Blitzscaling Quotes

“My friend Peter Thiel has written eloquently about the power of being a contrarian in his book Zero to One. Whenever I interview someone for a job, I like to ask this question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to answer. It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon. And it’s psychologically difficult because anyone trying to answer must say something she knows to be unpopular. Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“There’s a common misconception that Silicon Valley is the accelerator of the world. The real story is that the world keeps getting faster—Silicon Valley is just the first place to figure out how to keep pace. While Silicon Valley certainly has many key networks and resources that make it easier to apply the techniques we’re going to lay out for you, blitzscaling is made up of basic principles that do not depend on geography. We’re going to show you examples from overlooked parts of the United States, such as Detroit (Rocket Mortgage) and Connecticut (Priceline), as well as from international companies, such as WeChat and Spotify. In the process you’ll see how the lessons of blitzscaling can be adapted to help build great companies in nearly any ecosystem, albeit with differing degrees of difficulty. That’s the mission of this book. We want to share the secret weapon that has allowed Silicon Valley to punch so much (more than a hundred times) above its population index so that those lessons can be applied far beyond the sixty-mile stretch between the Golden Gate Bridge and San Jose. It is sorely needed.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Even if you can’t meet the best, you can read about the best.” Brian”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“To achieve massive success, you need to have a big new opportunity—one where the market size and gross margins intersect to create enormous potential value, and there isn’t a dominant market leader or oligopoly. A big new opportunity often arises because a technological innovation creates a new market or scrambles an existing one.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Blitzscaling is a strategy and set of techniques for driving and managing extremely rapid growth that prioritize speed over efficiency in an environment of uncertainty. Put another way, it’s an accelerant that allows your company to grow at a furious pace that knocks the competition out of the water.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“We tried a number of single-threaded efforts to meet the challenge. We rolled out features one after another, such as a recommendation engine for people that our users should meet and a professional Q&A service. None of them worked well enough to solve the problem. We concluded that the problem might require a Swiss Army knife approach with multiple use cases for multiple groups of users. After all, some people might want a news feed, some might want to track their career progress, and some might be keen on continuing education. Fortunately, LinkedIn had grown to the point where the organization could support multiple threads. We reorganized the product team so that each director of product could focus on a different approach to address engagement. Even though none of those efforts alone proved a silver bullet, the overall combination of them significantly improved user engagement.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Brian Chesky of Airbnb defines culture in a simple and concise way: “a shared way of doing things.” Clearly defining the way an organization does things matters, because blitzscaling requires aggressive, focused action, and unclear, hazy cultures get in the way of actually implementing strategy. Netflix cofounder and CEO Reed Hastings told me, “Weak cultures are diffuse; people act differently, and don’t understand each other, and it becomes political.” Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg have done many wonderful things at Facebook, and one of them is building a unified culture that is devoted to aggressive experimentation and data-driven decision making, as summarized by Mark’s original motto “Move fast and break things.” Facebook’s culture helps employees understand that they shouldn’t be afraid to try things that might fail. This allows Facebook to move faster, and to move on from failed experiments quickly. Imagine if someone asked a random employee from your start-up the following questions: What is your organization trying to do? How are you trying to achieve those goals? What acceptable risks are you incurring to achieve those goals more quickly? When you have to trade off certain values, which ones take priority? What kind of behavior do you hire, promote, or fire for?”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“The best entrepreneurs don’t just follow Moore’s Law; they anticipate it. Consider Reed Hastings, the cofounder and CEO of Netflix. When he started Netflix, his long-term vision was to provide television on demand, delivered via the Internet. But back in 1997, the technology simply wasn’t ready for his vision—remember, this was during the era of dial-up Internet access. One hour of high-definition video requires transmitting 40 GB of compressed data (over 400 GB without compression). A standard 28.8K modem from that era would have taken over four months to transmit a single episode of Stranger Things. However, there was a technological innovation that would allow Netflix to get partway to Hastings’s ultimate vision—the DVD. Hastings realized that movie DVDs, then selling for around $ 20, were both compact and durable. This made them perfect for running a movie-rental-by-mail business. Hastings has said that he got the idea from a computer science class in which one of the assignments was to calculate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes driving across the country! This was truly a case of technological innovation enabling business model innovation. Blockbuster Video had built a successful business around buying VHS tapes for around $ 100 and renting them out from physical stores, but the bulky, expensive, fragile tapes would never have supported a rental-by-mail business.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“The concept of product/ market fit originates in Marc Andreessen’s seminal blog post “The Only Thing That Matters.” In his essay, Andreessen argues that the most important factor in successful start-ups is the combination of market and product. His definition couldn’t be simpler: “Product/ market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.” Without product/ market fit, it’s impossible to grow a start-up into a successful business. As Andreessen notes, You see a surprising number of really well-run start-ups that have all aspects of operations completely buttoned down, HR policies in place, great sales model, thoroughly thought-through marketing plan, great interview processes, outstanding catered food, 30" monitors for all the programmers, top tier VCs on the board—heading straight off a cliff due to not ever finding product/ market fit. Unfortunately, it’s far easier to define product/ market fit than it is to establish it! When you start a new company, the key product/ market fit question you need to answer is whether you have discovered a nonobvious market opportunity where you have a unique advantage or approach, and one that competing players won’t see until you’ve had a chance to build a healthy lead. It’s usually difficult to find such an opportunity in a “hot” space; if an opportunity is obvious to everyone, the chance that you’ll be the one who succeeds is exceedingly low. Most nonobvious opportunities arise from a change in the market that the incumbents aren’t willing or able to adapt to.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“blitzscaling is prioritizing speed over efficiency in the face of uncertainty.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“In fact, the same basic ingredients can easily be found in numerous start-up clusters in the United States and around the world: Austin, Boston, New York, Seattle, Shanghai, Bangalore, Istanbul, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, and Dubai. To discover the secret to Silicon Valley’s success, you need to look beyond the standard origin story. When people think of Silicon Valley, the first things that spring to mind—after the HBO television show, of course—are the names of famous start-ups and their equally glamorized founders: Apple, Google, Facebook; Jobs/ Wozniak, Page/ Brin, Zuckerberg. The success narrative of these hallowed names has become so universally familiar that people from countries around the world can tell it just as well as Sand Hill Road venture capitalists. It goes something like this: A brilliant entrepreneur discovers an incredible opportunity. After dropping out of college, he or she gathers a small team who are happy to work for equity, sets up shop in a humble garage, plays foosball, raises money from sage venture capitalists, and proceeds to change the world—after which, of course, the founders and early employees live happily ever after, using the wealth they’ve amassed to fund both a new generation of entrepreneurs and a set of eponymous buildings for Stanford University’s Computer Science Department. It’s an exciting and inspiring story. We get the appeal. There’s only one problem. It’s incomplete and deceptive in several important ways. First, while “Silicon Valley” and “start-ups” are used almost synonymously these days, only a tiny fraction of the world’s start-ups actually originate in Silicon Valley, and this fraction has been getting smaller as start-up knowledge spreads around the globe. Thanks to the Internet, entrepreneurs everywhere have access to the same information. Moreover, as other markets have matured, smart founders from around the globe are electing to build companies in start-up hubs in their home countries rather than immigrating to Silicon Valley.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“The rope-a-dope calls for allowing an opponent to punch himself out; when that opponent is exhausted, you can beat him with a counterattack.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“The employee or executive who proposes a risky blitzscaling initiative is the one who stands to gain the most (promotions, bonuses, clout, etc.) from its success. In contrast, other employees gain little from that success, and might even end up losing if that success allows its champion to jump over them for promotions or bonuses. And if the initiative is unsuccessful and costs the company a large sum of money, its employees all bear the cost of failure as well. Is it any wonder that so many bold initiatives are killed in committee?”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“(market size, distribution, gross margins, and network effects) and overcome the growth limiters (lack of product/market fit and operational scalability).”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“as Reed argues, culture is actually a substitute for bureaucracy and rules. The stronger you make your culture, the less you’ll have to bind people’s behavior with rigid directives.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Culture is critical because it influences how people act in the absence of specific directives and rules, or when those rules reach their breaking point.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“What is your organization trying to do? How are you trying to achieve those goals? What acceptable risks are you incurring to achieve those goals more quickly? When you have to trade off certain values, which ones take priority? What kind of behavior do you hire, promote, or fire for? Would she be able to answer those questions? If you asked another employee, would he give the same answers? When organizations have strong cultures, their employees give consistent answers and act accordingly.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Only spend money to fix things that are on the critical path to reach the next phase of scale; everything else can wait.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“investors always prefer to give their money to someone who doesn’t need it.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“We’re not the first to observe that investors always prefer to give their money to someone who doesn’t need it. Few things trigger a more positive Pavlovian response from a venture capitalist than the words “We don’t need to raise any money.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“The planning fallacy is that you make a plan, which is usually a best-case scenario. Then you assume that the outcome will follow your plan, even when you should know better.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“planning fallacy”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“The fundamental rule of customer service has long been “The customer is always right.” But for many blitzscaling companies, the key rule is “Provide whatever customer service you can as long as it doesn’t slow you down…and that may mean no service!”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“To prioritize speed, you might invest less in security, write code that isn’t scalable, and wait for things to start breaking before you build QA tools and processes. It’s true that all of these decisions will lead to problems later on, but you might not have a later on if you take too long to build the product. A hack that takes a tenth of the time may be more useful than an elegantly engineered solution, even if it has to be thrown away later.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Engineers hate doing throwaway work. Not only is it wasteful, it offends their sense of efficiency. They are firm believers in the conventional wisdom that says it’s better to build your product right the first time, so you only have to build it once. But when you’re blitzscaling, inefficiency is the rule, not the exception.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Plus, if your people can’t let fires burn, they’ll spend all of their time fighting them, which won’t leave any time for coming up with breakthrough opportunities to advance the business.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“The ideal is a tight OODA loop—observe, orient, decide, act—over and over again.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“LAUNCH A PRODUCT THAT EMBARRASSES YOU It’s not that you should strive to produce a bad product. Rather, if you need to choose between getting to market quickly with an imperfect product or getting to market slowly with a “perfect” product, choose the imperfect product nearly every time.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“When blitzscaling, speed is more important than having a “well-run” organization. Under normal circumstances, you should strive for organizational coherence and stability. Chaotic, unstable organizations make employees nervous and hurt morale. But when you’re scaling up at lightning speed, you may need to reorganize the company three times in a single year, or repeatedly churn through members of your management team. 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. There’s always a lot of change, and much of it isn’t voluntary. You’re building teams and the company simultaneously. In the interests of speed, you might even surprise or blindside your people to cut down the time required to make and implement important decisions.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies