Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

by Reid Hoffman

Dropping below even 40 percent annual growth is a warning sign for investors.

Great companies and great businesses often seem to be bad ideas when they first appear because business model innovations—by their very definition—can’t point to a proven business model to demonstrate why they’ll work.

You have to be good at building a product, then you have to be just as good at getting users, then you have to be just as good at building a business model. If you’re missing any of the links in the chain, the whole chain is broken.

“Investors love companies where, all things being equal, higher revenues create higher profit margins. Selling more copies of the same piece of software (with zero incremental costs) is a business that scales nicely.”

In 2013, Paul Graham, the cofounder of Y Combinator, wrote a famous essay titled “Do Things That Don’t Scale,” in which he argues that start-ups are like old-fashioned cars with engine cranks.

the marines take the beach, the army takes the country, and the police govern the country.

the only thing that’s foreseeable about blitzscaling is that you will at some point encounter the unforeseeable.

The classic rule of thumb in Silicon Valley is to raise enough cash for eighteen to twenty-four months of operations.

Brian Chesky of Airbnb defines culture in a simple and concise way: “a shared way of doing things.”

Speed and uncertainty are the new stability.