Welcome to The Memo by Vecto.
Today, we explore one of the hidden (and my favourite) aspects of leadership that become critical to master as your organization scales.
Every founder develops a skills toolkit that sharpens over time. Early on, you’re all about the vision. You create momentum through purpose and agility. As your company grows, however, your leadership style evolves too. You must keep the vision and add layers of gravitas so that your teams can continue to make good decisions independently.
This transition requires mastering two diametrically opposite domains: the poetry and the plumbing.1
If your leadership focuses only on the poetry, your team stays motivated but lacks the practical tools to execute. Your vision becomes a mirage.
On the flip side, if you focus only on the plumbing, you get death by SOP and your best operators lose their drive.
That is why a long-lasting culture requires both. Purpose shapes belief. Systems shape behavior. Evolving as a founder and leader means holding both pieces together.
Let’s dig in.
Walk into any great restaurant before meal service begins.
The head chef and the restaurant manager each hold their team briefings. They gather their team, set the tone for service, share diner notes, and other important information. This moment of shared purpose is necessary; it keeps the magic alive and on track.
Then everyone gets back to work. Everyone knows what they own and works in sync to create a memorable dining experience.
Leadership works the same way.
When you start a company, the air is filled with possibility. You’re imagining a new future, talking to customers, convincing early hires and investors, and painting a picture of what your startup could become.
This is the poetry: it gives people a reason to believe.
As the startup grows, your vision still carries weight, but decisions multiply and coordination becomes harder. Every new customer, employee, and product line introduces new complexity.
This is where the plumbing begins.
When poetry and plumbing work in sync:
Audacious goals 🔄 decision rights.
Campaign launches 🔄 operating rhythms.
Freedom to experiment 🔄 clear ownership.
Sustainable growth depends on the systems that empower yet allow for accountability. There is no need to choose between purpose and process.
You need to strengthen both.
Case Study #1 - DBS Bank
When DBS Bank's CEO Piyush Gupta recognized that customer expectations were being shaped by technology companies rather than traditional banks, his ambition shifted from simply launching better digital products. He wanted DBS to become "digital to the core" and make banking "simple, seamless and invisible." That was the poetry.
DBS leadership then redesigned how work happened in real life. The bank reorganized around customer journeys instead of business functions. It created cross-functional platforms jointly led by business and technology leaders, and invested in the technology architecture that enabled teams to move faster. That was the plumbing
Employees saw the change for themselves through redesigned teams and shared ownership. This alignment of purpose and plumbing generated massive commercial returns. The bank saw its total broad-market revenue grow consistently, and its net profit crossed the landmark 10 billion SGD threshold.2
By operating more like a tech company than a traditional bank, DBS achieved a Return on Equity of around 18 percent.
The core vision to make banking joyful defined the destination, while the updated operating system helped DBS become one of the best in the world.
That is what poetry and plumbing look like together.
Case Study #2 - The Indonesian Warung Episode
A different lesson emerged from Indonesia’s wave of B2B platforms modernizing traditional neighborhood kirana stores, known as warungs. Startups like Ula and BukuKas scaled rapidly by offering small merchants digital tools, inventory, and financing.
Ula successfully raised over $140 million from investors that included Jeff Bezos's Bezos Expeditions, Tencent, and Sequoia. They had a clear and meaningful purpose: to solve the fragmented supply chain for micro-retail. The market pain was real, and warungs eagerly adopted the digital procurement platform.
But the physical operational plumbing turned out to be unforgiving. Wholesale commerce involves razor-thin margins; physical distribution in an archipelago of 17,000+ islands involves immense logistics costs.
When global capital markets tightened, their inventory and warehouse models became unsustainable, and Ula eventually wound down its core B2B commerce business.
In a remarkable feat, the company returned almost 30% of unused capital back to their investors instead of exhausting it.
Similarly, BukuKas raised an $80 million Series C round to replace manual ledger books with a high-utility digital logbook. They saw rapid early adoption and raised an $80 million Series C round from Tiger Global and Sequoia.
However, their internal product plumbing shifted too frequently. Through rapid pivots from basic accounting into a complex SaaS e-commerce platform (LummoShop), the company burned through capital on constant code rebuilds, leading to a permanent closure.
Through both these startup journeys, the leadership challenges were the same: Should you focus on poetry to revolutionize warungs, or on plumbing for business growth and foundational systems?
Building the Bridge
Founders often assume their ‘job’ is to cascade their vision and the rest will take care of itself. After all, hustle is a badge of honor and the team will figure the rest out on the fly.
But true organization design requires the patience to look away from the big picture and ensure the drains work, so your speed can continue without your constant intervention.
It also means you can’t look at the plumbing for too long, else you’ll lose sight of the big picture.
Before I sign off.
When you look at your operations this year, what did you spend more time on: the poetry or the plumbing?
Reply to this email and let me know what patterns you are seeing in your current stage of growth.
Until next time,
Shweta.
1 A Note on Inspiration: The core framing of "poetry and plumbing" in this issue was sparked by an episode of the Hidden Brain podcast titled "Why Following Your Dreams Isn’t Enough." It is a fantastic exploration of how these dual forces shape execution, and I highly recommend a listen.
2 DBS Case Study: (1) DBS Bank's Full-Year 2023 Financial Results Media Release (2) Harvard Business School Case Study: DBS: Digital to the Core and (3) McKinsey & Company’s fantastic Case Study on how DBS scaled its technology infrastructure to operate like a Big Tech platform.