There's a way to improve your startup by orders of magnitude 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.)
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Boom! You just made your startup more effective and drastically increased your chances of building a great product.
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By assuming the CVO title, you made something explicit that most startups leave vague: that there is 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.
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​Here’s the thing..​
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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.
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As a result, the system keeps refactoring itself and accumulating complexity. It feels like motion, but it’s actually entropy.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.