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20 CEOs in one company

softwaremill.com

12 pointsPuchtaOla11 comments

I think you should read the tyranny of F/OSS -- There are some interesting opinions in there -- having no structure does not always work out like you would think, secret social structures still get created.

http://satifice.com/post/the-tyranny-of-open-1

Yeh no managers 20 CEO's but I bet there aren't 20 owners :-)

Even worker coops have a CEO and management its just that all the employes are the share holders which is a bit more manageable at scale.

Yeah I'm kind of worried that in reality, though there isn't a 'structure' it will devolve into something worse than high school girls trying to get dates for prom

And the scale they're doing it on is also alarming, but I'm relatively new to the startup scene, so maybe I'm wrong

ALSO - They should look at the problems that Valve has had in the past with a "flat" structure

There are still 4 owners, just like before the changes. Still all the decisions about the company are made within tho whole team. Shareholders do not have any more decision power than the others.

Thx for the link!

Of course the social structure will evolve, however we're not afraid of 'secret social structures' as the company is fully transparent and we all have similar mindset.

For 3 years we've been all working remotely from our homes - I can imagine, that during this time, any 'secret structures' would have already appeared.

Will this scale past 150 employees? (I know, that's a high class problem, but it will come if they are successful.)

Valve Software has a similar flat organization structure. You can view their employee handbook on their website[0], which outlines it pretty well(from the inside).

From what I've read[1], scaling of the small development/production groups is the pitfall.

[0]http://media.steampowered.com/apps/valve/Valve_Handbook_LowR...

[1]http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-07/09/valve-managem...

Valve is the one I had in mind. I've read of some challenges they've had scaling. 50 and 150 seem to be magic #s in terms of organization size, and adding formality.

Thanks for your comments. So just to make it clear, we've introduced this model, as we want to stay relatively small and to avoid second line of management. Valve's example shows the cons of the model in a really big organization, while we are 20 ppl, friends and family and we know each other really well. Plus being devoted to agile makes us solve problems really efficiently. I'm not trying to say that the model is perfect and we won't make any mistakes, but for sure we will avoid the biggest problems with scaling.

It's great to see more and more people adapting flat structure, financial transparency and so on.

Thanks for your comment. We will keep you posted on how the situation evolves.

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