Comment by breck 3 days ago
For the record, 23andme is one of the few companies where the CEO never once responded to one of my emails (2017, 2019, 2022, 2024).
You can make a lot of money just by betting on companies where the CEO (or the CEO's office) takes listening to customers'(who are rooting for them!) emails seriously, and shorting those that do not.
I do put try to make them a mix of feedback + entertainment.
Example
To: jeff@amazon.com
subject: The Day the Music Died
I was looking forward to playing my Yamaha Digital Piano that I ordered from Amazon today when I got home from work at "the country club". Instead I'm stuck tapping this UPS "Delivery Attempted" notice and the melodies just aren't coming through.
?
In the last 6 months I ordered 37 packages from Amazon. I needed to be home for zero.
Why didn't Amazon send me an email, phone call, text, message through Echo, notification through one of my four Amazon iPhone apps, or airdrop from a drone alerting me that I needed to be there for this package?
I also have an Amazon Echo at home so Alexa should have an idea of my schedule and know that the odds of a successful delivery at 4:42pm on a weekday are 1%. Now I'm listening to Alexa play sad songs instead of belting out great new tunes on my Yamaha.
Also, why didn't the UPS driver call or text me when he or she was at my building to ask if it was okay to leave the package? This would have saved them a minimum of 1 trip and I wouldn't have to bet the delivery of my $700 package to a half a cent sticky note stuck to my door being pelted by the Seattle rain.
OK love ya bye
-Breck
If this is representative of the quality of your emails, I would read every one that you published.
Yes, they solved it. I forget what they did in that case, but IIRC it was like, that night or early next morning the piano showed up. And I got a phone call from someone in JB's office.
Even last week I had a similar experience:
Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2024 06:24:04 -1000
Subject: the journey of the thermometer
From: Breck Yunits <breck7@gmail.com>
To: jeff@amazon.com
ORDER NUMBER 112-0027370-6957065
Please don't ask me to explain. Look at the shipping history. The package has travelled from Hawaii to California. I am in Hawaii. WTF?? October deliver for an amazon prime 2 day?!!!!
please fix.
thanks lov ya bye!
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Within hours I got a voicemail:
"Hi, this is Heidi calling from the Amazon executive customer department calling you regarding to the email you sent to Andy Jesse"
And Amazon identified and fixed the problem and gave me a $30 gift card.
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I tell all the startups I invest in: if the CEO of $1T Amazon with 1.6 million employees can intelligently handle receiving constructive customer emails over a $10 purchase, why can't you?
This triggers my "don't overwhelm your correspondent" watchdog.
I'm occasionally prone to self-indulgence in written correspondence.
... (There, I said it.)
I hope that my coworkers are blissfully unaware of this tendency. Sometimes I must write dense things which they must read, because a formal record is required and technology is complicated. But I hope they perceive me as a crisp and clear communicator who makes copious but appropriate use of sentence fragments in bullet point form (not too deeply-nested). With judicious and limited use of humor, and only of the sort that is adequately subtle to be overlooked by any who would not readily accept it.
I would especially hesitate to attempt anything but the most simplifed and direct version of my message in a request for help!
Although I guess when you're emailing a consumer product corp c-suite, you have a greater expectation of patience for customer communications, and of general literacy.
In truth, the exec's mail-tenders are likely relieved to receive anything not written in a hostile tone, and perhaps delighted by anything in complete sentences. All the more so, if they are able to help.
Thank you. May every minor wickedness find its appreciative audience.
I have a similar success rate with a few emails to top CEOs in companies such as AMEX, and Toshiba Japan. It is probably that someone else is shadowing them but they acted very quickly with specific issues, and less hierarchical people follow the issues until they were success. Better than support.
It's not the CEO replying, it's one of his/her assistants.
I suppose it depends if your email is relevant to their interests.
My CEO response rate is about 1%. That one time when DHH (creator of Ruby on Rails) responded to my email about my software library 10 years ago. It wasn't even a Ruby library. What a nice guy. A great CEO and engineer as well.
I too can add that my in-person interactions with DHH were incredibly pleasant. What an amazing person!
I'm curious to know the topic of these emails. I never once thought to cold email the CEO of a company. (Then again maybe that's why I'm a programmer, not a CEO myself.)
Most of them are minor ideas like the ones I just copy/pasted below. But sometimes they are longer like this one: https://hub.scroll.pub/applecard/applecard.pdf
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Nope, we don't have one yet though it would be a good idea. I'm looping in Joe for this.
Thanks for the nudge!
Nathan Co-founder & CTO Help: www.airbnb.com/help Recent press: Washington Post http://bit.ly/KkEzT
On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 11:12 AM, Breck Yunits <breck7@gmail.com> wrote:
just curious why you don't have a favicon (or maybe it just doesn't work on my computer)?
- favicon police
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Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 06:19:24 -1000
Subject: Idea: OpenAI should invest in TabNine which uses GPT-2
From: Breck Yunits <breck7@gmail.com>
To: SArouter@openai.com
The product is one in a million. Hard to code without it now.
But the kid seems overworked and like he's struggling to keep up with demand (https://github.com/zxqfl/TabNine/issues/179#issuecomment-547...)
Years ago, after months of pushback from Apple Authorised Service Provider I decided to write an email to Tim Cook... Got a phone call soon after straight from HQ and my issue was resolved - it's sometimes worth to escalate high up if the situation is absolutely out of company values
You cold e-mail CEOs and get a >70% hitrate? I gotta try this more often.