I'm sure the trend generalizes, but I'd be wary of cargo-culting it because a number of simple and plausible explanations put the causality arrow firmly in the other direction. Failure isn't fun to share, failure implies a need to re-think and strategize, failure means you can't delegate enough of your responsibilities to specialize in appearing quick and decisive to your investors, failure means you aren't in the startup circle anymore and aren't looking to cultivate your relationship with Sam Altman, and so on. Any one of those effects could singlehandedly create the observed trend without implying that quick response times lead to healthy businesses.

That's actually pretty awesome.

Of course, it's more of a symptom that is an emergent property than a root cause. Like saying every top tennis player uses $$$ rackets - so if I use $$$ rackets, I'll be a top tennis player.

If people knew Sam Altman judged companies more positively by their response times which resulted in more funding, that's a metric just begging to be gamed without actually making the business better.

As someone who is generally a "slow responder", I'll guess at the root cause. My guess is that being a slow email responder is correlated with (a) higher propensity to procrastinate, (b) general indecisiveness and (c) lower self-esteem, all of which are not hard to see why they would negatively impact business success. Of course, I could just be projecting, but when I am slow to respond to an email, it's usually because I want to overthink the response, or that something about writing the response is generally uncomfortable so I practice avoidant behavior (same thing feeds into procrastination). That root cause trait has proven very inhibitory for me achieving my goals.

Oh, that is 100% me. I have this anxiety related to external (non-co-workers) people. When I know it's a negative response email, it makes my heart and body tense up. I know it's purely an internal response, a personal perception/projection, giving imaginative power away, etc etc. I try to woo-sa (meditate) through it, but it's still very real for me.

Side note, for a throwaway account - you are impressively dedicated to it.

Sometimes jumping right into every single thing is not the best, ideal decisions do not all come the same way, and self-esteem has its ups and downs.

Independently, opportunity can be a real wild card.

Regardless, I think an investor can expect a prospect to be putting full time effort into building a relationship that can lead to a growth partnership, and not wanting to miss a day.

Once you get into ongoing communication you may not want to miss an hour.

If there is good allowance for urgency you're still going to need to go full professional and be able to pick up the phone.

Sometimes around-the-clock with backup.

When you can start out that way there's no need for email at all.

Might also be best at a high point of self-esteem, decisiveness, and undelayed action.

Other times when those are not all completely within reach, related actions should be in progress to more than compensate, in preparation for less inhibited times.

This reminds me of a comment by a YC partner:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20225078