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Comment by winter_blue | Hacker News Reader

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?

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.

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/

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).

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.

Look at them downthrodden downvotees, living in the hopes, that the king notices the messages encoded into the folding of his toilett paper.

Could you please not post like this? We're trying for a bit better than internet median here.

If you could keep the substantive comments and drop the unsubstantive ones, that would help.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I believe that they're actually responding. Gabe Newell (the CEO of Valve) is worth billions[1], and has been known to respond to emails personally[2].

[1]https://www.pcgamer.com/gabe-newell-is-worth-55-billion-acco...

[2]https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/2keaco/i_sent...

Story time: in college, I played a lot of the Team Fortress 2 beta. When the release came around, performance tanked. Absolutely went straight to hell. Annoyed, I fired a snippy email off to Gabe. Not impolite, but snippy, something around "I expect performance regressions like this out of companies less awesome than Valve." The next day, a senior engineer at Valve reached out to me, we hopped on Skype, played a few rounds with a bunch of Valve employees, and we monitored my system perf. A few days later, I got an email, "next patch should help you out, let me know if not"--happy as a clam afterwards.

These days I have more than a few beefs with Steam, but that sort of reaction sticks, and generates a lot of goodwill.

Just for those of you looking at the URL slug and thinking, holy cow, $55bn! ... it's $5.5bn.

Still impressive, but I had to click to find out how a videogame guy could possibly be worth fifty-five-thousand-million dollars. :-/

About 15 years ago I emailed Gabe Newell about something and got a response. It was just "Thanks, I forwarded this to someone in department x" and then the person in that department helped me but it was still cool to get that single sentence back.

Maybe, but I think you would be surprised.

I wrote to the CEO of a company with a market cap of ~6bn (For comparison, WD40 is 1.95bn) about opening an office in a town where I wanted to move (Also his home town), basically so I could work there. And I got a reply within a few hours. It wasn't a crazy big reply but it was still personal.

I think what really hit it in my case was the fact the town in question was his home town, so it was personal to him. We don't know what was in the letters that were sent to these other companies, but they may have hit a chord because they were pet projects of the CEO's, or because they had already invested capital into it and failed and it was already a mark on their resume etc. CEO's are pretty passionate people.

In government, there are constituent management systems that allow staffers to manage correspondence, calendars, etc. Letters get triaged and things of interest either due to subject matter, the person writing it, etc move up the food chain. Depending on the principal, they see a few dozen per week.

These systems also allow for tagging of people too. Crazy people, various group affiliation (union, conservative, pro-x, anti-y), VIP status, etc. They also queue up personalized responses to specific issues to be timed with events, press hits, etc.

Many high level people really enjoy hearing from real people.

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