Why we’re a titleless startup (for now)
April 22, 2010 — Over ale at Steelhead Brewery in Burlingame last night, I traded startup war stories and tech anecdotes with Posterous founder Garry Tan. In a similar position with his recent Series A, Tan and I found that there’s an interesting difficulty in a place oft neglected.
Everyone’s familiar with the common challenges of startup life: once you actually do attract investors, you’re constantly concerned with delivering a great product, paying attention to metrics, iteration, cash flow and all of the other parts of running a business that you never have to think about as a big-company employee. Thankfully, most of these are quantitative, and with some common heuristics, good advisors and a heap of luck you can successfully navigate the waters in these areas.
However challenging the above factors can be, there’s much to be said about fostering a good, scalable corporate culture, which I have found myself thinking about a lot with the guys over at isocket, the ad startup I’m currently working on. We’ve had a couple of cultural discussions about what really matters in the “startup lifestyle”: is it long hours? Is it timing? Is it relentless evangelism of the product (and company) to anyone who will listen? Is it a sense of personal responsibility? Is it some other type of qualia related to “work ethic” or a “startup personality”?
The answers to a lot of the qualitative questions are still unclear. We did agree on one thing I proposed about two months ago: we’re completely skipping formal titles.
Of what use is a title anyway?
Historically, corporate titles exist in operations to give hierarchical structure to a large, centrally-governed organisation. Corporate hierarchy is a direct analogue to the social hierarchy of an army, with chains of command, generals and soldiers.
As a startup, though, it’s exceptionally pretentious to think of ourselves as armies; rather, to use another military analogue, we’re squads and fireteams, bands of specialists that ally toward a common goal, each of us participating equally in the dirty work. Of course, we do have separate responsibilities, but it’s hard to really argue that there exists a clear hierarchy in a startup. The only real hierarchical difference in most startups is that there’s a CEO that makes business decisions for the board. That’s it. Before you think of calling the CEO by that C-word in his title, though, think about it: would the CEO really be able to do anything without the rest of the collective? The CEO doesn’t make every vital decision in any company.
At a startup, everyone is C-level at something. I’m our Chief Creative Director, Chief JavaScript Developer, Chief IT Guy and Chief nginx Configurator. Al’s Chief CSS Author and Chief UI Control Designer. Our engineers are Chief Internal Build Tools Operator, Chief Ad Server Engineer, Chief Code Monkey, Chief iptables Guru and Chief Yeller-At-Rackspace-When-Shit-Breaks. Because of the do-everything, Swiss Army knife nature of a startup, titles are meaningless, even when you do end up with minimal hierarchies such as team leads.
Because of this, we’ve silly titles. I’m Mad Hatter. Some of our other titles include “Customer BFF” and “Startup Action Figure”. Internally, nobody even refers to the CEO as CEO. He’s “Chief Awkward Officer” (a title he’s lived up to a couple of times, although I’d probably hand that title to a different co-worker.) The only rule we have in title-making is that you can’t make your title sound important unless you’re a founder. Anything formal, such as “VP of Design”, “Design Director” or “VP of Technology” is strictly verboten. Anything that is silly but may allude to hierarchy is also 86′d, such as “President of Pooping” or “Bullshit Director”.
If anybody talks to press or we’re at social gatherings, I’m just “a designer”. That’s all that really matters.
The effects of a titleless organisation
When I originally proposed that we become a titleless startup, I did it because titles highlight social inequality in a system, something which does not inherently exist in a startup environment. Startups are (reasonably) egalitarian units, something reinforced by our narrow range for monetary compensation (everyone gets paid roughly the same) and the fact that, due to the equity stake given to early employees, we really are banded together by a common goal for the organisation to succeed, not any one individual agent. In a startup, you’re already under tremendous financial and temporal pressure; there is literally zero room for politics and social ladder-climbing. These factors have led to some interesting effects:
We fearlessly challenge one another. We openly critique each other’s work and decisions; there is no political motive. On day two, a new engineer came to me and completely criticised my decision not to use jQuery UI for some components on the site. Ten minutes of discussion later, she was convinced with my long-term plans and reasons why I didn’t use an existing library and instead fabricated my own control for a UI element.
Asymmetric information doesn’t intentionally exist. Because nobody feels threatened by others, things stay in the clear. Everything is shared in the community; there is no incentive for anyone to hold secrets against others because of the blatant reality that we’re all in this together.
Investors like it. Nivi at Venture Hacks has written this better than I can. We took our entire team to our board meeting yesterday. While the investors in the room appeared decidedly uneasy with this unorthodox decision, things came out in the meeting that they wouldn’t have learned otherwise. Instead of the CEO having to relay design concerns, or things about our redesign process, design was on-hand to pipe up and explain it. They get a much greater sense of how we operate as a team, and they were vocally impressed by our team work ethic.
While these are all nice, the best side effect of being a titleless organisation has been in the recruiting process. It’s amazing how much being a titleless organisation has filtered out the type of person you don’t want working at your startup.
For example, we talked to an engineering candidate that had all of her resumé ducks in a row: she wasn’t just good; she was brilliant. She had tons of work experience with our architecture and the industry, and she had the right type of personality fit we felt was necessary. She was willing to accept the equity we were going to give and was okay taking the cash cut in exchange, but she absolutely refused to join the company without a Senior Director or VP Engineering title. When we explained that we don’t have titles, negotiations fell through completely. None of us cared.
This situation has happened with us tens of times when recruiting qualified engineering candidates. If they can’t have some type of pretty formal title, they won’t join the company. It’s exactly the kind of bullshit that not only do we not want, but absolutely cannot tolerate in a 9-person team. I wouldn’t even say it’s tolerable in a 50 or 100 person team.
caveat lector:
I’ve a feeling we’d see less title fuckery if we weren’t effectively a B2B application with a Web-n.0 attitude. Consumer companies often attract more of the right type even with nothing more than a 5-digit seed round (after all, I’ll admit that working on an advertising application isn’t nearly as sexy as working on something that your peers love and use, such as the red-hot Quora or Tan’s own Posterous.)
What about scale?
Of course, at some point more hierarchy is inevitable; I watched as hierarchy at Facebook went from 2-levels-to-top to 5+ over two years as the company’s head count grew from 150 or so to nearly 1,000. However, even as titles sprouted and the platoon became an army, Facebook was largely able to avoid the image of social inequality in its growth: some of the most senior (and now most-well-materially-rewarded) are still individual contributors with titles, some even working on the same projects they did when they first started. As I haven’t worked at Facebook for a year and a half, I can’t give a first-hand account of how much this environment has changed as they have brought in external managers such as VP Engineering Mike Schroepfer, so any input from other large companies is valued in the comments to this post.
If you’re a startup founder or employee yourself, I’d love to know how you’ve handled hierarchy and growth. We’re just one case, and our solution has worked well for us thus far. As for everyone we’ve rejected for wanting formal executive-level titles, I’ve a title that begins with C for you, too. Don’t expect me to write it here.
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