Buffing Up With Extreme Transparency at Buffer
A case study on how a decade-old startup found success in applying radical transparency
It was an unprecedented move when Joel Gascoigne didn’t just release details about his salary, but also all the employees at his startup, Buffer (Gascoigne earns $280,500 today). A former Master’s student at the University of Warwick, Gascoigne co-founded Buffer in 2010 with Leo Wildrich. Three years into the startup, Buffer adopted transparency so radical that caused a ripple of effects across the business world, with magazines and news sites flocking to Gascoigne to understand: why?
For Buffer, transparency was not as superficial as simply allowing employees to know how much their co-workers are paid. Gascoigne took it multiple steps further, releasing salary data online and incorporating transparency into every workflow wherever possible.
Today, Buffer is almost a decade old and boasting more than 75,000 customers from the likes of Business Insider, Fortune and top 10 NFL team Denver Broncos. At a $60M valuation, Buffer is massively profitable—something you can discover from their revenue and growth reports.
You can even find out the progress of their product development on their public Trello board (which is 100% open to public comments too).
