(“Brex”) and the Brex logo are registered trademarks.īrex Inc. “Then the second side of it is, ‘Okay, now what can we accomplish when we're doubled that we can't accomplish now? When we double the size of our customer support team, can we take our response times down significantly? It can work at nearly every growth stage.” “Whether Chris is on customer support and we can support our customers better by having a second Chris, or any role we have, almost without exception, I can look at it and I can say another person's going to be valuable where that person is quite busy.” “Because I can look at every single person, at what ‘Chris’ is doing, and say, ‘Wouldn’t it be awesome if we had another Chris?” (To date, Shiner has scaled 1Password’s team from 20 to 570 employees by using this strategy.) He looked at team members who were particularly busy, and, after taking into account business goals and metrics, hired a duplicate for each of their roles.

In 2012, 1Password had a thriving customer base that was rapidly growing by word of mouth, but it had grown so quickly that it needed more than its then 20-person team to support it. This week, to celebrate Brex’s recent product integration with 1Password, we caught up with Shiner to share the key takeaways of what made 1Password so successful early on. Joining the company in 2012, Shiner has doubled the team at 1Password year-over-year. Though their success was a team effort that revolved around a deeply ingrained culture of customer centricity, a large part of their growth also had to do with CEO Jeff Shiner’s unique approach to hiring and scaling. The entire org, instead, consisted mostly of developers and customer support reps-about a 50/50 split.

There was no marketing department, no sales department, and no human resources department.

There were team leads, but no formal managers. Team members at 1Password also didn’t have formal titles until a few years ago, even though the company had grown to around 150 employees. When they did accept funding, they became Accel’s largest ever single investment in the firm’s 35-year history, raising a $200 million Series A in 2019. When it comes to tech startups, there’s a great deal of unique origin and growth stories out there, but one of the most interesting stories we’ve heard probably belongs to 1Password.ĭespite being the world’s leading password manager, 1Password didn’t accept any venture capital funding until 14 years after its inception.

1password family account