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

by Reid Hoffman

As the business grows into the Village stage and beyond, its organization necessarily includes larger teams, such as departments with tens of employees often dispersed across various offices and places. These larger teams cannot operate spontaneously and informally; an individual employee might only see certain team members a few times a year, if ever. Coordinating the efforts of tens or hundreds of individuals—and ensuring alignment with the goals of the entire organization as a whole—requires planning and formal processes, often to the chagrin of an idealistic founder more interested in long-term vision than the minutiae of day-to-day management. Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, learned this lesson the hard way. In an interview for Reid’s Masters of Scale podcast, she told us, “I started out twenty-eight years ago with a total disdain for organizational matters. I just thought everyone who comes to this should be mission-driven, and we’re not going to have any hierarchy, and we’re going to pay everyone the same thing. About five years into this, I realized if I didn’t become obsessed with the very mundane matter of how to manage effectively, we’d never get there!”