You context-switch between investor updates, product calls, hiring, and strategy. Your bottleneck isn't decisions -- it's getting them into words fast enough.
You're the CEO of a 15-person startup. You don't have an executive assistant. Every email, every Slack message, every strategy doc comes from your keyboard. Or it used to.
You're not even out of bed yet but you're already scanning email on your phone. Three investor follow-ups, a candidate's thank-you note, and a customer escalation. You hold the Steno button on your iPhone and dictate quick replies to all five. Two sentences each. Done before your feet hit the floor.
One of the investor replies needs a slightly careful tone -- you're pushing a board meeting back a week. You dictate it, listen to yourself say "I'd like to move our sync to the 14th so I can have the updated numbers ready," fix one word, and send.
These used to take you an hour. You'd sit in front of a blank compose window, agonizing over how to frame the burn rate and position the delayed product launch. Now you just talk. "Here's where we are on revenue, here's what changed on the timeline, here's why I'm not worried about it." Four minutes of speaking, ten minutes of editing. You hit send before your first meeting.
"We closed 340K in new ARR this quarter, up 18 percent from Q2. The API launch slipped two weeks because we found a data consistency issue in staging. The fix is in and we're targeting March 1 for the public release. Team morale is strong and we just extended an offer to our first senior engineer."
We closed 340K in new ARR this quarter, up 18 percent from Q2. The API launch slipped two weeks because we found a data consistency issue in staging. The fix is in and we're targeting March 1 for the public release. Team morale is strong and we just extended an offer to our first senior engineer.
Clean, direct, no filler. You read it back, change "percent" to "%", and send. The whole thing took fourteen minutes. Your investors get an update that sounds like you, not like a template.
You're on a call with your head of engineering. Decisions are flying. You have Notion open and every time something gets decided, you hold the hotkey and speak it. "We're cutting the dashboard redesign from v1 and shipping it as a fast follow in April." After the call, you have a clean list of decisions and action items. No reconstructing from memory an hour later.
You also catch yourself dictating a quick aside: "Need to check whether the redesign delay affects the enterprise demo on the 20th." That kind of thought usually evaporates by lunch. Now it's in your notes.
You have eight candidates to respond to. Three are getting offers, five are rejections. The rejections are the hard ones -- you want to be respectful but you don't want to spend twenty minutes on each. You dictate them. "Thanks for taking the time to meet with the team. We really enjoyed the conversation about your work at Figma. We've decided to move forward with another candidate for this role, but I'd genuinely like to stay in touch." Personalized, human, done in under a minute each.
The offer emails are easier but longer. You talk through comp, start date, what the first 90 days look like. Each one takes about three minutes of dictation and two minutes of cleanup. All eight emails are sent before lunch.
Your board wants a two-page strategic direction doc by Friday. You're eating lunch at your desk. Instead of typing between bites, you push back from the keyboard and just talk through your thinking. The competitive landscape, the bet you're making on enterprise, why you're not worried about the Series B timeline. Six minutes of speaking gives you a rough draft that's 80 percent there. You'll clean it up tomorrow.
"Our core thesis hasn't changed. Mid-market companies are underserved by the current tooling and none of the incumbents are moving downmarket fast enough. We're seeing this in the sales pipeline -- 60 percent of our qualified leads tried at least one competitor first and churned. The enterprise bet is about landing three to five lighthouse accounts in Q3 that we can use as case studies for the next raise. We don't need to build a full enterprise product. We need SSO, audit logs, and a dedicated onboarding flow. That's eight weeks of eng work, not a pivot."
You read it back. It needs structure and a few transitions, but the thinking is all there. That's the hard part, and it took six minutes.
Your sales lead posted that a big prospect wants custom pricing. Your head of design is asking whether to prioritize the mobile app or the API docs. Your co-founder flagged a potential press opportunity. Each thread gets a dictated response. The custom pricing thread gets a longer, careful reply because the whole sales team is watching. You talk it through like you'd explain it to someone sitting next to you.
"We can do a custom annual plan but I don't want to set a precedent for one-off discounts. Let's offer them a two-year commit at 15 percent off the annual price. Frame it as a partnership rate, not a discount. If they push back, loop me in directly." You fix "15 percent" to "15%" and post it.
You're about to close the laptop. You dictate three things into Apple Notes: the one email you have to send first thing tomorrow, the one hire decision you need to make, and the one thing you promised your co-founder you'd review. Fifteen seconds. Tomorrow morning you'll open your notes and know exactly where to start.
Tomorrow, pick the one email you've been avoiding. The investor update, the difficult conversation, the long explanation. Hold the hotkey and just talk through it. You'll send it before 9 AM.
After your next call, while the context is fresh, hold the hotkey and speak the three decisions that were made. Don't type them later from memory.
Next time you're walking somewhere, pull out your phone and knock out two email replies with Steno. They'd have sat in your inbox for hours otherwise.