Why we started The Org
My name is Christian and I’m the CEO & co-Founder of The Org. The Org is a professional community where you can explore any company’s organizational chart. Today, we have more than 15,000 org charts and thousands of visitors every day. This is the story of why two guys from Denmark decided to build the world’s biggest platform for teams.
In the summer of 2017, I read an article in The Information called “The People Who Matter at Airbnb” which was a piece about the top 70 people at Airbnb. The infographic was an org chart where you could see Airbnb’s CEO, Brian Chesky, at the top and his direct reports below him. You could then expand the org chart by clicking on a person to see who reported to them.
The article was going viral both inside and outside Airbnb — but why?
It seemed obvious to me why somebody outside of Airbnb would be interested in this information. Org charts provides insight into a company’s decision-making hierarchy and makes it easier to find the most relevant person to contact. Not only can you see everyone who works at the company, but you get a better understanding of their responsibilities and their decision-making abilities.
What really interested me was why this article was going viral inside of Airbnb. According to company insiders, the article was a hot discussion topic among employees and was even discussed at board level. Org charts has historically been an internal tool that nobody cared about but making it public completely changed the dynamics. Employees were frustrated about being omitted and other mistakes in the org chart.
What if it was possible to correct these mistakes?
I knew exactly who I needed to call to discuss this idea. Andreas and I had previously started a company together called Fitbay, which tried to solve the problem of buying clothes in the right size online. We raised some VC funding but never really found product market fit with our solution. We shut down the company in 2015 but had been hacking on some other ideas for fun next to our day jobs.
Here was my pitch to Andreas: “We’re going to build every org chart in the world, let people edit the org charts, and that’s how we’re going to build the world’s biggest platform for teams.” He was on board and within a few weeks we had a prototype.
It might seem counterintuitive why companies would want to share their own org chart but in the age of transparency it actually makes a lot of sense. There is a lot of wrong team information out there (LinkedIn, Crunchbase, etc.) and The Org provides a more controlled way for companies to show off their team to the world. You can check out our team here!
We’re on mission is to make organizations more transparent and we hope you want to join us. Create a free account here and join your company to show off your team to the world.
Thanks for your support 💪
