Leo Widrich

Buffer's radical transparency was a growth shtick founders warned would break at scale

Sam recounts that Buffer's open-salary transparency (copied from income-report bloggers like Pat Flynn's Smart Passive Income) was a growth tactic that worked early on. But Buffer's co-founder Leo and an Apple exec both warned that once a company hits ~75-100 people, public salaries start to hurt.

“Leo said in an interview, someone was like, this whole transparency thing, it's pretty cool. Like you guys got traffic and everything. Do you think that it would work? And I believe I don't want to quote him because I, I saw this a year and a half ago, 2 years ago, but something like, this works now and it's great for us, but I have a feeling when we get to 75, 80, 90, 100 people, it's not going to work anymore and it's actually going to hurt us big time.”