beehiiv Dropped Every Job Title to Chase a $100 Million Run Rate
Tyler Denk says title debates ate hundreds of hours beehiiv needs for a 2027 push toward a $100 million run rate. Foursquare and Amazon dropped titles too and kept pay levels underneath.
TL;DR
- beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk dropped every job title on November 9 and tied the move to ending 2027 near a $100 million revenue run rate.
- Denk paired it with a culture quiz and his own final-round interview for every candidate, the founder-in-every-hire rule ElevenLabs also runs.
- Foursquare and Amazon dropped titles but kept pay levels underneath, and Foursquare says it went from stalled launches to monthly ones.
beehiiv dropped every job title on November 9, CEO Tyler Denk's included. A day later, in his Big Desk Energy newsletter, Denk tied the change to a growth target.
"We're gearing up for an absolutely monster 2027," he wrote. He wants beehiiv to end that year near a $100 million revenue run rate, and he cast titles as overhead that slows a company down on the way.
beehiiv cut titles to win back hours
Denk's case is about time. Managers spent hours defining levels, debating who fits which title, negotiating leveling with candidates and lining up pay with title bands. "None of that time goes to customers," he wrote in the manifesto he shared with staff.
His example was a single hire. A candidate beehiiv wanted refused the job without a Director title, though the company had no Directors. A more experienced colleague with a lesser title messaged Denk within hours of the announcement, and fixing that one title would have rippled across the colleague's team.
Denk put the cost of moves like that at "hundreds of collective hours" in meetings. "When I'm stuck choosing between two imperfect systems, I'll choose the simpler one every time," he wrote.
Everyone at beehiiv is now described by job family, such as Engineering or Growth, plus "Lead" for anyone with direct reports. Lead means the same thing for a manager of two people or twenty. Denk said the idea crystallized after a podcast episode featuring Luca Ferrari, co-founder of Bending Spoons.
The title change came with a tighter hiring process. Every candidate now takes a culture quiz Denk built and sits a mandatory final-round interview with him. "No B players, no more titles, and no company politics," he wrote.
Companies that made it work changed more than the label
ElevenLabs removed titles across the company about a year before CEO Mati Staniszewski described the policy in an interview OfficeChai covered in December 2025. "We removed titles a year ago, and it's going well," he said. The sales side lost its labels too: "in a lot of the go-to-market, you are just go-to-market, not VP of sales or other roles."
ElevenLabs runs teams of five to 10 people, and its two co-founders interview every hire, the same rule Denk just adopted for himself. The company finished 2025 at $350 million in ARR and passed $500 million in the first quarter of 2026, Tech.eu reported. ElevenLabs credits enterprises deploying voice agents for that growth, so the title change rode demand rather than created it.
Foursquare offers the clearest before and after. In January 2025, it removed nearly all engineering manager roles and gave every engineer the same "software engineer" title. "We went from struggling to launch new products for years to monthly or bimonthly launches," Kit Krugman, its senior vice president of people and culture, said in an interview republished by the SF Standard.
Foursquare kept a career matrix under the single title, and "the level determines compensation," Krugman said. Amazon did the same this spring, when it moved product staff at its Ring and Blink units to a single "Builder" title. An Amazon spokesperson told Reuters that "compensation, growth, and promotion paths remain unchanged."
Krugman's warning fits beehiiv's package. "If you only put in one piece," she said, "you're not going to actually build a cohesive system that works."
Where dropping titles has broken down before
Medium ran holacracy from 2012 and dropped it in 2016. "For us, Holacracy was getting in the way of the work," head of operations Andy Doyle wrote, as Fortune reported. Holacracy removed managers, though, and beehiiv keeps its Leads.
Forrester principal analyst Kate Winick, commenting on Denk's LinkedIn post, said a former employer that dropped titles lost hours to gridlock over who could approve what. At Amazon, Ring and Blink staff told Reuters they worried the path to promotions and raises would get harder.
beehiiv left the outside world alone. Denk told staff to "put whatever (reasonable) title you'd like on your LinkedIn and resume," so an Enterprise buyer can still read a seller's profile the way it did before the change.
The bet is now public. Denk has said where he wants beehiiv at the end of 2027, near a $100 million revenue run rate, with nobody inside the company holding a title.
When I'm stuck choosing between two imperfect systems, I'll choose the simpler one every time.
Every beehiiv candidate now takes Denk's culture quiz and a final-round interview with him.
