John Boitnott

Special for USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO -- It's been hundreds of years since most people imagined the world to be flat, but at one of Silicon Valley's hottest startups, flat is the norm.

At the spacious offices of AngelList in downtown San Francisco, teams work on any project that feels necessary at the time. More than 500,000 people use the platform, which helps startups raise money from thousands of accredited investors.

About 25 employees "who could be founders" toil away in "happy anarchy." Their "flat" style of doing business is a far cry from the more conservative corporate world, but it's becoming tremendously popular in startups, and even bigger companies like Google and Facebook.

Just what is a "flat" business? For one, most employees don't have titles of any kind.

"I guess you can say that people who don't work in teams have titles...people on the outside need to communicate with them and a title helps," says AngelList's first employee, Josh Slayton. The organizational structure is known for smaller sales staffs, focus on engineering, looseness of schedules and a less strict definition of "success."

This style of running a startup finds much of its roots from engineers in the valley who came of age in the 1990s and 2000s, when the open source movement began to influence engineers into changing public code to suit their needs. The result is a thriving ecosystem of companies where code is everything. Even with well-known investor Naval Ravikant at the helm, most decisions aren't made in a top-down style.

"There's no management and there's no top-down hierarchy -- it's people coming from the bottom they contribute and sort of earn their way up," Slayton says. "Nearly everything we're doing here is building a product, writing code. There's very little 'business' work that goes. Even the people that are doing business are serving the engineers by helping us find out what we can bring into the product, how we can better self-serve our customers instead of having to hire a sales army to go support them."

Slayton says AngelList's flatness has created a culture unhindered by too much process. Teams make hires -- not managers. Employees say they feel freedom by directing their own work and schedules. It's not uncommon for team members to help each other with work problems in the middle of the night, and common for them to take a day off unannounced. Perhaps the most vital thing for new hires is being a "self-starter" who can latch onto a project that keeps them productive.

The idea is spreading to hundreds of other companies. Jayson DeMers, founder of AudienceBloom, a "flat" business and member of AngelList, agrees. "Our employees need to have the right mindset day in day out. The ability to thrive under autonomous conditions is absolutely essential for our success."

"What I usually tell people is, 'Everybody here has a unique thing that they lose sleep over every night that they think the business is going to go under if they don't worry about that night and day," Slayton says. "If you need to be told what to do…or need to be coddled into feeling included, it's probably not going to work out."

This means high turnover. AngelList lost almost as many people as it hired in the early days. It was tough to find new people who bought into the culture. Things have improved though.

The company has expanded to help companies recruit new hires. "It's starting to gain momentum," Slayton says. "It's gotten very much easier for people to just come in and ramp up very quickly."

John Boitnott is a longtime digital media strategist working and living San Francisco. He's written for NBC, the Village Voice, Venturebeat and FastCompany.