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

by Reid Hoffman

Unless you’re like Microsoft or Google and can finance your growth from an exponentially growing revenue stream, you’ll need to convince investors to give you money, and it’s much harder to raise money from investors for a calculated gamble (blitzscaling) than for a sure thing (fastscaling). To make matters worse, you usually need more money to blitzscale than to fastscale, because you have to keep enough capital in reserve to recover from the many mistakes you’re likely to make along the way. Yet despite all of these potential pitfalls, blitzscaling remains a powerful tool for entrepreneurs and other business leaders. If you’re willing to accept the risks of blitzscaling when others aren’t, you’ll be able to move faster than they will. If the prize to be won is big enough, and the competition to win it is intense enough, blitzscaling becomes a rational, even optimal strategy. Once you convince the market for capital and the market for talent—which include clients and partners, as well as employees—to invest in your scale-up, you have the fuel required to start blitzscaling. At that point, your objective switches from going from zero to one to going from one to one billion in an incredibly compressed time frame.