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

by Reid Hoffman

When you blitzscale, you deliberately make decisions and commit to them even though your confidence level is substantially lower than 100 percent.

blitzscaling is prioritizing speed over efficiency in the face of uncertainty.

Definition

Just when you’ve finished blitzscaling one business line, you need to blitzscale the next to maintain your company’s upward trajectory. And as blitzscaling continues to spread, established companies with mature business lines should consider turning to intrapreneurs to blitzscale new business units.

Blitzscaling companies use automation.

It’s important not to confuse critical mass with first-mover advantage. Being first to launch in a market might earn you congratulations on being a product visionary, but if you aren’t also the first to scale, you’ll end up as a footnote in a Wikipedia article about your competitor who did.

Stage 3 (Village): The Founder Designs an Organization That Pulls the Levers

Most people have skills and experiences that optimize them for a particular stage, and not every person can effectively grow in lockstep with the company.

In many cases, you should work to retain your generalists, both for their cultural and institutional knowledge, and for their ability to tackle new problems. But if you are unable to do so, and early generalists decide to leave the organization, you should try to maintain a positive relationship with them as members of your corporate alumni network.

This is why it’s generally better to have your ten best people working on a single important project rather than splitting them to attack two different opportunities. For example, AdWords is such an enormous revenue driver for Google that even tiny percentage increases make a huge difference to the bottom line.