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Why we’re a titleless startup (for now)
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.
Article Abstract
Posted 22 April 2010. Approx. 1,441 words.
Early in my onboarding process at advertising startup isocket, I recoiled from the thought of having formal titles in our early-stage company. The decision we made to exclude titles from our startup has led to very positive effects, including some we didn’t expect.
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So… then you guys *do* have titles? They’re just not “real” titles. Here’s the thing about titles. They don’t mean anything. Except when they do. And unfortunately, that “when” is often. I completely agree with you on one point – titles are pretty useless in a startup. In the early days of Threadless, it didn’t matter what you did you also shipped packages, cleaned, ran out to buy toilet paper, etc. It was a tee shirt company run by a handful of people wearing many, many hats. Titles didn’t mean anything internally, because we didn’t just *appear* flat – we were (and to their credit, this is as much the case as it can be these days).
But that’s internally. External to the world we were building for ourselves was the world as it exists for everyone else. The world where titles matter as a means of classifying information. Where thousands and thousands and people at SXSW flocked to see the keynote from the *co-founder and ceo* of Twitter get interviewed. How many people would have showed to see a keynote from “a person who works at twitter”. This information helps people make decisions about other people such as “should I spend an hour watching this person get interviewed” or “should I hire this person”.
Titles don’t *have* to mean anything to you, your co-workers, or really any person who’s fortunate enough to work in a company whose culture supports it. Just remember that businesses are built to be awesome, but when that awesomeness brings growth and that growth needs to be supported with internal growth – things can change.
Let’s assume this change leads to a few people leaving who now need to go find new jobs. But they’re not just looking for *any* job… they’re looking for a job that is suited to their skills. What kind of impression would that make on the person who’s interviewing you when your resume says that the last position you held was “Mad Hatter” when you’re trying to get a job as a creative director? (assuming your reputation didn’t precede you)
My point is this: the position of “titles are dumb” is a luxury of startup life. As companies grow, so does the need to keep them organized. It’s not impossible to maintain a flat structure when scaling, but it’s also not *wrong* to embrace an org-chartable title system.
While I’m certainly in favor of a flat-as-can-be internal structure, a company supporting or not supporting titles has absolutely nothing to do with whether It’s great. Even more importantly, simply wanting a “real” title has absolutely nothing to do with someone’s ability to fit in, kick ass, and be an integral part of your company’s greatness.
Jeffrey:
Perhaps I’m just rusty because I haven’t written any type of post for a year or so, but I think I need to clarify some things that you’re missing in this. I largely agree with you.
I didn’t say at some point we may have to change this; it is an experiment. The last section of this article is devoted to explaining that we kept things pretty flat internally at Facebook even as hierarchy (team leads, managers, etc.) grew as we did, and I fully expect some things about this will need to change at some point in the future.
The counterargument we’ve generally had when people say it’s for resumé stacking is that for now, that really doesn’t matter. The types of people that are going to come to us and demand large titles they can stick on their resumé now aren’t primarily concerned with building a company; they’re worried about building themselves. We don’t want that type of person right now. We’re in too early of a stage to have to deal with the bullshit that comes along with people that are that self-interested. So, yes, I guess to your point we do have titles, and we’re not “titleless”. Instead, our titles may be acting as a deterrent for those that are title-centered.
As for my recruiter in the next job I hold, a title at this stage is still pointless: calling myself “Product Designer” doesn’t fit the fact that I’m spending half of my time working on system infrastructure. Any title I could come up with, no matter how impressive, wouldn’t really fit my job description because what I’m doing — and what we will all be doing for tens of people to come — is a lot of things.
I think too many people are taking this to mean that I’m against titles as organisations grow, and that’s not my point. My main point is that titles are detrimental to an early organisation like ours, and we don’t want to foster that type of community right now.
Well said. I would say don’t stop and take that philosophy everywhere in life with you, it will serve you well.
Robin Sharma, a Toronto based author/speaker has a book out on ‘Leader who had no title’ and I highly recommend it to anyone. He basically takes what you say and applies it to life.
I was once CTO at a startup and everyone had these ridiculous titles, yet the business was going nowhere, fast. It was lame, we got business cards printed every 6 months for various ridiculous purposes, with these lame titles….and no product, revenue, or business leads. I vowed to never take these silly titles serious unless the company had some actual serious business in the works. Anyone can file company documents with their state these days and make themselves a C-Level Somebody.
I knew there was a reason we got a long – go and google up “designers as navy seals” and my IxDA talk is the first result, from the night before I accepted the isocket offer. I told you about the real life navy seal that was in the front row, heckling me as I explained how seal team six was created, right?
I disagree with you. Being called Senior Product Designer will help you much more when you leave then something cutesy or funny. Clearly the title doesn’t mean anything in a startup, so why then do you care which titles they have? Give them whatever title they want (its free!) and just let them know that internally it doesn’t mean much. Everyone wears different hats. Everyone is critical to the success of the whole. In my startup titles don’t mean much either: I think of myself as The Product Guy, though in a VC boardroom I am CEO. There is no reason you can’t have both internal and external titles from day one.
Evan:
There are a couple of reasons why that’s wrong.
I’m not a Senior Product Designer. What I do at a startup doesn’t even fit a normal title anyway. I’d carry a bunch of titles right now to fit with the industry-standard perceptions of them. Like I said earlier, everyone’s doing something C-level. We’d all be VPs or something, and we can’t be silly and top-heavy. There’s no point for that appearance of hierarchy.
Internally, we don’t want people with titles. If you want to be VP of Engineering or Senior Director of IT, you’re attempting to assert authority over someone that’s a Junior Engineer. You don’t have that type of authority. You shouldn’t posture and pretend you do. It’s like some guy attempting to act affluent on his $300K of credit card debt. Titles cause all sorts of internal issues.
If it really mattered to someone when they left, we could discuss giving them a closer formal title then. Expecting one in-house is trying to hard to posture in a hierarchy that doesn’t exist. Any recruiter worth their salt is going to ask you what your roles and responsibilities were at an early-stage venture because it is trivial to stack your title to make yourself sound more impressive than you really are. We’ve interviewed plenty of people with impressive titles from big, classic dot-coms that couldn’t pass our interview process as well as a Stanford intern. Titles have never meant much in interviews, either as an interviewer or an interviewee. What I’m capable of has always been what counts.
I do start ups for a living. I guess you could call me a serial entrepreneur. I HATE TITLES, which is how someone happened to share your posting with me. I just written on my white board: “Titles are for outside use, only! Inside the company it is all about responsibilities, communication and managing expectations…leave your ego at the door.” Titles perform a function outside of the company, because they evoke a preconceived respect, that one might need, but not necessarily receive on a first meeting. My business cards usually don’t have titles. Eventually if a project gets legs, I will put ‘founder’ on them, but reluctantly. Most people aren’t stupid…(maybe most is an overstatement), but they can figure out within a few minutes if your know your stuff.
Perhaps business cards should be exchanged at the end of a meeting, instead of the beginning. That would probably shock a few.
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Good read. I love the idea of a titleless organization. It calms the ego and removes a shit load of elitism. Over at the Cube Trance Team we are all known as cubes haha and always refer to our selves as part of the Cube Trance Team when ever we are inquired by external sources.