Blitzscaling Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“Susan Fowler described in her personal blog as “a game-of-thrones political war” with managers fighting for advancement: The ramifications of these political games were significant: projects were abandoned left and right, OKRs were changed multiple times each quarter, nobody knew what our organizational priorities would be one day to the next, and very little ever got done. We all lived under fear that our teams would be dissolved, there would be another re-org, and we’d have to start on yet another new project with an impossible deadline. It was an organization in complete, unrelenting chaos.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“we suspect that the market for food delivery from existing restaurants—a pure commodity business—is unlikely to offer any lasting competitive advantages that would justify an expensive blitzscaling campaign.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“As we’ve discussed, key growth factors like distribution and network effects tend to provide disproportionate rewards to a company that is the first in its space to achieve critical scale.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“People should be part of building the future rather than feeling like the future is being”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Blitzscaling requires more than just courage and skill on the part of the entrepreneur. It also requires an environment that is willing to finance intelligent risks with both financial capital and human capital, which are the essential ingredients for blitzscaling. Think of them as fuel and oxygen; you need both to propel the rocket skyward. Meanwhile, the infrastructure of your organization is the actual structure of your rocket, which you’re rebuilding on the fly as you rise. Your job as a leader and an entrepreneur is to make sure that you have sufficient fuel to propel your growth while making the necessary mechanical adjustments to the actual rocket ship to keep it from flying apart as it accelerates. Fortunately, this is more possible today than it has ever been in the past.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“PROVEN PATTERN #1: BITS RATHER THAN ATOMS Google and Facebook are largely software businesses that focus on electronic bits rather than material atoms. Bits-based businesses have a much easier time serving a global market, which in turn makes it easier to achieve a large market size. Bits are also far easier to move around than atoms, so bits-based businesses can more easily tap into distribution techniques like virality, and their ability to be highly networked provides more opportunities to leverage network effects. Bits-based businesses tend to be high-gross-margin businesses because they have fewer variable costs. Bits also make it easier to design around growth limiters. You can iterate more quickly on software products (many Internet companies release new software daily) than on physical products, making it faster and cheaper to achieve product/market fit. And”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Remember, starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.”
― 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;”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Distribution Product Revenue model Operations Competition What’s next?”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Years later, Steve Blank and Eric Ries would dub this a “minimum viable product” (MVP). For LinkedIn, the MVP included a user’s professional profile, the ability to connect to other users, a search function to find other users, and a mechanism for sending messages to friends.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“I learned this lesson the hard way when I was running my first start-up, SocialNet. I didn’t want to be embarrassed by our first release, so the approach we took was to complete the entire product before we pulled back the curtain and let people sign up. This approach delayed SocialNet’s launch by a year, and when we finally did launch, we quickly realized that half of the features we’d painstakingly implemented weren’t important, and half of the important things that our service would be useless without were missing because we hadn’t thought of them. While there were other reasons why SocialNet failed, not launching early and iterating based on market feedback was probably the main cause of death.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“When Selina Tobaccowala joined SurveyMonkey in 2009, she had to build up the company’s data infrastructure quickly.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“If you run out of market headroom, all that speed and momentum will come to a crashing halt as you slam into your market’s ceiling.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“No business can grow forever, simply because no market is infinite. You blitzscale when your market is big or growing fast”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“First, the Internet has driven the cost of discovery for products and services lower than ever. Unlike in the past, when companies needed to offer goods in retail stores or broadcast advertising in order to be visible to customers, today buyers can find whatever they’re looking for on Amazon or other online marketplaces like Alibaba, in app stores, or, when all else fails, by Googling. Because products and services that are already popular will almost always come up first in search results, companies with a competitive advantage can quickly grow to the point where the increasing returns of network effects produce a winner-take-most or winner-take-all market.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Most of the orthodoxy in Silicon Valley is about building a good product. I think that’s because most companies in the Valley don’t survive beyond the building-the-product phase. You have to be good at building a product, then you have to be just as good at getting users, then you have to be just as good at building a business model. If you’re missing any of the links in the chain, the whole chain is broken.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Founder Brian Chesky describes this strategy succinctly: “Do everything by hand until it’s too painful, then automate it.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“While the hypergrowth of blitzscaling is often synonymous with scrappy start-ups, blitzscaling can take place within larger, established organizations as well.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Chesapeake moved faster than any other company in its industry, deploying an army of land men to aggressively lease as much land as possible, with instructions to pay whatever was necessary, without knowing whether the gas deposits would justify the price. Hiring an army of land men and paying top dollar for leases sight unseen seemed inefficient…until the wells started producing.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Because traditional drilling techniques didn’t work on shale rock formations, the land above those formations had never been leased, which meant that when fracking made those hydrocarbons accessible for the first time, the market to acquire those mineral rights was completely wide open.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies