“Nobody’s ever had a really good middle manager,” says OnlyFans CEO Keily Blair on the structure of her small but mighty tech company.
OnlyFans, the adult-only site, has an impressively small team behind the scenes.
Keily Blair, the CEO of OnlyFans, sat down with Jeff Berman of the Masters of Scale podcast to discuss the company’s success.
One of the things Blair attributes to the company’s success is not having that “squidgy” layer of middle management.
Blair told Berman that it's a structural decision about how OnlyFans runs the business, as the company hires only “incredibly senior talent” and the “incredibly hungry” junior talent.
“We look for attitude and aptitude in hiring rather than experience, and we do not have that sort of squidgy layer of middle management in the middle. Because nobody’s had a really good middle manager in my experience, Blair told Berman.
Instead of following the traditional business model, Blair says that she wanted to keep the company “very lean” and only scale up teams when there are bigger projects.
OnlyFans has only 42 full-time employees, but it often hires contractors for larger projects.
Blair explicitly states to her team that there “is no manager track,” meaning that there’s no progression from senior positions to managerial positions in OnlyFans, as opposed to traditional big tech companies.
The company, which generated over $7 billion in revenue in 2024, has revolutionized the way people consume online content.
The site pays out roughly $25 billion to creators and has some of the world’s best-known creators, like adult entertainment star Camilla Araujo, on its platform.
Blair seems to suggest that OnlyFans' success has come from its deliberate and unique approach to business.
However, many other big tech companies are seemingly following suit, as what has been described by media outlets as “the great flattening” has occurred over recent months.
Microsoft has scrapped 6,000 employees, while many of those were said to be contributors, the company told Business Insider that the cuts were implemented to increase managers’ “span of control.”
Intel also decided to switch up its operations, in which the company highlighted the importance of more time in the office, less focus on administration, and smaller teams.
Other big tech giants like Amazon and Meta have also been scrapping manager roles, according to Business Insider.
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