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

by Reid Hoffman

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. To get them started, founders need to engage in a separate and laborious process that couldn’t possibly work at scale, such as personally recruiting a product’s first users. This essay is a classic, but it may give some readers the mistaken impression that once the “engine” starts, all you need to do is keep doing things that scale. In other words, the conventional (and erroneous) wisdom says: Step 1: Do things that don’t scale. Step 2: Achieve scale. Step 3: Do things that scale. But when you’re blitzscaling, the things you do to help you scale up to the next stage probably won’t allow you to scale up to the stage after that. To build a true scale-up, almost everything you do has to change with each stage. Blitzscaling extends the simple three-step process of “Do Things That Don’t Scale” as follows: Step 1: Do things that don’t scale. Step 2: Reach the next stage of blitzscaling. Step 3: Figure out how to do one set of things that scale, while somehow also finding a way to do a completely different set of things that don’t scale. Step 4: Reach the next stage of blitzscaling. Step 5: Repeat over and over until you reach complete market dominance.