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

by Reid Hoffman

Tesla electric car, whose software component allows the company to innovate on software timescales (days or weeks) rather than hardware timescales (years).

Tesla electric car software

If technological innovation alone were enough, federal research labs would produce $100 billion companies on a regular basis. Spoiler alert: they don’t.

“If this is a decision based on opinions, then my opinion wins,” said Jeff. “However, data beats opinion. So bring data.”

Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,”

Steve Jobs quote

Uber’s SVP of Leadership and Strategy, Frances Frei, described the management team’s lack of cohesion as one of the largest problems facing the company. The article reports that “Uber’s senior executives weren’t working as a team and only had one-on-one relationships with Kalanick who oversaw them all.”

There are only three ways to scale yourself: delegation, amplification, and just plain making yourself better.

how do you accelerate your learning curve so that you can learn more faster? The key is to stand, as Isaac Newton wrote, “on the shoulders of giants.”

Plus, when you model the behavior of taking the time to improve yourself, you help encourage the rest of the company to develop a culture of learning.

Entrepreneurs should always have a Plan A, a Plan B, and a Plan Z. Plan A is your best current plan; Plan B is an alternate plan, based on the “adjacent possible” to which you can pivot if Plan A isn’t working or you learn of an even better opportunity; Plan Z is your fallback plan for surviving a worst-case scenario. ABZ planning gives you multiple opportunities to recover from mistakes or setbacks.

ABZ planning

When your organization is growing 300 percent per year, you might have to promote people before they’re ready and then swap them out if they sink rather than swim. You don’t have time to be patient and wait for things to “work out”; you have to act quickly and decisively.

The ideal is a tight OODA loop—observe, orient, decide, act—over and over again. Speed really matters, and launching early lets you climb the learning curve to a great product faster.

I often tell entrepreneurs that starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down. The default outcome for any start-up is death, which means that you have to move quickly and decisively to avoid that default outcome at all costs.

Bezos believes that memos encourage smarter questions and deeper thinking. Plus, because they’re self-contained (rather than requiring a person to present a deck), they are more easily distributed and consumed by a wider population within Amazon.

Importance Of narratives via memos.

Every aspect of Zara’s business is organized around achieving that speed. The results are impressive: Zara takes only two weeks to develop a new product and get it into stores—the industry average is six months—and launches over ten thousand new designs per year, a rate several times that of competitors like H&M and Gap. Zara holds just six days of inventory, while rival H&M holds nearly ten times as much. In the 1970s, Ortega established a rule that Zara had to fulfill apparel orders from its stores in less than forty-eight hours. Today, Zara still follows that rule, even though it has expanded from a local Spanish retailer into a global empire with stores in Africa and Asia.

“What seems great today, in two weeks is the worst idea ever.”