The CEO of OnlyFans explains how she hires for her tiny, but insanely profitable, team
In a recent interview at the Web Summit technology conference in Lisbon, OnlyFans CEO Keily Blair shared insights into her unconventional management philosophy, emphasizing the absence of middle management within her company. Blair’s approach has contributed to OnlyFans’ impressive financial success, with the subscription-based platform generating approximately $7 billion in annual revenue while operating with a remarkably lean team of just 42 full-time employees. She attributes this efficiency to her hiring strategy, which focuses on recruiting highly skilled senior talent alongside enthusiastic junior staff, prioritizing attitude and aptitude over traditional experience. This innovative model challenges the conventional corporate hierarchy, where the number of direct reports often defines a leader’s success.
Blair’s perspective reflects a broader trend in the tech industry, known as the “great flattening,” where major companies like Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Intel, and Google have been streamlining their organizational structures by reducing middle management roles. By eliminating this “squidgy layer,” as Blair describes it, OnlyFans allows for a more agile and responsive workforce. She believes that exceptional results can be achieved even by individuals working independently, a philosophy that fosters accountability and innovation among employees. With 400 million users and 4 million content creators on the platform, Blair’s leadership style not only supports a dynamic work environment but also positions OnlyFans favorably in a competitive market, showcasing how a lean organizational structure can drive substantial revenue while maintaining a strong focus on talent and results.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auFHTIYm2WA
OnlyFans CEO Keily Blair said she does not hire middle managers in her company.
Sam Barnes/Sportsfile for Web Summit via Getty Images
OnlyFans CEO Keily Blair said the key to a small and efficient team was not hiring middle managers.
She only hires senior and junior talent in the company, which has a lean team of 42 full-time staff.
In recent years, Big Tech has endured the “great flattening,” a rapid culling of middle management roles.
The CEO of OnlyFans has a rule on how to rake in big bucks with a tiny team: don’t hire middle managers.
Keily Blair
, OnlyFans’ chief executive, spoke with Jeff Berman, the host of the Masters of Scale podcast, during the November Web Summit technology conference in Lisbon.
Blair said in the interview that OnlyFans, a
subscription-based content platform
founded in 2016, has only 42 full-time employees.
Berman chimed in, saying that it was “very powerful” that the company was making $7 billion in annual revenue with such a lean team. Blair said she was proud of her team, which she called a “pretty efficient bunch.”
The key to this, she said, was to eliminate middle management roles in the company.
“So we hire incredibly senior talent, and then we hire incredibly hungry junior talent, and we look for attitude and aptitude in hiring rather than experience,” she said.
“And we do not have that sort of squidgy layer of middle management in the middle, because nobody’s ever had a really good middle manager in my experience,” Blair added.
She said that leaders in big companies are often judged by the number of people reporting to them, a concept she did not agree with.
“We’ve said to our teams, ‘You can be a team of one and deliver exceptional results, and that will be so valued,'” she said. She added that there is no “manager track” for her staff’s career progression in the company, and every OnlyFans employee is an individual contributor.
OnlyFans, which initially started as a platform for creators to earn money from paywalled content, has become synonymous with adult, NSFW content. Blair, who became the company’s CEO in 2023 after years of work as a lawyer, said in the interview that OnlyFans has 400 million users globally and 4 million content creators.
OnlyFans’ middle-managerless workforce aligns with the broader trend of
Big Tech firms eliminating
this layer of staff. In recent years, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Intel, and Google have all reduced the head count of middle managers, opting for a flatter hierarchy in the name of efficiency.
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