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Comment by thepablohansen | Hacker News Reader

> with an average email response time of about 5 minutes to anything.

Seems like he's always considered this a good measure of a founder's quality.

From a 2019 interview- https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/sam-altman/

> You know, years ago 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. 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

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One thing to keep in mind is that this was the email response time to Sam Altman, the head of YC. What competent startup founder waits to reply to that?

Responsiveness as a general approach to all email is a bad idea. But one needs to know who are the high-priority emailers, and how much they value quick replies.

I don't get this narrative taken to the extreme.

If you can answer every mail in minutes from important people, then how can you meaningfully do other stuff?

It's perfectly fine to spend a day without answering to the head of YC if you've had the entire day full at hiring, talking to investors, etc. You can't do that effectively and be distracted by your phone all time.

This is about the nature of emails themselves, if they conveyed a more urgent information then a phone call would've been better.

> You can't do that effectively and be distracted by your phone all time.

I think the differentiator is that some people can and do remain effective at a primary task while handling a multitude of distractions, and that this trait strongly indicates high ability overall.

I don't believe this.

You're not entirely focused if you're answering emails on your phone.

Maybe Greg's 50% focus is still good enough for answering to Altman and doing other stuff? It's still giving 50% to both or a different mix.

It's also disrespectful if you're with other people imho.

Anyway my main point is that if you're expecting people to answer you urgently, don't write them an email but find a better channel.

It also depends on what your task queue is. I’d expect an IC to have a few tasks to work on with complete focus for hours at a time. Senior management however, having delegated properly, I’d expect to have a large set of tasks that require a limited amount of time to address.

Eg you’d expect a CEO to enter a meeting, receive a variety of reports from their staff and make a final call or two — and then moving onto another meeting in an entirely different domain — and do so fluidly without interruption.

Which would make it a lot easier to be readily available for ad-how things like emails. Though 5-minutes feels a little much.

Focus is about prioritization.

Apple has context-specific notifications and manual DnD exception list.

Short iOS email VIP list can be manually curated.

Interrupt-automation exists to support a spectrum of human priorities and workflows.

I assumed that the responses were something like "hey, not sure I'll need to get back to you" (and then he researches/investigates after re-prioritizing other work and gets back to him).

Yes, that is the way to do it. Don’t leave the sender wondering. Immediately confirm that you read the email and are prioritizing a substantive response.

That seems a bit simplistic and 'bad founders' begs for a definition because it can't just be 'answers email slowly'.

I would absolutely believe that founders who (go on to) run billion dollar companies make a point of replying to YC partners very quickly. "Successful executives are highly responsive to investor and advisor emails" seems eminently plausible. It doesn't suggest that they're equally responsive to all emails, but they've got a sense of who's important/needs to feel important.

I'm sure they do. But you can also interpret that as 'bootlickers are the kind of people I like'. And that is not necessarily equivalent to 'good founders'. So I think it is a bit of a thin element to judge people by.

I think it is maybe best reframed as "good founders from the perspective of those who control capital".

Whether these people ultimately improve society, or create a better sense of purpose for their employees, or provide visionary direction for the company at a higher rate than other founders is kind of orthogonal (or perhaps anticorrelated) to being good stewards of invested capital.

Founders can, to some extent, get help with (or succeed financially despite the lack of) the other things, but I think it can be reasonably argued that if they're not personally regarded as good stewards of capital, then the whole enterprise is in doubt.

Precisely. Good founders, bad founders, in the eyes of the beholder.

I'm pretty sure I have a completely different opinion on what constitutes a good founder and what constitutes a bad one compared to Sam Altman, fortunately I don't have enough clout to make authoritative statements on the subject.

Except that he only found out there was a correlation between startup success and responsiveness by doing a historical analysis.

Or that's the bit that sounded like a nice story.

Startup success is random enough that it'll be correlated with a great variety of interesting things. A good scientist makes a hypothesis based on a casual model first, then constructs a test for it. Data mining for correlated things is a recipe for apophenia.

Goodhart's law would tell you what any metric-driven understanding of the cause of success would cease to be useful as soon as it was announced.

It remains plausible that the connection is neither causal nor spurious, but after the announcement of the correlation, the correlation becomes useless

I take it bad founders means the founders that run less than billion-plus companies.

P|Q != Q|P

A very stupid metric, or very useful if you want to know who just wait for emails instead of doing long strands of deep work, with notifications off or not visible.

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