On the Risk of a Vision Never Made Explicit
Everyone's Working Hard, So Why Are They Facing Different Directions?
The first post in a series that reads Machiavelli's The Prince as a guide to startups. We look at how a vision that exists but is never made explicit quietly scatters an organization in different directions.
In The Prince, Machiavelli laid out how a ruler gains and holds power. The princes he observed acquired their territories through war, through marriage, sometimes through sheer luck. Yet few of them held onto those territories for long. Acquiring power and keeping it turned out to be two entirely different problems.
Startups are no different. Starting a company on the strength of a single idea, or a single well-timed moment, is relatively easy. What’s hard is growing that into an organization that lasts. This series, The Startup Prince, is about the many ways a venture falls apart in that gap — things that look like growth but rest on unstable foundations, misunderstandings in how a leader leads, and the moments when a founder fails to protect what needed protecting. We’ll work through them one by one, borrowing the frame of The Prince.
The first risk we’ll cover is the most common one, and the one that surfaces the latest. It isn’t the absence of a vision. It’s a vision that exists but was never made explicit.
Everyone’s Working Hard, So Why Are They Facing Different Directions?
From the outside, nothing looks wrong with this organization. The engineering team is shipping features late into the night. Sales is booking new meetings every day. Marketing runs a new campaign every week. No one is being lazy. If anything, everyone is working too hard.
The problem is the direction of all that effort. Engineering is optimizing for shipping as many features as possible before the next quarter. Sales is optimizing for the number of contracts signed. Marketing is optimizing for traffic and sign-ups. Each team, from its own vantage point, believes it is doing its best for the company. But six months later, you find yourself with more features than before, and the core problem your key users actually cared about is still unsolved; more contracts than before, and churn rising right alongside them; more sign-ups than before, with active usage flat.
No one did anything wrong. Each team faithfully pursued the goal it was given. The problem is that those goals never pointed in the same direction to begin with.
When the Prince’s Aims Are Unclear, Vassals Each Interpret Them Their Own Way
One thing Machiavelli returns to again and again in The Prince is that a ruler’s intentions must be made unmistakably clear to those who serve under him. If it isn’t clear whether the prince wants territorial expansion, stable rule, or the goodwill of his people, his vassals begin filling that vacuum with their own judgment. One raises taxes aggressively to fund conquest; another delays necessary reforms in the name of stability. The prince believes he is governing one country. In practice, several different countries are quietly being run under his name.
A startup founder stands in exactly the same position. There is a clear picture in the founder’s head. It simply hasn’t been written down, spoken consistently, or repeated often enough to take root across the organization. The founder believes the vision has already been communicated — and it may well have been, more than once. But whether that vision actually functions as a concrete standard in each team’s daily decisions is an entirely different question.
A Vision Is Not a Manifesto — It’s a Decision-Making Standard
A common misunderstanding shows up here. If you distill the vision into one polished sentence and put it on the wall, or on the first page of the pitch deck, it’s easy to assume the job of “communicating the vision” is done. Lines like “making the world more convenient” or “finance for everyone” sound good and read smoothly in front of investors. But sentences like these don’t answer any concrete question that comes up on the ground.
A real vision is tested by questions like these. This quarter, should we put more resources into new features or into stabilizing what already exists? Revenue is growing, but it’s coming from a customer segment outside the core users we defined — do we keep chasing it, or let it go? If a moment comes where protecting the team’s culture means slowing growth, which do we choose? If people across the organization arrive at similar answers to these questions, the vision is actually getting through. If different departments give completely different answers to the same question, then no matter how polished the sentence on the wall is, the vision isn’t yet alive inside the organization.
The Illusion of Implicit Agreement
A trap that shows up especially often in early-stage startups is believing that because everyone agreed on “fast growth,” the vision has already been shared. But “fast growth” specifies nothing on its own. Whether it means growth in revenue, growth in users, or growth in brand awareness determines a completely different metric for each team to optimize.
In the early days, when the team is small, this ambiguity rarely surfaces. The founder is involved in nearly every decision directly, so any drift in direction gets corrected immediately, by the founder alone. The problem starts the moment the organization grows large enough that each team begins making decisions independently. From that point on, it’s no longer the picture in the founder’s head but what each team actually understands the goal to be that determines the organization’s direction. And if the vision still hasn’t been put into words by then, teams start chasing different metrics, and the organization quietly scatters in several directions at once.
This scattering is hard to see. Each team’s individual performance report still looks positive on its own. The problem only becomes unmistakable much later — the moment you add up all those individually good numbers and realize the company hasn’t actually moved any closer to where it originally set out to go.
What It Means to Put a Vision Into Writing
Making a vision explicit isn’t the work of crafting a catchy slogan. It’s the work of setting concrete priorities and standards that will sit in front of every decision the organization makes, and repeatedly checking that they hold up. What’s the priority this quarter? Given that priority, which of the choices in front of us right now should we make? And are the choices different teams have each made on their own actually pointing in the same direction? A founder has to keep asking these questions.
This isn’t something you finish with a single announcement. It’s work that has to repeat for as long as the organization keeps growing. When a prince fails to make his aims clear to his vassals, they each do their best to build a different country. When a founder fails to keep re-inscribing the vision concretely into the organization, every team does its best to build a different company.
The next post takes up a risk that pairs with this one: the difficulties a business runs into when a misunderstanding of vision leads it to make money the goal.