Of CEOs, Titles, and Other Startup Ailments: A Treatise on the Cult of Empty Authority

Startups are curious beasts. They move fast, break things, raise millions, and yet remain spectacularly unable to define who is actually in charge of scheduling the Zoom calls. Titles abound—Founder, CEO, President, Principal Evangelist of Crypto-Enabled Omnichannel Innovation—and yet actual leadership is often thinner than a Series A cap table diluted by seven accelerators and a dog.

Among all these fantastical titles, one reigns supreme: CEO. Three letters, big energy. But the startup CEO is a strange creature—equal parts product manager, pitch artist, part-time barista, and full-time performance theorist. It’s a job title sought with the fervour of a Silicon Valley pilgrimage, worn with pride, and displayed on LinkedIn with the gravity of a head of state. Never mind that the “organisation” in question consists of three people, a Notion page, and a failed AWS free trial.

When Everyone is CEO, No One Is

There was a time, not so long ago, when one earned the title of CEO through a combination of attrition, political manoeuvring, and the quiet slaying of one’s rivals in the middle management jungle. Today, all it takes is a Canva logo and a Delaware C-Corp.

In the modern startup, the title of CEO is granted not because someone has managed a company but because they’ve managed to register a domain name and raise $100,000 from someone’s uncle. And thus begins the reign of the PowerPoint Caesar.

In many of these ventures, the CEO is not necessarily the most senior person by age, competence, or moral authority—but simply the person who speaks the loudest in investor meetings and had the foresight to claim the calendar invites. This is not leadership. It is administrative dominance masquerading as vision.

Taleb and the Tyranny of Cookie-Cutter Leadership

Enter Nassim Nicholas Taleb, philosopher-statistician-curmudgeon-in-residence, who has long warned against the perils of sterile, institutional thinking. In his book Antifragile, Taleb observes that true leadership emerges from exposure to volatility, not from crafting spreadsheets in climate-controlled MBA classrooms. He derides the “fragilista”—someone who over-optimizes for appearance and control, unaware that robustness comes not from planning, but from surviving.

In Taleb’s world, the prototypical business-school-trained CEO is a hollow man: all signalling, no skin in the game. He wears the title like a uniform—tailored, immaculate, and entirely unsuited to battle.

“The three most harmful addictions,” writes Taleb, “are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”

But let us add a fourth: title inflation.

Especially when it comes with a nameplate, a lanyard, and a Harvard case study about how you once outsourced product development to a freelance team in Moldova.

The MBA-Industrial Complex

The rise of startup titles coincides perfectly with the commoditisation of business education. Once rare, MBAs now emerge fully formed from every corner of the globe, each equipped with frameworks, jargon, and the unshakeable belief that they were born to lead. And what do you do when you are 28, flush with McKinsey confidence, and no one will hire you to run their company?

Easy. You start your own. Call yourself CEO. Raise a pre-seed round from your roommate’s crypto fund. Speak at panels about "scaling culture." Then flame out six months later when you realise that “vision” doesn’t cover server costs.

The MBA-trained startup CEO is often confused by ambiguity. They look for playbooks where there are none, KPIs where there is only chaos, and org charts where there are just three exhausted co-founders trying to remember the AWS root password. Their sin is not malice—it is misplaced confidence, the illusion that startups are just mini-corporations waiting to grow up.

Titles Are Cheap. Skin in the Game Is Not.

Startups, at their best, are exercises in doing without the trappings. You do without resources, without structure, without certainty. You earn trust by showing up, not by assigning yourself “Head of Culture.” The best startup founders are not title-hungry—they are problem-hungry. They are janitors one day, lead engineers the next, and amateur accountants by the end of the week.

The real CEO doesn’t need the label. She is already doing the job—guiding decisions, absorbing stress, and staying up at night not to polish pitch decks, but because a customer complained and she's replaying the call on loop. She is not on Twitter posting “thought leadership.” She is in the trenches, wondering if this week's payroll will clear.

Titles should follow from function, not precede it. And yet in the strange theatre of the startup world, the title often arrives first. It’s like giving a toddler a badge that says “Fire Chief” and being surprised when they set the house on fire.

Closing Recommendation

If you must use a title, choose wisely. The more performative it sounds—"Chief Visionary Officer," "Digital Prophet," "Innovation Sherpa"—the less likely it is that you’re actually building something.

And if you find yourself gravitating toward the title of CEO because it sounds good, ask yourself this: Would you still want the job if no one knew? If the press release were scrapped, the LinkedIn headline redacted, the speaking invites rescinded—would you still be doing what you're doing?

Because in the end, startups don’t run on titles. They run on grit, madness, and coffee. Mostly coffee.

As Taleb might put it, if your title gives you power, but not exposure to downside, then it’s not leadership. It’s theatre.

So stop worrying about who gets to be CEO of the group chat. Go build something that doesn’t need a nameplate.