How 1Password grew to a $6.8B valuation without VC funding, managers, or titles.

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.

Despite being the world’s leading password manager, 1Password didn’t accept any venture capital funding until 14 years after its inception. 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.

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. There were team leads, but no formal managers. There was no marketing department, no sales department, and no human resources department. The entire org, instead, consisted mostly of developers and customer support reps—about a 50/50 split.

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.

Joining the company in 2012, Shiner has doubled the team at 1Password year-over-year.

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.

Hiring by ‘Doubling’

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.

Shiner’s solution was fairly simple. 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. (To date, Shiner has scaled 1Password’s team from 20 to 570 employees by using this strategy.)

“I always look at doubling,” he told us. “Because [in its most simplistic form] I can look at every single person, at what ‘Chris’ is doing, and say, ‘Wouldn’t it be awesome if we had another Chris?”

“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.”

“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.”

Leveraging Customer Love

Founded in 2005 by Dave Teare, Sara Teare, Roustem Karimov, and Natalia Karimov, 1Password is renowned for being super focused on product iteration and customer satisfaction. For a long time, the entire company spent one day each week answering support tickets to better understand user needs, while developers also reserved a day just for fixing bugs.

The customer love they nurtured helped make them profitable from day 1, but it also gave 1Password the unique opportunity to leverage their customers to scale their team.

“We didn’t have recruiters in-house. But because we were quite a popular brand, we would go into the forums and see which of our customers were just answering other customer’s questions. Then we’d reach out to them and say, ‘Hey, would you like a job in customer support?”