I’m the CEO of an 8-Figure AI Company and an Extreme Procrastinator

This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Richard White, CEO of AI note-taking company Fathom. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Everyone talks about procrastination as a personal failing. I disagree. I’m an extreme procrastinator, and I’ve been building successful companies, like UserVoice and, most recently, Fathom, for 15 years.

It’s been one of my greatest assets as an entrepreneur. I see procrastination as ruthless prioritization in disguise.

Consider procrastination as data collection

Procrastination is a way to gather more information before making critical decisions. When I delay a choice, I’m not being lazy; I’m waiting for the optimal moment when I have enough data to make the right call.

In college, I judged the size of a project and left it to the last achievable minute. I might have frustrated my peers or not gotten the most out of every seminar, but I’d do exactly what was needed and nothing more. Since then, I’ve learned to be more thoughtful about my approach.

I used this philosophy to build Fathom, which now has an eight-figure valuation. We started building the company in 2020. Instead of rushing to market with whatever technology was available, we waited. We gathered data. We watched AI capabilities evolve.

For example, prior to the rollout of GPT-4 and Claude 2, Fathom would yield basic call summaries. When GPT-4 was made available, we saw its capabilities and knew concerted investment on our side would yield massive gains. It was a foundation for our more advanced call summary features, and any earlier investment wouldn’t have been as useful to our company.

The same principle applies to my personal life. I plan trips at the last minute because I want to see what opportunities emerge, what’s actually happening in my life, and what I might miss out on if I commit too early.

In other work environments or even relationships, being a procrastinator can annoy people. However, the real and most common downside of procrastinating is underestimating the effort required and starting something too late to meet the deadline. As a CEO, I get to define the deadlines or, in our case, create a deadline-free environment.

Urgent matters to trump important matters

I’ve adopted an unfashionable approach for a CEO: urgent trumps important. This keeps our entire company moving forward without anyone waiting on me to make progress.

It means that sometimes important but non-urgent things languish. I tell my team that if something’s truly important, they should keep tagging me until I respond. This creates a culture where people at all levels in the company can advocate for what matters, and truly important tasks don’t get lost.

I’ve developed what I call the “Jenga model” for running my company. Like the game, when a piece looks too difficult or risky to move, I leave it and come back to it later. I can think about a problem and then put it back down without fear. Months later, I’ll pick it up again, and suddenly, the answer falls right out.

I’ll prioritize problems that will get bigger with time, such as making an important product change, as well as problems where the solutions are low stakes or reversible. Higher-stakes decisions that are non-reversible should be deferred to gather data as long as possible, or broken out into lower-stakes decisions that help gather data to inform the larger issue.

For product development, we circulate ideas internally while waiting for technological improvements. We don’t rush features to market. Instead, we wait for the AI to get better, watch for what could go wrong, and optimize our timing. I don’t think I have ever missed out on an opportunity. The reality in startups is that few things have a “hard” deadline.

Implementing a deadline-free environment at Fathom means there hasn’t been much negative feedback on this model. My team understands what we’re prioritizing versus what we’re doing later.

CEOs need to play to their strengths

Working alongside great entrepreneurs over the years has taught me that you can’t build something around yourself that doesn’t play to your strengths.

My strength isn’t planning or rigid schedules. My strength is recognizing optimal timing, gathering information, and making high-impact decisions. I delegate open-ended goals to my teams rather than micromanaging tasks. I encourage people at every level to make decisions.

Most people think efficiency means doing things as quickly as possible. I think efficiency means doing things at the right time. You might be wrong about when something is needed or the time cost of execution, but that’s the risk you take using your best collective judgment.

This mindset has served Fathom incredibly well. We’re exploring ways to use AI to take better notes, reduce unnecessary meetings, and democratize information sharing within companies.

The next time someone tells you that procrastination is holding you back, ask yourself: Are you really procrastinating, or are you waiting for better information? Are you being lazy, or are you being strategically patient? Sometimes the best thing you can do is put the problem down and come back to it when you can solve it easily and effectively.