Is Your C-suite “Way Too Crowded”?

Note: This article was originally published October 15, 2024. It has been updated to include current benchmarks as of June 2025.

In his 2018 Fast Company piece, Russell Fleischer, GP at Battery Ventures and three-time tech CEO, warned that “the modern alphabet soup of C-level titles threatens to slow down innovation.”

So, just how many C-level executives are expected at your company according to market benchmarks?

The Problem with Too Many C-level employees

“If everyone’s a chief, no one is.”

Not to mention the downstream cultural implications where “more people come to the CEO with their hands out looking for their own shiny titles”.

This said, it’s a balancing act. A large public tech company with no CFO, for instance, is likely to be painfully chaotic in a different way.

C-Suite Benchmarks

So, how many C-Level executives is too many?

Here are the benchmarks from an analysis of 8,158 Pave customers on the median C-suite size by company stage. For this analysis, C-suite is defined as an executive who has a "President" or "Chief" title, including "Chief Legal Officer" (but excluding Chief of Staff and General Counsel). Note that founders actively employed by their companies are included in these benchmarks.

Companies and startups with 1-100 employees typically have a median of 1-3 C-level executives. At the next phase of growth from 101-1000 employees, the median is 3-5 C-level executives. And at larger, enterprise-stage companies with 1001-3000+ employees, the median grows to 6-8 executives in the C-suite.

How does your company compare to the benchmarks?

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I will conclude with some final parting words of wisdom from Russell Fleischer:

“I’m not saying that org charts and job titles should never change. Far from it. But my general advice is to tread carefully if you’re considering creating a new C-level title in your company. Doing so might give you a whopper of an organizational headache–one that will take more than a couple of aspirin to cure.”