Open 10 startup websites. Cover the logos. Shuffle the pages. Nothing breaks. “Revolutionising how finance works.” “Trusted by industry leaders.” Nobody asks which leaders.
The usual diagnosis is lazy copywriting. It lets the founder off. The real cause is worse: she did everything right.
Imagine a Series A software company. Watch one sentence travel through its second year.
The founder writes it in an afternoon: We connect community banks to their old core systems, so they never have to replace them.
Marketing arrives, because the product needs customers: We help financial institutions modernise.
PR arrives, because the company needs news: The fintech infrastructure company reshaping banking.
Investor relations arrives, because the Series B needs a story: A platform for the global financial industry.
An agency polishes the lot: Powering the future of finance.
Every edit was defensible. Every hire was rational. Every version sounded more professional than the last.
Now look at what went missing. Community. Old. Never have to replace them. Those three phrases were the strategy: a narrow customer, an unglamorous problem, a niche larger rivals might ignore. Nobody deleted them on purpose. Each department simply preferred a bigger sentence.
Call it compound dilution. Nobody lies. The judgement leaks anyway.
No one is paid to decide which customers the company will refuse, which markets it will skip, which promises it will not make. That job belongs to the CEO, who is approving budgets and sitting through board meetings.
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The company has acquired professional management. It has lost the person who decides what it is not.
And the damage does not stay in the copy. In this imagined firm, sales reads “financial industry” and starts calling insurers. Engineers, being obliging, build what the insurers ask for. The roadmap bends toward the market investor relations described, not the market that pays. Each choice carries a business case. The sum is a company that traded a market it knew how to win for one where it has no particular edge, without a single meeting at which anyone decided to.
The company stops describing its business and starts building the business it has described.
Silicon Valley has circled this problem since Paul Graham published Founder Mode in September 2024. Drawing on Airbnb’s Brian Chesky, he attacked the advice to hire good executives and leave them alone. The argument soon became a quarrel over micromanagement, and both camps missed the odder risk. A company needs no incompetent executive to lose its way. Three excellent ones, each optimising a different version of the firm, will do it.
A tighter finding sits in a 2025 Harvard Business Review study by Scott Cook, Intuit’s co-founder, and Nitin Nohria, a former Harvard Business School dean. They profiled leaders at Amazon, Danaher, RELX and Toyota. The ones who impressed them did not simply make every decision. They designed how work gets done and how decisions get made.
A CEO who delegates the design of judgement has delegated the company.
That does not make micromanagement the answer. A founder who approves every press release becomes the bottleneck, and specialists earn their salaries by challenging her assumptions. But challenging a strategy and quietly replacing it are different acts.
Who decides whether a new customer segment strengthens the business or distracts it? Whether a bigger market is worth a weaker position? Whether the investor narrative matches the product customers actually buy?
These are not communications decisions. They decide where the next dollar goes.
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Investors meet the consequences across a table. Sequoia’s pitch guidance opens by asking for the company in one declarative sentence, then moves to the customer’s problem, why now, the competition, the business model. The sentence is the compressed record of choices already made.
A founder who stumbles in the first minute may still have a good company. Brilliant engineers present badly. Smooth talkers build nothing. But when a polished answer collapses at the first question about the customer, a careful investor should wonder who decided what it says.
The temptation is real for Asian start-ups that raise from Singapore, sell to Japanese corporates and recruit distributors in Indonesia within a single quarter. Each audience deserves its own emphasis. None deserves its own company.
The founder’s job is not to write every sentence. It is to make sure each one traces back to a decision she is prepared to defend. Otherwise professionalisation becomes abdication: more people responsible for communicating the strategy, fewer for keeping it intact.
Picture the next fundraising meeting. The marketing deck says the company sells to everyone. The IR deck says the market is enormous. The agency has made both look convincing.
The investor closes the laptop and turns to the founder.
Which one is the company actually building?
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