OnlyFans has 42 full-time employees. The CEO explains the hiring strategy that keeps her team lean

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.

The size of the workforce has surprised many industry observers, especially given the scale of the business. In a tech world often obsessed with growth and head count, OnlyFans stands out as a company that has chosen restraint. Blair made it clear that efficiency, not expansion, has always been the goal. She believes smaller teams move faster, communicate better, and avoid the internal politics that can slow progress.

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."

That efficiency, according to Blair, comes from clarity of responsibility. Each employee knows exactly what they are accountable for. There is no confusion about who owns a decision or who needs to approve work. This structure removes friction and allows the company to respond quickly to creator and user needs in a highly competitive digital market.

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.

By pairing experienced leaders with motivated newcomers, OnlyFans creates a direct flow of knowledge and energy. Senior employees set direction and standards, while junior staff bring fresh ideas and a strong drive to prove themselves. Blair believes this mix leads to better outcomes than adding another layer of oversight that often slows decision making.

"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.

This approach challenges traditional ideas of success in corporate careers. Instead of climbing a ladder by managing more people, employees are rewarded for impact and results. Blair said this creates a culture where people focus on doing great work rather than chasing titles or authority.

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.

Despite the platform’s public image, Blair emphasized that running OnlyFans is still about building trust, safety, and long term sustainability. Managing such a massive global user base with a small internal team requires strong systems, clear rules, and disciplined execution. She credits the company’s structure for helping maintain control at scale.

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.

Blair’s comments suggest that what began as a cost cutting move in Big Tech may become a lasting shift in how companies think about leadership. For OnlyFans, the absence of middle management is not a temporary experiment. It is a core philosophy that has helped turn a small team into one of the most profitable platforms in the world.

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