Blitzscaling Quotes

“The key is to combine new technologies with effective distribution to potential customers, a scalable and high-margin revenue model, and an approach that allows you to serve those customers given your probable resource constraints”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“There are only three ways to scale yourself: delegation, amplification, and just plain making yourself better.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“There are no job descriptions for founders. If the role doesn’t change, there’s something wrong.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“your chief of staff should amplify your business impact: he or she should be a businessperson who can not only make certain decisions for you but also triage the important decisions that you have to make yourself.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Taken together, Silicon Valley’s 150 most valuable publicly traded technology companies are worth $3.5 trillion. That number is so big it doesn’t mean anything to most of us. So consider this: those 150 companies alone make up 50 percent of the value of the NASDAQ, and they account for over 5 percent of the entire world’s market capitalization. That’s a lot of value created by a region with an estimated 3.5 to 4 million residents, or roughly 0.05 percent of the world’s population.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“A company might employ different types of scaling at different points in its life cycle. The canonical sequence that companies like Google and Facebook have gone through begins with classic start-up growth while establishing product/market fit, then shifts into blitzscaling to achieve critical mass and/or market dominance ahead of the competition, then relaxes down to fastscaling as the business matures, and finally downshifts to classic scale-up growth when the company is an established industry leader. Together, this sequence of scaling generates a classic “S-curve” of growth, with slower initial growth followed by rapid acceleration, eventually easing its way into a gentle plateau.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“You might feel like you can’t afford to take time out from your busy schedule to make yourself better. After all, you might think, everyone is counting on me. This feeling, while natural, is counterproductive. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings warned our Stanford class, “[When I was running Pure Software,] I felt like investing in me was selfish. I thought, ‘I should be working.’ I was invited to join YPO [Young President’s Organization], but I thought, ‘I can’t take a day off.’ I was too busy chopping wood to sharpen the axe. I should have spent more time with other entrepreneurs. I should have done yoga or meditation. I didn’t understand that by making myself better, I was helping the company, even if I was away from work.” Plus, when you model the behavior of taking the time to improve yourself, you help encourage the rest of the company to develop a culture of learning.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“change is the only constant,”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“A major mistake made by many start-ups around the world is focusing on the technology, the software, the product, and the design, but neglecting to ever figure out the business.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“The first technique of blitzscaling is to design an innovative business model that can truly grow.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Ice melts into water; water boils into steam. As a start-up scales up from one phase to the next, it undergoes fundamental changes as well.”
― 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?”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“For example, I was one of the first start-up leaders in Silicon Valley to borrow the “chief of staff” concept from the realm of politics and established corporations.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Kalanick, in other words, was doing what felt good to him rather than what the organization needed.”
― 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.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“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

“In the Family stage, you should hire only generalists.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Weak cultures are diffuse; people act differently, and don’t understand each other, and it becomes political.”
― 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.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“the only thing that’s foreseeable about blitzscaling is that you will at some point encounter the unforeseeable.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“if the fires at your start-up are burning money but not touching the customer, and if you’re able to afford the waste, you might be able to literally buy time and ignore them.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“if you are a rare genius and can accurately and consistently predict what the market wants, trusting your instincts will be faster than using trial and error to iterate your way to a better product. Good luck with that approach! As a mere mortal, I prefer market feedback.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“When anecdotal user feedback and data contradict each other, listen to the data.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Keep in mind that you should be embarrassed by your initial release—not ashamed or indicted! The desire for speed is not an excuse to cut dangerous corners. If you trigger lawsuits or burn through your money without learning, it means you did launch too soon.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“Learn and go as quickly as you can. Even if not every single release is perfect, I think you’re going to end up doing better over a year or two than you would be if you just waited a year to get feedback on all of your ideas. That focus on learning quickly is the focus of the company.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

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

“Embracing chaos, on the other hand, means accepting that uncertainty exists and therefore taking steps to manage it.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

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

“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

“If you have a billion-dollar opportunity, it makes sense to invest more resources and eke out a 5 percent gain ($50 million) than to grow a nascent million-dollar opportunity by a factor of 1,000 percent ($10 million). This is why it’s generally better to have your ten best people working on a single important project rather than splitting them to attack two different opportunities”
― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies