How to Radically Improve Your Startup in 10 Seconds

Here’s what you do:

Go to your email signature and add this to your title:


CVO, Chief Visionary Officer.


(You can keep your CEO title or replace it — I don’t mind.)

Boom!


You just made your startup more effective and drastically increased your chances of building a great product.

By assuming the CVO title, you made something explicit that most startups leave vague: that there is now a single source of intent in the system. You’re telling everyone, “Here is a place where clarity lives.” You’re committing that no one will be expected to act unless they can clearly see how it improves the end experience — and that you are responsible for constantly providing that clarity.

The confusion and wasted effort you just prevented is enormous. Congrats.

Here’s the thing.

When you decide to create a startup, it’s because it will be your vehicle for delivering the specific value you intend — here at the point of initiation — to some future user at the end of the journey. But as you become the “chief executive,” that intent often gets diluted. You start seeing yourself as building a system rather than shaping an end experience. You start outsourcing parts of your vision to “data-driven decisions,” customer feedback, A/B testing, or AI.

As a result, the system keeps refactoring itself and accumulating complexity. It feels like motion, but it’s actually entropy.

There’s a reason Apple is such a common example. It was clear that Steve Jobs was using the company as a means to realize a very specific end state he envisioned for the world. You might not like that idea, but every great product has this somewhere: one person who holds a clear and specific picture of the whole and aligns the parts.

In film, it’s the director.
In a restaurant, it’s the chef.
In companies, we often pretend this role doesn’t exist — even though we expect the result to feel just as intentional.

So if you’re a scientist, an engineer, or a technologist and the title “Chief Visionary Officer” makes you cringe — I’m afraid that’s part of the job. As the primary decision-maker, you have the authority. Which means you also have the obligation to clarity of vision.

Every time you don’t step into that role, you introduce noise into the system. You trade coherence for comfort. And your startup pays the price downstream