For a company that dominates news trends and moulds entire corners of the internet, a business generating more ostensible profit than many Silicon Valley unicorns, OnlyFans has an astonishingly little team. And that’s not an accident. The company’s chief executive has been unusually blunt about what drives her hiring — and why the key to running a (mostly female) workforce that supports one of the most profitable platforms on earth is keeping headcount low, expectations high and everyone working in “the service of the business.”
The vast majority of tech CEOs are obsessed with headcount, growth, and scaling. OnlyFans takes the opposite approach. The CEO says she hires slowly, almost warily, because she feels doing so adds more harm by bringing on the wrong person than waiting to do it right. To her, small teams create clarity. It forces accountability. It makes people actually do the work rather than hiding behind agglomerations of managers and middle-management fog.
When Kath explains her philosophy on hiring, it feels more akin to selecting founding partners than employees. She wants people who aren’t weirded out by the brand, who get the platform’s actual virtues rather than the stereotype version and who can handle special kind of pressure that arises when you’re running a company in constant view of culture. OnlyFans isn’t a normal workplace. It is a hybrid of finance, tech, publishing, marketplace and lightning rod. And the CEO is looking for people who can handle that without blinking an eye.
She also seeks those who possess an uncommon degree of independence. There are no passengers on a team this small. No one is hired to manage a title — they’re hired to resolve whatever specifically impacts the thousands of creators and millions of subscribers. The C.E.O. says she’s always filtering for people who don’t have to be told what to do, who can move fast, and who can communicate clearly in a company that moves quietly but aggressively when it comes to the back room.
It’s also the subject of another thing she talks about openly: emotional intelligence — actual emotional intelligence, as opposed to that generic, corporate version printed on posters. OnlyFans is a business that deals with creators who work in high-stakes, clickbait-prone worlds. They navigate issues with payment, online harassment, brand alignment, burnout and the instability of being self-employed. He wants employees who can speak to creators like people, not just as “users.” Any disconnect there is potentially a business risk immediately.
What a lot of people are surprised about is how much she depends on gut instinct. Tech C.E.O.s typically hide behind data. She doesn’t. “If there’s something that someone feels wrong for the culture, she’ll walk away from them even if their credentials are perfect. Explicit content is too big for OnlyFans — and barely contained enough to boot. She is known to say she would rather leave a seat empty for six months than fill it with someone who makes the workplace slower, louder or harder to trust.
And that’s likely the real reason the company is so profitable. Less politics with a small team. Fewer meetings. Fewer layers of approval. Fewer distractions. When OnlyFans pivots, it pivots quickly — to the extent that there isn’t an organization-bogged-down decision process here. The CEO has created a culture in which a few high-performers can serve as stand-ins for entire departments at more traditional companies.
The approach works because OnlyFans is a peculiar kind of tech platform — it’s stable in the way others aren’t. It isn’t based on some expensive growth hacking. It doesn’t have to burn money in order to grab users. It doesn’t combat churn the way an ordinary subscription service does. Its primary marketing is its creators. Its growth engine is organic. It leaves the CEO free to steer clear of bloated, inefficient hiring practices that ruin so many startups.
But the higher truth is this: OnlyFans thrives or dies on trust. Trust with creators. Trust with financial partners. Trust with regulators. Trust with the public. And trust inside the company. You can’t subcontract trust to a massive labor force. Building it one person at a time. And the CEO appears to think that the fewer people you hire, the easier it is to uphold that trust.
Her approach isn’t flashy. It’s not the Silicon Valley “hire hundreds and see what sticks” mentality. It’s disciplined. It’s controlled. It’s almost old-school. But it’s also the very reason that OnlyFans is one of the few modern platforms to print money without burning itself out.
OnlyFans is a tech company run by one of the leanest executive teams in any corner of Silicon Valley, and some would argue that its leaps and bounds during the pandemic are firm evidence of how much bloat has been impeding most of tech’s giants.
