7 ms·
I Write Letters to CEOs (2018)
- jelliclesfarm 4y agoI wrote regularly to Bezos and a couple of others I am not going to name. I have a friend who wrote to Trump when he was POTUS every day..first thing in the morning when he wakes up. I admire that kind of dedication and discipline.
- gnicholas 4y agoDid you use the jeff@amazon.com address? I heard it was manned by a team of customer service people who were not materially different from regular Amazon customer service, at least in recent years. Did you have a different experience?
- jelliclesfarm 4y agosadly, yes. never got a reply. i think i might pen one tonight for old times sake.
- simonswords82 4y agoYour friend wrote to Trump every day? For how long? The entire term? Did he ever get a response?
- jelliclesfarm 4y agoevery single day. like it was his morning pages. i was very impressed. i think he needed to..it was very important to him. i dont think he got a response..at least the last time we communicated. he is very active in the local politics and party stuff. was hoping to run for local office.
- al_borland 4y agoWhat kind of stuff was he writing him about? I can see the letters devolving over time, like Stan. Did he also write his representatives? It seems like that's what they are there for.
- jelliclesfarm 4y agoHe is very active in local politics. He got letters from others too.
- LegitShady 4y agoyou know even minor politicians have staff who handle this kind of things for them, right? Especially if this person is writing very often, it's unlikely to get elevated to trump's actual attention, because the people who handle the mail recognize someone who sends tons of letters.
- jelliclesfarm 4y agowriting letters to public figures..it is an exercise. when i was a youngling, my grandmother and I would write to everyone..letters to the editor in english and to the vernaculars. that's how she learnt english and i learnt tamil(my mother tongue). and we'd read art buchwald columns in the mornings together. i guess that's how i learnt english too. i didnt really expect jeff bezos to reply back to me. i doubt if trump ever replied to my friend. altho he did show something with the official WH seal..could be a form letter. i plan to publish all the letters i have written and maybe the replies after i 'retire'. it is fun reading!
- WalterGR 4y agoIf you’re curious, the discussion in 2018 got 449 points and 176 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17192926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17192926
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ki85squared 4y agoSonos publishes an email address for contacting CEO Patrick Spence "directly." [1] I wrote an email drawing attention to a clunky process for reactivating a subscription to Sonos Radio HD that was cancelled because the credit card had been closed. (Forced to call in and speak to someone, couldn't reactivate it online.) Sonos did revamp that process so you could reactivate a subscription online, but I never received a reply. I still like to think the few minutes I invested in writing that email saved many others dozens of minutes on hold with support. [1] https://support.sonos.com/s/contact https://support.sonos.com/s/contact
- mathgladiator 4y agoThis was a great read. I email CTOs all the time. Most recently, I emailed the CTO of Cloudflare who put me in contact with their VP, and we had a good Zoom chat.
- bitsnbytes 4y agoTry that with comcast, lol. I cancelled my account with them but they kept billing me for months. luckily I saved the chat logs where I opened a chat with them immediately after canceling in order to have some type of written confirmation. I also emailed the support email accounts I found online stating my request to cancel the account, because I had other bad experiences with them canceling services and wrong charges. So each month I had to get on the phone and go through and explain it was canceled then they would apologize and say they see where i had called to cancel but a mistake was made or more often they would hang up on me when transferring the call even after finding the CEO email address and emailing him directly. I Got tired of it and I wrote a informal complaint to the FCC. I emailed the ceo and comcast support with filed complaint and cc'd the FCC. Just a day later got a call saying they see that a mistake was made and they are removing all the erroneous charges.
- gnicholas 4y agoI imagine the response rate is very different for paper letters and emails.
- ystad 4y agoI write to CEOs when I'm frustrated with a product or a service. The fastest response I've received was with Costco. I got a call within 10 minutes of sending an email.
- pigtailgirl 4y ago-- emailed mr. cook a few months ago & had a call back from someone in the apple exec team the next day - problem was solved within 3 weeks - called cineplex HQ number to ask if the number collected online is truly just for TFA or if it's also used for marketing - pushed the directory number for the name of the CEO expecting a voicemail or EA - CEO answered - promised me it's 100% just for TFA - told me he'd pass along to marketing to get something added to the site --
- Ma8ee 4y agoI guess TFA doesn't stand for The Fucking Article?
- jorgesborges 4y agoFunny — I made a Cineplex account recently and had the same uneasy suspicion. 2FA is mandatory and via phone only — and they send a code EVERY time you login, despite cookies or whatever. It’s jarring. I left thinking okay they made a deal with someone to distribute phone numbers.
- Zak 4y agoI'm pretty annoyed any time there isn't a TOTP option for 2FA.
- crmd 4y agoI emailed Steve Jobs (sjobs@apple.com) in 2009 after a frustrating exchange at the Soho apple store in NY. He or someone using his account replied in less than 5 minutes with a follow up question, and the problem got fixed the next day.
- edko 4y agoI took my laptop for repair to an Apple store in Germany. After that, they kept emailing me, despite me asking them to remove me from their mailing list several times. I then wrote an email to Tim Cook. They never answered back, but did not get any further spam.
- throwawayricha 4y agoI interviewed with Amazon last August. They have a cool of period of one year before next interview. However, their recruiters keep sending spam asking if I am interested in position XYZ. When I say yes, they go and check their database and then send me a "not eligible yet" mail. I emailed Amazon CEO Andy Jesse about this nuisance. He didn't do anything about this. I still get their recruiter spam.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Beltalowda 4y agoWait, so you interview at Amazon and then you have to wait a full year before you can continue the process? This happens for everyone? Wat? Why? How? What? I am so confused; how can this work well for the candidates or Amazon? I'm looking for a job now; in a year I'll have a different job and if things are going well I probably don't want to leave.
- billh 4y agoI think the parent means that if you're not hired in the process, then you must wait a full year before entering into the candidate pipeline again.
- Beltalowda 4y agoAhh, that makes much more sense! I completely misread that!
- the_svd_doctor 4y agoYou wait a year if you’re not selected and want to try again. You don’t wait a year before you start working there if you are selected :)
- throwawayricha 4y ago>>You wait a year if you’re not selected and want to try again. yes. >> You don’t wait a year before you start working there if you are selected :) Unless you are google where you wait for upto 8 months for team match!
- nubb 4y agoi rma’d a 10tb drive (or something) to WD using their Advanced RMA process. WD support gave me a huge nightmare over pictures of the drive. i couldn’t pull the drive without risking down time and data loss. wd support basically told me fuck off. i emailed David Goeckeler and explained the situation and he took care of everything. i will always be a WD customer as long as he’s around.
- rmason 4y agoMy late father was fond of writing CEO's and sometimes Governors when he had a grievance. He'd always hear back and usually have his problem taken care of by the CEO's, though not always from the Governors. Following his example I tried it once or twice writing the CEO. Never heard back a single time. I am not speaking of an email which can possibly get lost in the web machinery at most corporations, but a typed letter. A letter can indicate real problems at a location which are hidden from him when he visits. While it may get ignored by an executive secretary when you don't hear back you hold it against them. It sends the message loud and clear they don't care about the customer.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
- atlasunshrugged 4y agoThe writing style of a formal letter to an executive versus a comment on an online forum is bound to be different. Not sure what your point is here.
- 99_00 4y agoNot if it's well written
- MichaelZuo 4y ago‘bound to be different’ Really? Many do not know how to write appropriate formal letters, even on HN. And some probably don’t care to or don’t have the english skills to write credible comments either. That’s just how a diverse community works. Some folks, long time posters, smart, even with the best of intentions, just sound off, or come off as strange when writing comments here, especially when they are doing so outside of their domain of expertise or responding to someone they believe is weighing in with a disagreeable opinion. You really think zero of them would send a letter in the same writing style when a formal style would be most appropriate? I’m fairly certain some percentage would. Especially if the person is famous or otherwise notable. For example, the last big Stripe thread had Patrick Collison comment and otherwise seemingly respectable posters, judging by their history, came out of the woodwork to dump on him. For some perceived faults of Stripe, etc.
- 1970-01-01 4y ago>Now, I look for companies whose leaders communicate well. Writing is thinking and executives who are clear in their words are likely to be clear in their thoughts. This one simple trick is real.
- mint2 4y agoHow does one get the CEO’s address to send a letter to? is it the company address?( He says letters many times not email) Also how does one get the CEO’s email?
- SnowHill9902 4y agoTo: Emily Smith, CEO
- discordance 4y ago<CEO firstname> @ <company>.com
- kk6mrp 4y agoI contacted the Light Phone CEO about APN settings for the phone on a LinkedIn comment and he told me to get in touch with support and reference the message but Support refused to do escalate even with the CEO's direction. Must have been more of a "look good" maneuver than anything else.
- YZF 4y agoMany years ago (10+?) I ran into some complicated travel issue related to my booked travel on Travelocity and I CC'd the CEO on my email trying to resolve it. Got an email back fairly quickly that seemed to be genuinely from the CEO CC-ing some relevant person and my issue got resolved. Probably wouldn't happen today but who knows.
- atlasunshrugged 4y agoAlthough my experience was at a mid-size startup, I know that emails to the CEO always ended up getting resolved quickly because he would forward them to the relevant team lead and they always got prioritized at the top of the queue. Not sure if that's the most efficient way to manage user issues, but works for the user who emails. Something to be said about the squeaky wheel getting the grease.
- prawn 4y agoI emailed Mark Cuban several years ago and had a reply within a few minutes. A friend was buying a basketball club and Mark said he wouldn’t recommend it!
- kbob 4y agoI feel compelled to mention The Laszlo Letters and its sequels. In the 1970s, comedian Don Novello (aka Father Guido Sarducci) wrote a variety of crank letters to CEOs and politicians. He got a variety of responses. He published the letters and their responses in the books. It had sort of a Borat-by-post vibe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Novello#Career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Novello#Career
- orobinson 4y agoI wrote an email to Tim Cook in 2018 complaining about the butterfly keyboard on my MacBook and pleading that apple change the design on their future machines. I never got a reply but they did change the design a year later which I’ll take the credit for.
- hartator 4y agoNo doubt. Thank you orobinson.
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- al_borland 4y agoNice work! I used the feedback form to request a feature to only whitelist calls from people in my address book. A year or so later... "silence unknown callers" was released. I take credit for that one. I made my own version of it before Apple did anything, but it was a huge pain (but did dramatically reduce spam calls).
- daniel-cussen 4y agoI do give you all the credit. Thank you orobinson.
- altitudinous 4y agoIt is important here that he wrote LETTERS. Not emails. LETTERS. Folks are firing off emails all the time. Taking time to write a letter is more likely to get a response, from just about anyone.
- 99_00 4y agoAnd it costs money. 53 cents if you use stamps.
- dangus 4y agoThis article feels a lot like CEO worship or LinkedIn Hustle Culture to me. In my view, the main takeaway about respondents vs. non-respondents isn't dramatic or verified enough to convince me that this letter-writing practice isn't just a giant waste of time. CEOs aren't particularly gifted individuals, they mostly just come from families with ample connections (Bill Gates), stumble into timing-based opportunities (Mark Zuckerberg, MySpace Tom), inherit the company (Herbert Fisk Johnson III, Meijer and Walton families), or are workaholics who climb the corporate ladder. (Tim Cook) [1] I don't see much of a reason to actively seek out their thoughts. Social mobility has been decreasing since the 1970s. To me it's time to drop the hustle and focus on ways we can work and think about work less, not writing letters to CEOs. Less production and consumption, more idle time. [1] https://money.cnn.com/2008/11/09/technology/cook_apple.fortune/index2.htm https://money.cnn.com/2008/11/09/technology/cook_apple.fortu... - He starts emailing at 4:30 AM
- nojs 4y 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. Sounds like a decent investment strategy. Fire handwritten letters at the S&P500, go long if you get a response and short if not. Weight portfolio by length, timing and sentiment of response.
- Scoundreller 4y agoOnce I wrote my prime minister and then got a message saying they’ve sent it to the minister responsible for a reply. Then they have to respond.