Blitzscaling Quotes

“his personal website, Casnocha.com.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Successful blitzscaling means that you’re maintaining at least some level of control by rapidly fixing the things that will inevitably get broken so that the company can maintain its furious pace without flaming out or collapsing in on itself.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“There is a scientific term for out-of-control growth in the human body: “cancer.” In this context, uncontrolled growth is clearly undesirable. The same is true for a business.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“while geography can present challenges to blitzscaling, they become much more solvable if you’re aware of them.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Blitzscaling requires you to move at a pace that is almost certainly uncomfortable for your team. You will definitely make many mistakes as you navigate an environment full of uncertainty; the art lies in developing the skill to learn quickly from those mistakes and return to a relentlessly rapid advance.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“If you’re willing to accept the risks of blitzscaling when others aren’t, you’ll be able to move faster than they will. If the prize to be won is big enough, and the competition to win it is intense enough, blitzscaling becomes a rational, even optimal strategy.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“you usually need more money to blitzscale than to fastscale, because you have to keep enough capital in reserve to recover from the many mistakes you’re likely to make along the way.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Blitzscaling means that you’re willing to sacrifice efficiency for speed, but without waiting to achieve certainty on whether the sacrifice will pay off. If classic start-up growth is about slowing your rate of descent as you try to assemble your plane, blitzscaling is about assembling that plane faster, then strapping on and igniting a set of jet engines (and possibly their afterburners) while you’re still building the wings.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Fastscaling means that you’re willing to sacrifice efficiency for the sake of increasing your growth rate. However, because fastscaling takes place in an environment of certainty, the costs are well understood and predictable. Fastscaling is a good strategy for gaining market share or trying to achieve revenue milestones.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“What’s especially exciting these days is that software and software-enabled companies are starting to dominate industries outside of traditional high tech. My friend Marc Andreessen has argued that “software is eating the world.” What he means is that even industries that focus on physical products (atoms) are integrating with software (bits). Tesla makes cars (atoms), but a software update (bits) can upgrade the acceleration of those cars and add an autopilot overnight.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“To mitigate the downside of the risks you take, you should try to focus them—line them up with a small number of hypotheses about how your business will develop so that you can more easily understand and monitor what drives your success or failure. You also have to be prepared to execute with more than 100 percent effort to compensate for the bets that don’t go your way.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“When you blitzscale, you deliberately make decisions and commit to them even though your confidence level is substantially lower than 100 percent. You accept the risk of making the wrong decision and willingly pay the cost of significant operating inefficiencies in exchange for the ability to move faster. These risks and costs are acceptable because the risk and cost of being too slow is even greater.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“When a market is up for grabs, the risk isn’t inefficiency—the risk is playing it too safe. If you win, efficiency isn’t that important; if you lose, efficiency is completely irrelevant.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Blitzscaling is just about as counterintuitive as it comes. The classic approach to business strategy involves gathering information and making decisions when you can be reasonably confident of the results. Take risks, conventional wisdom says, but take calculated ones that you can both measure and afford. Implicitly, this technique prioritizes correctness and efficiency over speed. Unfortunately, this cautious and measured approach falls apart when new technologies enable a new market or scramble an existing one.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“technological innovation alone doesn’t make for a thriving company.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Disruption on its own is neither good nor bad, but it always involves change.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Network effects generate a positive feedback loop that can allow the first product or service that taps into those effects to build an unassailable competitive advantage.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“the Internet has made it possible to access global markets and tap into massively scalable distribution channels in a way that wasn’t feasible during earlier eras. But perhaps the most important impact for businesses has been the rising significance and prevalence of so-called network effects that occur when increased usage of a product or service boosts the value of that product or service for other users.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“When a start-up matures to the point where it has a killer product, a clear and sizable market, and a robust distribution channel, it has the opportunity to become a “scale-up,” which is a world-changing company that touches millions or even billions of lives. Often, the fastest and most direct path from start-up to scale-up is the hypergrowth produced by blitzscaling.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“To put WeChat in an American context, it’s as if one single service combined the functions of Facebook, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Venmo, Grubhub, Amazon, Uber, Apple Pay, Gmail, and even Slack into a single megaservice.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Blitzscaling drives “lightning” growth by prioritizing speed over efficiency, even in an environment of uncertainty. It’s a set of specific strategies and tactics that allowed Airbnb to beat the Samwer brothers at their own game.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“blitzscaling. It is an idea that applies to many different industries, as he and Chris explain in the last section of this book. But prioritizing speed over efficiency—even in the face of uncertainty—is especially important when your business model depends on having lots of members and getting feedback from them. If you get in early and start getting that feedback and your competitors don’t, then you’re on the path to success. In any business where scale really matters, getting in early and doing it fast can make the difference. This is especially true for two-sided business models, where you have two user groups that create positive network effects for each other. For example, LinkedIn wants to attract people who are looking for work as well as employers who want to hire them. Airbnb wants guests looking for a place to stay as well as hosts with space to rent. Uber wants to attract drivers as well as riders.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“blitzscaling. It is an idea that applies to many different industries, as he and Chris explain in the last section of this book. But prioritizing speed over efficiency—even in the face of uncertainty—is especially important when your business model depends on having lots of members and getting feedback from them. If you get in early and start getting that feedback and your competitors don’t, then you’re on the path to success. In any business where scale really matters, getting in early and doing it fast can make the difference.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Can you find, hire, and manage good people, then transfer work over to them so you can tackle the challenges you’re uniquely suited to tackle? Many founders are so talented that they have a hard time letting go of tasks once they start performing them. They often think things like “Will someone else be able to do this as well as I can?” The answer is almost certainly “No, especially not at first, but they’ll probably figure it out over time, just like you did.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“The purpose of hiring a management team is to solve the organization’s problems in a more scalable way. The CEO should be the hub, and the executive team the spokes that connect the CEO to the frontline managers and employees operating where the rubber hits the road.”
― 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.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“By contrast, 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

“Managers are frontline leaders who worry about day-to-day tactics: they create, implement, and execute detailed plans that allow the organization to either do new things or do existing things more efficiently.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Sizing the market for a disruptor based on an incumbent’s market is like sizing a car industry off how many horses there were in 1910.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“The real value creation comes when innovative technology enables innovative products and services with innovative business models.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies