
I Write Letters to CEOs - henryjones
https://www.johnwdefeo.com/articles/why-i-write-letters-to-ceos
======
ordinaryperson
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.

~~~
snowwrestler
I'm impressed but not surprised he responded; that sort of clear, actionable
feedback can be surprisingly difficult for a CEO to get, especially in retail.

Most retail CEOs don't reserve much time for popping into stores and talking
to customers, and store and district managers tend to dislike it--feels like
micromanaging.

But at the same time, store managers and district managers are often not eager
to feed a list of their stores' shortcomings up the chain of command. IMO it's
a rare retail manager who is willing to stand up and say, "my store is bad and
here is what I need to make it good." Most focus on putting the best possible
face on things, internally. It's so hard to make good numbers in retail and
there is so much pressure to do so... relationships between the management
layers can often feel more adversarial than collaborative.

~~~
wmeredith
GameStop is sorely in need of some micro managIng. I was in there with my
daughter the other day looking to buy a Nintendo Switch and some Pokémon
cards. The place was a cramped disorganized mess. And the neck beard working
the counter grunted half hearted responses to our questions for about 5
minutes before we left with nothing. About 20 minutes later I spent $350+ at
Amazon using my smartphone while we ate lunch in the food court.

~~~
anonymouskimmer
Food courts are the best part of the mall experience.

As malls disappear it would be nice if the multi-restaurant open and shared
dining experience was preserved.

------
wgerard
> 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...](http://www.businessinsider.com/ceo-golf-rounds-indicate-poor-
performance-2014-11)

~~~
leroy_masochist
Here's my anecdotal-experience-driven theory of what's going on with the
golfing-CEO companies underperforming the non-golfing-CEO ones: it isn't a
matter of lost productive hours while golfing instead of working. It's that
the golfing CEOs are, as a population, different from the non-golfing ones.

The golfing ones are a bit more extroverted and charismatic than the non-
golfers; they "look like CEOs". They are more likely than the non-golfing ones
to have attended a top-tier MBA program. Their average height is significantly
greater than the non-golfers. And so on; you see where I'm going.

Certainly there are plenty of introverted, socially challenged golfers out
there. But within any population whether CEOs or lawyers or cops or musicians
or whatever else, the subset of people who golf is going to be, on average,
more extroverted than the subset of people who don't.

I think this somewhat ties in to Taleb's argument that you should trust
surgeons who don't look like surgeons, since their achievement of professional
success despite their tendency to create a negative first impression is a
robust heuristic of professional competence[0].

The population of non-golfers, averaged out as a population, were held to
subtly higher standards that required better performance out of them. This
means that non-golfers, as a population, tend to be more challenged at work
over the course of their careers, and that it was less likely that individuals
could "fail up" \-- the Peter Principle extends further for extroverts.

Anyway that's my theory.

0: [https://medium.com/incerto/surgeons-should-notlook-like-
surg...](https://medium.com/incerto/surgeons-should-notlook-like-
surgeons-23b0e2cf6d52)

~~~
cjhopman
Interesting theory. Do you apply it to men in predominantly female occupations
and vice versa?

~~~
kybernetikos
I think it's entirely plausible that the median woman in a coding job is
better than the median man in a coding job because of this effect.

That's why vague claims (like in the google debacle) that women are
biologically less suited to coding than men might not be relevant to your
organisation _even if_ we were to believe it true in general.

A similar effect may explain some of this: [https://hbr.org/2017/09/the-
comprehensive-case-for-investing...](https://hbr.org/2017/09/the-
comprehensive-case-for-investing-more-vc-money-in-women-led-startups)

------
rmason
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
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.

------
wallflower
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/d...](https://www.amazon.com/College-Grad-Job-Hunter-Entry-
level/dp/1598695479) (highly recommend this, written from the perspective of
the hiring manager)

~~~
tzahola
Why did the CEO want a photo with you?

~~~
joncrane
It wasn't the CEO who wanted the picture, it was the PR person. So s/he
suggests it to the CEO and he said "sure."

But when it came time to make it happen, the way to get the person on board as
quickly as possible is to say "the CEO over there wants to take a picture with
you."

------
vortico
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
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.

~~~
spondyl
Rather than guessing, you can also connect to the SMTP gateway of that company
using telnet then enter rcpt to:<ceo@company.com>. It'll tell you if that's a
valid address or not. Rinse and repeat.

~~~
solotronics
and much lulz were had

------
erikb
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
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
> 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
Most of them exist in an echo chamber. It’s rare to see them talking to or
having time to think outside the current situation. Especially if they are
self made (meaning they are leaning closer to the control freak side). It’s
rare for regular people like me get a blast of outside perspective on my day
to day, let alone an evaluation of wtf I do at work or how I can do it better.

------
martin1975
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
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.

------
hajrice
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
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
I that's pretty weird tbh

~~~
joering2
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
>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
I get that impression from almost everything I've read about Musk over the
last 15 years. He absolutely does not fit into that bucket. Bezos is also not
in the Jobs / Ellison group in regards to behavior. Bezos is a difficult boss,
he's not a terror like Jobs & Ellison, he isn't known for attacking people,
belitting people, throwing epic temper tantrums, threatening people, etc -
much less doing the borderline criminal things that Ellison has (such as
hiring PIs to dig through Bill Gates & Microsoft's garbage).

With Jobs and Ellison there are endless examples of them behaving as assholes
toward normal people. What are the examples with Musk? He overwhelmingly seems
to treat most people extremely well by comparison. The worst I've seen about
him is that he pressurizes the work environment, that he's hard charging,
although it certainly doesn't appear to be anything like Apple or Oracle under
Jobs / Ellison. I don't believe you can build Tesla & SpaceX without anything
less than the approach Musk has used.

------
obblekk
> 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.

~~~
xapata
You can easily do a statistical signicance test to estimate if the effect is
non-zero.

~~~
asdsa5325
Which will still mean almost nothing, since past performance doesn't guarantee
future results.

~~~
shanghaiaway
You basically just claimed that data analysis as a whole is invalid.

~~~
skolsuper
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)

------
bitofhope
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
That's super cool, and also VERY Scandinavian (culturally).

~~~
workinthehead
Finland is not Scandinavian.

~~~
kwhitefoot
I wonder why you were downvoted for a simple statement of fact.

------
bradknowles
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
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.

------
coupdejarnac
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
You were trading stocks in the 4th grade?

~~~
coupdejarnac
Dad was stockbroker.

------
megamindbrian2
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
I wish I had as much spare time as you

~~~
megamindbrian2
“I annoy Jeff Bezos weekly and he still doesn’t want to be friends.”
[https://medium.com/@megamindbrian/i-annoy-jeff-bezos-
weekly-...](https://medium.com/@megamindbrian/i-annoy-jeff-bezos-weekly-and-
he-still-doesnt-want-to-be-friends-ef40e6e86686)

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

------
whack
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
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.

------
winter_blue
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?

~~~
Orangeair
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...](https://www.pcgamer.com/gabe-newell-is-worth-55-billion-according-to-
forbes/)

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

~~~
eropple
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.

------
mindhash
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 :)

------
krmmalik
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_
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.

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

~~~
RankingMember
Shouldn't have "written" it with each individual letter being cut-out and
pasted from random magazines/newspapers. ;)

~~~
known
I wrote to Carly Fiorina suggesting that all HP devices should embed
Skype/Whatsapp type of software

------
bunkydoo
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
Are you a nigerian prince?

------
ikeboy
Would be interesting with the actual letters and responses

------
hackathonguy
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.

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

------
mykull
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.

~~~
dang
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
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.

