Blitzscaling Quotes

“At that point, even the most inveterate pirates will have to trade in their Jolly Roger for the flag of a legitimate, disciplined navy. If they don’t, their organizations will devolve into chaos.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“During the early stages of blitzscaling—Family and Tribe—it’s easier to take risks because you don’t have much to lose.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“This key transition is the shift from playing offense to playing offense and defense at the same time. More poetically, it’s the shift from being a pirate to being part of the navy. It requires an evolution in strategy as well as an evolution in company culture.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“The shift to multithreading usually occurs during the City stage of blitzscaling. Once the company has more than a thousand employees, the organization is large enough to support the creation of multiple divisions or business units.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“people with the entrepreneurial drive required to make multithreading successful usually want to start their own companies, or apply their skills to the company’s main thread. One thing that can keep these employees motivated is making the various threads discrete projects—the equivalent of “apps” running on the main thread’s “platform.” This makes it easy to answer the question “Why shouldn’t I just start my own company?” by pointing out the benefits of building on the platform.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Assuming that you make the decision to multithread your organization, the optimal management approach is to think of each thread as a different company. For each thread, you’ll need to identify a leadership team (“cofounders”) and create an incentive structure that allows it to operate with a great deal of independence and reap the benefits of success, without making your current managers so envious that it tears the organization apart. This is always challenging!”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Generally, you should start adding threads when it’s strategically necessary, and with a realistic assessment of the negative impact that multithreading will have on organizational focus, resource efficiency, and so on.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Your teams need the ability—and the manpower—to relentlessly pursue a specific objective; asking a team to split its time between two different business lines is likely to result in the failure of both. This is especially true when the main thread is a business line that has matured. In their Harvard Business Review article “The Ambidextrous Organization,” Charles A. O’Reilly III and Michael L. Tushman draw the distinction between “exploiting” and “exploring.” Mature business lines focus on incremental innovations that help them exploit a well-known market, whereas new threads focus on more radical innovations and exploring a new market opportunity. They examined thirty-five attempts to spin up new threads, across nine different industries. What they found was that these efforts were most likely to be successful in “ambidextrous” organizations, where the new threads were organized as structurally independent units but integrated into the existing management structure. In other words, the leaders of the new threads not only have the freedom to innovate but also the ability to coordinate with senior leadership to leverage existing resources and expertise from more mature threads.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Don’t try a second channel until you have your main flywheel working. Most successful companies dominate one channel.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“We don’t know of a single start-up that succeeded without starting out as single-threaded. That focus is the key to beating larger competitors in the early stages of a company’s existence.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“This is why you may need to blend quantitative and qualitative analysis. Our friend John Lilly likes to distinguish between “genius-driven design” (e.g., Apple) and “data-driven design” (e.g., Google). Both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses. Data-driven design is great at optimizing products with incremental changes, but it could steer you to the top of a local hill rather than the highest peak. Genius-driven design may be the only way to build a revolutionary product, but it usually needs to be supplemented with data-driven refinement”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“One of the challenges you face as you build up your data capabilities is that your strategy can disappear behind the numbers. The numbers might not measure the real health of the business or reveal the real major threats you face.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“In contrast, a growth team’s engineers can move far faster because building scalable and extensible testing infrastructure is a core part of their jobs.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“A growth team also helps by making growth a number one priority rather than a second- or third-class citizen”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“In addition to simply supplying data and insights to existing business units, many of the top-performing companies create a dedicated growth team, which combines marketing, product, and engineering to drive and coordinate the response to these insights. Most companies, even in the highly competitive world of the consumer Internet, still think it’s sufficient to conduct a lot of A/B tests and iterate accordingly. This is an effective tactic but poor strategy, since local optimizations do not necessarily lead to a globally optimal result. A dedicated growth team can look at the big picture and see how product and marketing decisions interact to produce (or not produce) the desired results.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Watch out for what Eric Ries dubbed “vanity metrics”—numbers that present a rosy picture of the business but don’t actually reflect its key drivers of growth. Note that one company’s vanity metric might be another’s key driver.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Whatever metric(s) you select, that information must be easy to access and provide clear context.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“I strongly believe that as a whole company, you can’t get behind more than three to five metrics.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Regular e-mails to all employees are a common best practice. Blitzscaling masters Patrick Collison and YouTube’s Shishir Mehrotra also employed this technique to manage their rapidly growing organizations. “I was a big believer in writing a weekly email,” Shishir told our Blitzscaling class at Stanford. “Leaders [who] write things down tend to deal with [fewer] communications issues. You have to clarify your thought processes in a completely different way.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“One interesting approach is to have all employees use a teleconferencing service rather than allow headquarters employees to have a better in-person experience than the rest of the company. For example, at the asset management company BlackRock, certain meetings are held by teleconference, even for the subset of employees who could gather in a single conference room so that all employees are on an equal footing.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“One area that undergoes the most change during blitzscaling is the internal communications process. As the company grows, you have to shift from informal, in-person, individual conversations to formal, electronic, “push” broadcasting and online “pull” resources.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Blitzscaling organizations need organization, not just to coordinate their many resources and activities, but in order to maximize speed. The organization’s collective learning rate—especially within its leadership team—determines its ability to anticipate future trends, while the strength of its internal structure—especially in terms of its frontline teams—determines its ability to act quickly on those key insights and seize the competitive advantage.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Once the executive has earned the team’s trust and credibility, consider promoting him or her.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Bring the new executive in at a lower level initially and let the executive prove himself or herself. John gave himself the title “Director of Business Development and Operations” and only took on bigger titles after he had demonstrated his ability and value to existing teams. He employed the same technique when he hired Schrep, bringing him in as “Director of Engineering”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Given Mozilla’s small initial size, this growth necessitated hiring executives from the outside (“the graft”), which was particularly challenging because of the company’s strong engineering-driven culture (“the host”) that was already skeptical about outsiders. John was able to do this successfully by following the same three-step process that was used to hire him. Hire someone who is already a known quantity to at least one member of the team. John was hired by Mitchell Baker, his predecessor as CEO of Mozilla. The two had gotten to know each other by serving on a board together, and Mitchell’s personal endorsement of John carried weight with the team at Mozilla.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“The ideal, of course, is to hire an executive with past experience at a blitzscaling start-up that has already dealt with the challenges your company currently faces. This is why investors have more confidence in serial entrepreneurs. One of the major advantages that companies in Silicon Valley enjoy is generations of rapidly scaling companies that have produced a rich supply of executives with blitzscaling experience. Yet even if you can’t land an ideal candidate, second best is to hire a manager who has previously worked with successful executives in a very rapidly growing company, or an executive who earned her executive experience at a larger or more traditional business but who also worked at a blitzscaling start-up at another time in her career.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“the “Standard Start-up Leadership Vacuum,” and the result is that inexperienced founders find themselves having to hire and integrate experienced executives from the outside. The situation is made worse when those founders wait until the strain on the organization has become unbearable before making the new hires, meaning that all the leaders are new to the company precisely at the time when tension and uncertainty are running high. The key to navigating this transition is open-mindedness: insiders need to be open to the outside ideas of the new executives, while the outsiders need to be open to learning from what happened before they arrived.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“the role of the executive is to lead managers. For the most part, executives don’t manage individual contributors. Instead, they focus on vision and strategy. Yet they are still connected to the frontline employees because they are also responsible for the “fighting spirit” of their organizations; they need to be role models who help people persist through inevitable adversity.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“One metaphor I use to explain this shift is to take yet another analogy from military history: the marines take the beach, the army takes the country, and the police govern the country. Marines are start-up people who are used to dealing with chaos and improvising solutions on the spot. Army soldiers are scale-up people, who know how to rapidly seize and secure territory once your forces make it off the beach. And police officers are stability people, whose job is to sustain rather than disrupt. The marines and the army can usually work together, and the army and the police can usually work together, but the marines and the police rarely work well together. As you blitzscale, you may need to find new beaches for your marines to take rather than ask them to help patrol the existing ones.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“one of the signature strategies for blitzscaling is rapid, parallel market development. When Airbnb made the decision to blitzscale, its chosen strategy was to rapidly expand from a single office in the United States to a score of offices around the world, especially in Europe. This kind of growth is highly inefficient—think of all the new knowledge and infrastructure and personnel an organization has to acquire to successfully open offices around the world—but it can allow a company to stand out from its competitors. It would have been more efficient for Airbnb to expand one country and one office at a time, refining its approach based on the lessons of each rollout, but that would have allowed its competitor Wimdu to be the faster mover. In other words, when it needed to grow from a forty-person company to a global company in a single year, Airbnb couldn’t afford to be cautious with its capital and focus on efficiency.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies