Need advice on org structuring

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Hi,
We’re a self-funded business in our second year of operations.
Our current team strength is 8. (3 co-founders + 4 ops members + 1 accountant)

We will need to have a team in place and do some hiring. I need advice on this, so that we can create a structure and hire accordingly.

  1. What kind of org structure do you follow in Zerodha?
  2. How do you structure your business?
  3. How did you convince people to join you in your company’s early days?

Some of our fundamental org design principles - FYI

  • We need less managers and more doers (leaders should emerge from within, organically)
  • The org should be designed for innovation and should support ideas
  • People should have clear cut responsibilities.
  • We want to only hire when it is desperately needed and keep the team size as small as possible.

And in fact, out of the three co-founders, we haven’t given ourselves titles such as CEO, COO, etc. Is that normal? Or should we define this now?

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Congrats, @dipenderb, for getting here without raising outside capital. :slight_smile:

As a disclaimer, I don’t think we thought about this too much when we started. :slight_smile: I think we ended up building what felt right for us, given the limitation of not having external capital. And once that culture got built, it continued even when the business started generating cash. Of course, we have made many mistakes and have tried to correct them quickly whenever we have realised that maybe this isn’t the right way to do it.

The way you are thinking in terms of Org design principles is almost exactly how we have built Zerodha. While people need to have clear-cut responsibilities, I think it is essential to involve people in different aspects of the business to better understand the overall context. Maybe not everyone on the team, but more than the co-founders. I think this also helps build a culture of transparency which can have large payoffs in the long run.

I have shared quite a bit about this in my interviews. You will probably have to dig through here.

Make sure to check out what K (Kailash) has shared here

As a startup, I think the idea is to find ways to be as agile as possible. While it is important to take feedback from everyone, it becomes hard to be agile if you have to build consensus on everything you do as a business. K and I keep talking about this; while it is a democracy, we, in a way, run it like a benevolent dictatorship. The way I run the business, the way K manages tech, the way Nik manages the investment portfolio, @venumadhav.ks is running the ops, or @karthikrangappa running all our education bits.

So yeah, necessary not only to give yourself those designations but also to give power to those designations to take decisions quickly.

Hopefully, this was useful.

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Surely this is helpful.
Although I had gone through your blogs earlier, I will again go through it with this perspective.
And yes, I also follow Kailash very closely and his open source initiatives.

Once I go through everything, I may come back with some more questions. Actually, there is no person that I know (or authentic material) who has created large company without external funds, and so no reference point for me. And to know how it has been done by someone successful. And that is why there is a need to ask this. Thanks a lot once again for your time & guidance.

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