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

by Reid Hoffman

Build a “Ship of Theseus” The other main lever for cultural development is the organization’s people management practices. After all, the strongest influences on organizational culture are often who you hire, promote, and fire. When he visited our Blitzscaling class at Stanford, Eric Schmidt shared how Google’s hiring strategy shaped its culture. “The people that you hire make your culture,” Eric said. “We’d hire people who were special in some way. You don’t hire generic people—you hire people who have had stress and achievement.” Culture is a key part of the hiring process at Airbnb too. Each candidate also goes through a values interview, conducted by an Airbnb employee who isn’t that candidate’s hiring manager. This ensures that values are considered independently of how much the organization needs that candidate’s particular job skills. When the business is growing that quickly, it’s usually desperate for bodies, and it can be tempting to simply pay whatever is necessary to get employees through the door. The problem is that you end up hiring mercenaries rather than missionaries. And if you’re tripling the company’s size each year, you can shift your company from a majority-missionary culture to a majority-mercenary culture in a single year.