Email Responsiveness
One of the more important yet subtle lessons I’ve learned through my entrepreneurial experiences is the importance of email responsiveness. I’ve found that many successful founders share the common trait of insanely fast email response.
Specifically, I mean that if you have a request for a trusted founder friend with this trait, they nearly always get back to you within hours, sometimes within minutes. They are often able to achieve this because their responses are clear and concise. When they send their response, a decision has been made, or work has been delegated. For every email request beyond trusted friends, this is obviously not possible on all occasions. But for the majority of email requests from close friends, I’ve noticed they respond clearly and concisely within an hour.
Less determined and indecisive folks seem to respond more casually, perhaps forgetting altogether. If a severely delayed response does arrive, it often contains a verbose apology or additional thoughts that make the task at hand unnecessarily complicated.
Sam Altman recently wrote about “Super Successful Companies” and ended with this note:
*They move fast. They make quick decisions on everything. They respond to emails quickly. This is one of the most striking differences between great and mediocre founders. Great founders are execution machines.
The essence is right there in that last line: Great founders are execution machines.
An easy example is the Rap Genius team. Mahbod responded to my cold email in the “RapGenius Growth Hack Exposed” saga within 5 minutes. This was not an anomaly, the Rap Genius team gets things done and their growth proves it.
This means you need to equip yourself with a smartphone.
