OnlyFans CEO on How She Hires for Her Tiny, Insanely Worthwhile Crew

The CEO of OnlyFans has a rule on how you can rake in large bucks with a tiny group: do not rent center managers.

Keily Blair, OnlyFans’ chief government, spoke with Jeff Berman, the host of the Masters of Scale podcast, in the course of the November Net Summit expertise convention in Lisbon.

Blair mentioned within the interview that OnlyFans, a subscription-based content material platform based in 2016, has solely 42 full-time workers.

Berman chimed in, saying that it was “very highly effective” that the corporate was making $7 billion in annual income with such a lean group. Blair mentioned she was pleased with her group, which she referred to as a “fairly environment friendly bunch.”

The important thing to this, she mentioned, was to get rid of center administration roles within the firm.

“So we rent extremely senior expertise, after which we rent extremely hungry junior expertise, and we search for perspective and aptitude in hiring somewhat than expertise,” she mentioned.

“And we would not have that type of squidgy layer of center administration within the center, as a result of no one’s ever had a extremely good center supervisor in my expertise,” Blair added.

She mentioned that leaders in large firms are sometimes judged by the variety of individuals reporting to them, an idea she didn’t agree with.

“We have mentioned to our groups, ‘You generally is a group of 1 and ship distinctive outcomes, and that might be so valued,'” she mentioned. She added that there isn’t any “supervisor observe” for her employees’s profession development within the firm, and each OnlyFans worker is a person contributor.

OnlyFans, which initially began as a platform for creators to earn cash from paywalled content material, has develop into synonymous with grownup, NSFW content material. Blair, who turned the corporate’s CEO in 2023 after years of labor as a lawyer, mentioned within the interview that OnlyFans has 400 million customers globally and 4 million content material creators.

OnlyFans’ middle-managerless workforce aligns with the broader development of Huge Tech companies eliminating this layer of employees. Lately, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Intel, and Google have all decreased the pinnacle depend of center managers, choosing a flatter hierarchy within the title of effectivity.