

> From the time that I mailed my letters, the compound annual return of the respondent group is 8.97% greater than the non-respondent companies. Neat.

iamwil 8y ago

...Well, that is until everyone tries writing them.

wgerard 8y ago

> the compound annual return of the respondent group is 8.97% greater than the non-respondent companies. That's actually interesting, because I could easily explain away the opposite result: CEOs who waste their time responding to personal letters aren't focused on improving company performance. For example, there's some potential negative correlation between time spent playing golf and company performance [1]. Granted, even if this were statistically significant you can think of explanations why it makes sense: "These CEOs have thought so deeply about their business that responding to these letters is trivial", or "Being forced to answer these questions is beneficial for the CEOs business acumen". Of course the most likely explanation is that the correlation is just spurious and the two things are unrelated. Still, would be an interesting study! 1: http://www.businessinsider.com/ceo-golf-rounds-indicate-poor-performance-2014-11 http://www.businessinsider.com/ceo-golf-rounds-indicate-poor...

auntad 8y ago
I'd suspect a valid correlation that's not a causation. If a company is generally doing well, presumably the CEO isn't under as much stress and doesn't have as many firefighting responsibilities as those whose companies are doing poorly. Hence having the time to write a letter to a stranger. Maybe those underperforming companies will bounce back and you'll find a (much delayed) response in the author's mailbox a few months down the line!
- bluGill 8y ago
  I think the correlation is real. The type of person who writes to a CEO is likely to do other things for the company. For instance they might be a undercover reporter researching a story. Responding to the letter can give the company free press, which can be far more valuable than the time a personal letter takes. Likewise, many companies have a comments toll free number. Almost nobody will call them (who has a comment about their toothpaste), but it turns out the type of person who does call those numbers is likely the type of person who tells all their friends which is the best toothpaste, and so it is important that whoever answers that phone is an expert on what makes their toothpaste great. (honest answers are important - this type of person already knows their stuff so lies will hurt) Also, CEOs often know they have trouble connecting with their real customers. If a real customer writes, that is real information that they cannot easily get in any other way. A good CEO will pay attention because what one person writes 100 others think but don't say at all. All of the above are things that make a CEO who doesn't respond under perform.

winter_blue 8y ago

How do some of these CEOs have the time to respond so throughly to random letters? Is it possible that someone is ghostwriting for them?

baxtr 8y ago
I work a lot for these guys. The larger companies have whole teams responding to these kind of emails. They triage incoming emails and then the team can send the emails on their own on behalf of the C-level exec.
- addflip 8y ago
  Exactly this. Tim Ferriss had Frank Blake, the old CEO of Home Depot, on his show where he discussed this. Super interesting. https://tim.blog/2018/03/15/frank-blake/ https://tim.blog/2018/03/15/frank-blake/
  - icelancer 8y ago
    I am listening to this podcast literally as I type this, and it frustrates me to no end to hear Frank's story and how much he cares about customers, and how shitty Home Depot is now. Their customer service is atrocious and their reps are poorly-trained to help with technical tasks. I fear Frank's decrees were not carried over after he left office (2014).
- acou_nPlusOne_t 8y ago
  Anything i get in CC - i automatically delete- some CEO i heard about. Sorry, but personal emails from a CEOs perspective are noise. And just that noise. Even if you want to know about interesting things in the noise, you use dedicated people to filter out.
  - acou_nPlusOne_t 8y ago
    Look at them downthrodden downvotees, living in the hopes, that the king notices the messages encoded into the folding of his toilett paper.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

megamindbrian2 8y ago

This is awesome. I've written Jeff Bezos dozens of emails, I should write a blog post on it. Most of them complaints that some time get directed to the right forum and a proper response, a few of them praise, and a few of them completely insane or mean that I assume are ignored or caused some secretary to ask for a vacation.

tomcam 8y ago
I wish I had as much spare time as you
- megamindbrian2 8y ago
  Time is a concept, it's not something we have or lack. I spent a year working over 4,500 hours and recorded every task down to the hour and still never felt productive. I got a lot done and wrote thousands of lines of code, but it's of no use to anyone now.
- megamindbrian2 8y ago
  “I annoy Jeff Bezos weekly and he still doesn’t want to be friends.” https://medium.com/@megamindbrian/i-annoy-jeff-bezos-weekly-and-he-still-doesnt-want-to-be-friends-ef40e6e86686 https://medium.com/@megamindbrian/i-annoy-jeff-bezos-weekly-...

ordinaryperson 8y ago

Years ago I wrote a letter to Paul Raines, then the CEO of Gamestop. Mainly I complained how terrible the store experience was. Whereas Apple stores feel like an avant-garde museum Gamestops feel like the inside of a Chuck E. Cheese circa 1987 -- games everywhere, no real organization, no marketing of individual titles or genres, it's just grabbag nonsense of plastic container after plastic container. Days after I sent the letter, his secretary called me and scheduled a phone call for the next day. Paul could not have been nicer. He said he appreciated the criticism and offered to have his district manager tour a location with me so I could share in greater depth my concerns. I declined (too busy) but was obviously taken aback with his generosity and patience. Sadly, he passed away in March of this year from brain cancer at the very young age of 53. He had no real incentive to respond to an angry letter from a random customer, but he went way out of his way to at least listen to me (even if the stores haven't improved much). R.I.P. Paul.

anoncoward111 8y ago
this is an incredible story and has personally made an impact on me i didn't know paul before he died (on my birthday even), but because of your comment, i researched his story i work in sales, so rejection and silence are very frequent. it is rare for anyone to connect through writing or through voice, and quite often i feel like nobody desires to brainstorm and have fun thinking about ideas in a low pressure environment i wish you well in life and i hope that we can both live every day to the fullest-- because not all of us have the luxury of time
- douevenshiftbro 8y ago
  How do you make the ( without a shift key?
  - medecau 8y ago
    you mean the parenthesis?
    - 8y ago

hajrice 8y ago

When I was a teenager, I wrote to Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, telling him how he's had such a huge impact on me, and how he's very inspiring to me. He responded that I buy one of his two books.

Xavdidtheshadow 8y ago
I worked for a startup that was acquired by Salesforce. Pretty soon after it was all official, they sent over 200 signed copies of his book. This is especially notable because they weren't signed by him - just by random other SFDC employees. It was a nice gesture, I guess.
- make3 8y ago
  I that's pretty weird tbh
  - joering2 8y ago
    I don't know if you sensed it, but both hajrice and Xavdidtheshadow were sarcastic in their posting :) At least what I take from it, good CEO would answer you with "thank you" or whatever, as Benioff is know to be more of a Ellison / Jobs type of asshole CEO, rather than let's say polite Elon Musk, so hajrice made fun that instead, Benioff asked him to buy his book in order to just squeeze few extra bucks from someone that admires him :) Xavdidtheshadow was pointing how creepy it is to get forced to receive someones book with their signature that actually is being signed by someone else. Both their responses made me laugh, thanks guys :)
    - alien_at_work 8y ago
      >let's say polite Elon Musk Uh... where do you get this impression? My impression is that Musk easily fits in the same bucket as Ellison / Jobs / Bezos
      - adventured 8y ago

obblekk 8y ago

> CONSIDER INVESTING IN RESPONSIVE COMPANIES No. As he notes, the sample size is ridiculously small. It's simply too likely that he got lucky with 1 or 2 companies in his "respond" group. e.g., if he wrote these letters in the the early 90s and Buffet responded, he's immediately skewed his returns up because Buffet outperformed the market SO much in the 90s. That's likely luck, not replicable skill. Otherwise, interesting article and the 1/3 response rate is surprisingly high.

make3 8y ago
maybe CEOs that are less negatively stressed by current affairs feel more free to answer him.. obviously this doesn't scale though
xapata 8y ago
You can easily do a statistical signicance test to estimate if the effect is non-zero.
- asdsa5325 8y ago
  Which will still mean almost nothing, since past performance doesn't guarantee future results.
  - shanghaiaway 8y ago
    You basically just claimed that data analysis as a whole is invalid.
    - skolsuper 8y ago
      It's a valid point, this is post-hoc data analysis so you need to be careful of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy

wallflower 8y ago

I got my first job in the tech industry by writing a thank you letter. Many years ago I met the CEO of a tech company at a networking event for recent college grads that they hosted. Like a job fair but with a twist. Having read Brian D. Krueger's excellent "College Grad Job Hunter" [1], I had business cards prepared. This was long before Moo.com so they were printed out on my Deskjet on Avery pre-perforated card stock. I went with my ill-fitting suit and mismatched shoes/belt, and I was talking to someone from a small tech company and I got a tap on the shoulder, "Our CEO would like to get a picture with you." Having miniscule networking mojo and knowledge, I actually followed the PR person without excusing myself. We took the photo, and I asked if I could give him my business card. He said yes, and he gave me his. The next day, I wrote him a letter. I honestly wrote how I liked that this networking event was not the usual deal but more like a classy cocktail event and a great opportunity to meet other companies in a less-networky, relaxed atmosphere. I thanked him and the company for hosting it. I ended up later getting hired by his company (I was invited to apply, someone called me) and worked there for many years, as I learned the art and trade of software development, starting from nothing and someone who managed to bluff their way through the interviews. [1] https://www.amazon.com/College-Grad-Job-Hunter-Entry-level/dp/1598695479 https://www.amazon.com/College-Grad-Job-Hunter-Entry-level/d... (highly recommend this, written from the perspective of the hiring manager)

ChristianBundy 8y ago
Why didn't you excuse yourself?
- wallflower 8y ago
  It was a "deer in the headlights" moment. What happened, happened and I am not proud of it. When I heard "The CEO wants a photo with you", I was completely pattern interrupted with the current thread of what I was doing talking to whoever it was (keyword: CEO and keyword: you) and just System.exit(1)'d (e.g. left with the PR person). I didn't realize that I'd not excused myself properly until after the photo op was done. As a tangent, on the topic of social niceties and navigating a party situation: If you ever need to get out of the awkward "I've been talking with this one person and I really want to exit the conversation", you never want to say "It was nice meeting you.". What you want to say is this: "I'd like to go meet those people over there. Come with me." This is genius (and I learned this from a social genius) because it gives the person a choice. If they don't want to go with you, you are golden. If they go with you, you've developed your own little temporary group of 2.

whack 8y ago

This part is pretty amazing. > From the time that I mailed my letters, the compound annual return of the respondent group is 8.97% greater than the non-respondent companies. If anything, I would have expected the opposite. "Successful companies are more busy, and have less time to write letters to strangers. Failing companies love to spend all their time justifying themselves." Glad to see that hypothesis disproven. If the above correlation does hold across larger sample sizes, I wonder if hedge funds will start using it to identify profitable trades. Send anonymous letters to the executives of public companies, and weight your investments in favor of those who reply. At some point, the executives will wise up and start replying to everyone. But you could make a nice pile of money before that happens.

jfoutz 8y ago
From my vague systems experience, it makes sense. If everything works, you have time for random nonsense. You want a sysadmin that’s playing video games all day, because everything is in great shape. Not a constantly stressed , jaded, angry admin. I know nothing of being a CEO, but if the CEO is bored, the company is probably in great shape.

vortico 8y ago

Because of this post, CEOs around the world are receiving 3x emails today. Haha, just kidding. It's actually the opposite. The reason CEOs respond is because they get much fewer emails from customers than you'd imagine. They get their typical solicitations, internal meeting emails, external business discussions, but the customer emails can be interesting and more insightful than any internal letter could be. If you put time into it and write your letter which doesn't require a huge time investment to response (i.e. avoid dozens of specific questions and allow the discussions to be open-ended), you might get a response. If any human is contacted by another of our species, it's intrinsic to want to respond. Being a CEO doesn't remove that desire. Yes, you might be bothering them a bit if they sacrifice family time, but that's their own problem/choice!

xster 8y ago
How does one even discover the email addresses of CEOs (or board members)? It's not like they're searchable online and guessing common formats only gets you so far.
- vortico 8y ago
  LinkedIn is a good place to start. Curriculum vitaes if you can find them. Asking around. Some CEOs of smaller companies than WD-40, typically startups with a younger age group, give them out in the About page of their website. Sometimes you can just guess (e.g. jeff@ some large used book company .com). Every time you discover one of these email addresses, you think "I could have guessed that on my first try."
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- aantix 8y ago
  Is it even legal anymore to cold contact a CEO in Europe?
  - elygre 8y ago
    Why wouldn’t it be?

bradknowles 8y ago

One thing I would like to highlight here — writing a letter to a CEO is not just sending an e-mail message. Try writing an actual letter and printing it on real paper, and sending it through the real-world post office. Don’t just dash off an e-mail message.

lozf 8y ago
I feel this could be optimised further: how about emailing the CEO's secretary a PDF, and asking them to print it (on heavy but plain paper), put it in an envelope and deliver it with the rest of CEO's mail.

rmason 8y ago

My late father had great success in writing CEO's and receiving a direct reply. But I think times have changed because I've done it a few times and never had any luck. There's a local automotive specialty repair chain in Michigan. My family has always done business with them. When they opened their first store which was in Detroit my grandfather took a picture of all the cars lined up. They were giving away two gallons of free gas which was apparently a pretty big deal in the nineteen twenties. My dad met the CEO at some business function and sent him a copy of the photo and they put copies in every one of their dozens of stores. I've always had excellent service at our local branch. A good friend of mine asked for a recommendation so I sent him there. He received horrible service and a botched repair job which they refused to fix. I was embarrassed so I wrote the CEO. I mentioned my father so it would be clear to him who was writing. I didn't want anything for myself, I just wanted him to do right by my friend. I never received a reply and moved my personal business to a competitor. I've also probably told two dozen people the story. The store changed managers and the new guy is driving business away. My letter should have tipped them off to problems but they ignored it.

exelius 8y ago
I’ve had great success with e-mailing CEOs. I have engaged in (respectful) debates with them, and on more than one occasion they have come around to my point of view enough to actually implement changes at their companies. Most CEOs are actually dying to know what their customers think of them. The hardest part of being a CEO at a major company is getting honest feedback without someone blowing smoke up your ass, so most good CEOs will make time to read direct feedback. Customers rarely have a political agenda the way a CEOs direct reports might. That’s why I think these companies perform better. A responsive CEO is more interested in hearing the unfiltered voice of the customer. That’s a mindset that carries through to all parts of the business.

bunkydoo 8y ago

I write letters to many different people, none really respond showing me that this is a thoughtful yet ineffective means of reaching out to people nowadays... Interesting thoughts nonetheless

magnat 8y ago
Are you a nigerian prince?

erikb 8y ago

This looks like a lot of fantasy confidence. For instance, even if you are quite rich, it's unlikely that Colgate-Palmolive would consider you really an "investor". And of course if you write something to the CEO his 10+ PR team will respond to you, maybe even with something that is signed by the CEO. But do you really think the CEO sits down to discuss shower thoughts about product ideas with you? If you think that would make sense at all, you don't understand how big companies work. The big company is in the later phases of a snowball effect. It's a huge thing that rolls by itself and can't really be redirected, stopped or sped up by anyone. A CEO knows that. He's mostly concerned about internal politics and external representation. He's not really doing anything like develop new products. Companies like Apple that move from one big product line to another are very, very rare. So, what you get is a PR letter that can contain some insights into their current strategy. But nothing of real value. It's unlikely that such a response contains anything one could learn.

scandox 8y ago
I think you're wrong. Powerful people are very often influenced by chance encounters, by mere happenstance. I've seen it a hundred times: decisions (or at least discussions) driven by accidental meetings on planes or trains. Something overheard at the pool or in a bar. It's because these guys know at some level that they're in a closed chamber, away from the reality that underlies their corporate activity and if they think they've suddenly been given an authentic glimpse of something, unmediated by their lieutenants then they find that extremely novel and exciting. They're just human beings. Often they're very interested in people in general.
- mathgenius 8y ago
  > at some level that they're in a closed chamber I actually think it's the opposite: really successful people get there because they are more vulnerable. At least in my experience, whenever I met someone like this, they always seem way more responsive and open than the usual joe.
  - what-the-grump 8y ago

coupdejarnac 8y ago

When I was in 4th grade in the '80s, I wrote a letter to the CEO of Atari. I was a stockholder(maybe 5 shares, ha), and I was concerned that Atari could do a few things to make their games more enjoyable. I received a really nice letter in return that addressed my concerns, and a bunch of promotional material was included. In retrospect I wish I had written more letters and perhaps built up correspondence with someone high profile.

user9182031 8y ago
You were trading stocks in the 4th grade?
- coupdejarnac 8y ago
  Dad was stockbroker.

krmmalik 8y ago

I didn't write a letter but I did write emails to executives at Blackberry and Nikon. I felt I had strategies that could help them. I never got a response. So I'm wondering what it is this guy is doing that is promoting a response. Maybe it is just the fact that it's a letter and not an email, or the letters are written by someone in the PR department and not the actual CEO? I would love to reach out to CEOs and have an actual conversation with them even if my ideas are way off the mark.

Cthulhu_ 8y ago
I think he's made sure to put all the legal safeguards in there; normally companies will throw any idea they get from people right into the trash without paying attention to it, because (and this has happened in the past) if they then run with it, the sender will sue them for stealing their idea without compensation.

hackathonguy 8y ago

I’ve had similar experiences with CEOs of large tech start ups. I’ve learned that when an email is clear and concise, the response rate astonishingly high.

known 8y ago

I once wrote a letter to Top CEO. And I got a reply from his Lawyer.

RankingMember 8y ago
Shouldn't have "written" it with each individual letter being cut-out and pasted from random magazines/newspapers. ;)
- known 8y ago
  I wrote to Carly Fiorina suggesting that all HP devices should embed Skype/Whatsapp type of software

Bromskloss 8y ago

I would like to know what the ideas he wrote about were.

bitofhope 8y ago

A friend of mine in high school tweeted to Mikko Hyppönen (CRO, F-Secure) and invited him with us for a beer. A few weeks later we met with him in Helsinki over a pizza and discussed cybersecurity, arcade games, politics, pinball and miscellaneous topics. It was fun. Sometimes contacting high profile individuals is all about making the step of reaching out.

joncrane 8y ago
That's super cool, and also VERY Scandinavian (culturally).
- workinthehead 8y ago
  Finland is not Scandinavian.
  - kwhitefoot 8y ago
    I wonder why you were downvoted for a simple statement of fact.

mindhash 8y ago

I once wrote letter to Decathlon, the largest sporting goods retailer. I complained about store and lack of empathy at stores. Next day I received call from store manager. Who offered me a 100$ gift voucher if i return to the store :)

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martin1975 8y ago

I wrote a letter to Wal-Mart's CEO about 10+ years ago to apologize for switching the barcode from a less expensive Sony Walkman to a more expensive one because I didn't want to pay more. I was in college, about 19 years of age (mid 90's), and at the time felt that if I could get away with this, it's ok. And I did. Little did I know this act would gnaw on my conscience for many later. I asked them what could I do to make it right after so many years. Soon after he received my letter, I got a call from the CEO's secretary to let me know he read my letter and that he forgives me and that there's nothing I need to do. Since I didn't expect the call, I was taken aback and moved to tears while I was talking to her. I expected some wrath and punishment for what I'd done. Instead, I experienced forgiveness. Now if I could only quantify how much software, movies and music I've bootlegged while I was a student, I would probably write those CEOs a letter too, but I can't even remember it properly so I can quantify it. It wasn't a lot, and I mostly bootlegged because I thought it was "cool" to be visible on IRC #warez and what not... never really used or resold the software, just mostly did it cause I got to hang with the cool crowd. Given I'm a software engineer for nearly 20 years now, I don't bootleg anything anymore... music, videos, apps.. and if I do, it's only because there's no trial for some of the apps. If I end up using the app, I pay for it or if I can't afford it, usually an employer will pay for it if I/we need it.

kwhitefoot 8y ago
This is one of the most encouraging posts I have read for a long time. Shame there is no way I can vote it to the top.

ikeboy 8y ago

Would be interesting with the actual letters and responses