Blitzscaling Quotes

“Another example of how blitzscaling applies to a completely different type of business is the rapid rise of the shale oil and natural gas industry in the United States during the 2000s. The energy sector scores well on the growth factors we’ve defined. Oil and gas is an enormous, high-margin industry, with a very efficient distribution system. And while the shale industry doesn’t feature many network effects, it has its own source of powerful long-term competitive advantage. In the energy industry, rather than buy land outright, the usual practice is to lease the drilling rights for ninety-nine years for a combination of guaranteed lease payments and royalties. This means that leasing the right land is tantamount to holding an unbreakable monopoly on the oil and gas underneath that land,”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Despite all the chaos, and the inefficiency of manufacturing and shipping in small batches, Zara’s gross margins continue to exceed those of its competitors H&M (55 percent) and Gap (29 percent). That’s because all that inefficiency incurred in the pursuit of speed allows Zara to avoid one of the biggest drags on gross margin for almost any apparel company—overstock of designs that failed to sell. Ortega devised this model when he was sixteen years old—don’t order inventory and hope it sells; instead, figure out what people want, and then make it.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

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

“New hires are an opportunity to refine your culture and add to its capabilities. They should be compatible with your current culture but also bring elements that help change it for the better. The art is in finding transplants that the organization’s existing “immune system” doesn’t reject.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Successful organizations need a combination of conformity and diversity. The right kind of sameness (e.g., smart, driven, intelligent, hardworking, mission-driven) can give a company an edge, as was certainly the case at PayPal. But too much sameness can result in groupthink, bias, and stagnation.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“In the words of the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, “If we are to preserve culture, we must continue to create it.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“The people, the product, and the offices of a company can, will, and must change as it blitzscales. Culture is one of the few mechanisms that allow the ship to retain its essential identity. Culture is what helps Apple retain its “Apple-ness” with Steve Jobs gone, and Intuit retain its, well, “Intuit(ive)-ness” even as it shifted from selling packaged personal finance software to providing a cloud accounting suite.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

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

“while early employees often fear that deliberate cultural development will bring bureaucracy, 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

“while the personalities of the founding team play a critical role in defining an organization’s culture, it is more accurate to say that an organization’s culture emerges over time based on the actions of many people, not just the founders.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down. If you run out of money for the fuel and parts you need to get airborne, no one will ever get to find out how efficiently you spent it along the way!”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“When you are blitzscaling your start-up, growth is so rapid and your organization is pushing its limits in so many ways that multiple things are always breaking. It’s tempting to fix these things with money, but you have to resist that temptation. Only spend money to fix things that are on the critical path to reach the next phase of scale; everything else can wait. As I described earlier, at PayPal we deliberately avoided spending money on customer service because we knew it wasn’t a critical path. The more you can keep juggling and defer spending, the more likely you’ll be able to raise money without the pressure of a short runway.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Even if the money doesn’t prove to be necessary, a major financing round can also have positive signaling effects—it helps convince the rest of the world that your company is likely to emerge as the market leader, and can discourage investors from backing additional competitors”
― 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. 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

“This story also highlights why you need people on your team who have a tolerance for chaos, risk, and uncertainty. Most of us are willing to fight fires; it’s a smaller subset of people who are capable of noting the presence of a roaring blaze that might soon cut off all escape routes without allowing it to distract them from their laser-focused effort to fight an even more urgent fire.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“If I received a nickel for every time someone asked me, “How is LinkedIn going to make money?” during those days I probably wouldn’t have needed another revenue model! But I knew that we should ignore that fire, because (1) the lack of revenue wasn’t going to be the proximate cause of death unless it prevented us from raising money and (2) the product fire was far more urgent and required our focused attention. If we couldn’t find the distribution to acquire a critical mass of at least a million users, and build a product they found compelling enough to become regular users of the service (or at least respond to LinkedIn requests), the revenue model would be irrelevant.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“I believe that there is a Maslovian hierarchy of fires that applies to most rapidly growing start-ups, where the top of the list is the most important fire to fight first: Distribution Product Revenue model Operations Competition What’s next? What this means is that for most consumer Internet start-ups, the most important fire is distribution; if your distribution goes up in flames, your company is doomed. If you are able to contain that fire, however, it will make fighting the other fires a whole lot easier. Acquiring users gives you feedback on how to improve your product. Acquiring millions of users or thousands of customers makes it a lot easier to generate revenue. Generating revenue makes it easier to pay for the infrastructure and personnel to scale up your operations, either out of cash flow or by raising investment. And if you have a successful and growing business, then it makes sense to worry about the competition.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Getting to market fast allows you to start getting the feedback you need to improve it. Any product that you’ve carefully refined based on your instincts rather than real user reactions and data is likely to miss the mark and will require significant iteration anyway. 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.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“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

“while we knew meetings were important, we didn’t designate a note taker to capture key points and action items, a common and basic practice in Silicon Valley.”
― 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.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“At LinkedIn, one of the key employees who fit the description of Ms. Right Now was Minna King. Minna is an incredibly accomplished professional who has carved out a valuable niche at a very specific stage in the life of a start-up. You see, Minna specializes in taking a successful software product and helping it go global.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“it’s important to leave yourself time and space for reflection and feedback. It’s easy to get caught up in an endless to-do list and to lose sight of what is important. That’s one of the things I learned from Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. Mark and Sheryl meet first thing every Monday and at the end of every Friday—no matter how busy they are or what else has come up. The Friday meeting is especially important because it gives them time to look back over the week and reflect on what they’ve learned.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“In addition to seeking help on an ad hoc basis, I believe it’s a good idea to be systematic about learning from others. I advise entrepreneurs to have a personal board of advisers or “board of directors” who can proffer advice and help you fill the gaps in your knowledge. For example, I have a set of informal advisers who help me learn about the areas that matter to me, including very specific topics like virality or people management. If you’re serious about someday blitzscaling a company, you should think of your mentors as a board of directors. Regularly report to them on your progress, and ask them how you can do better.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“The slide shows he created for my book The Start-up of You have been viewed nearly fifteen million times.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Rather than delegate work you’re doing to others, can you hire people who amplify the work you do? The goal here isn’t to free you up from your work so that you can do other things; it’s to make the things you do much more impactful.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“You’ve got to keep your personal learning curve ahead of the company’s growth curve.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“if you’re building a global business, there are three key elements you need to put in place. A set of managers who are responsible for, and have strong executive control over, their individual markets globally An understanding of how those markets differ, which leads to a variety of plans for how to grow in each of those markets A unified executive team to coordinate global operations, including the activity of the individual managers leading operations in each country The first two elements involve a decentralized command structure that allows the individual “captains” of the ships in the fleet to operate with entrepreneurial vigor. The third involves a centralized staff that can help the “admiral” coordinate the actions of the fleet for maximum impact.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“try to establish a standard. One of the classic Silicon Valley plays is to move from an app to a platform so that you can attract people to build on and to your platform (thereby leveraging the network effect of compatibility). Salesforce.com’s Force.com ecosystem is a great example of this. By offering the ability to build third-party applications on top of the Salesforce platform, Salesforce benefits from a “force multiplier.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“I like to generate fresh, innovative ways to play defense by asking my team, “If we were trying to compete with ourselves, what we would do? What if we were a start-up? Google? Facebook? Microsoft?”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies