Blitzscaling

by Reid Hoffman

LinkedIn cofounder, legendary investor, and host of the award-winning Masters of Scale podcast reveals the secret to starting and scaling massively valuable companies.

What entrepreneur or founder doesn't aspire to build the next Amazon, Facebook, or Airbnb? Yet those who actually manage to do so are exceedingly rare. So what separates the startups that get disrupted and disappear from the ones who grow to become global giants?

The secret is blitzscaling: a set of techniques for scaling up at a dizzying pace that blows competitors out of the water. The objective of Blitzscaling is not to go from zero to one, but from one to one billion -as quickly as possible.

When growing at a breakneck pace, getting to next level requires very different strategies from those that got you to where you are today. In a book inspired by their popular class at Stanford Business School, Hoffman and Yeh reveal how to navigate the necessary shifts and weather the unique challenges that arise at each stage of a company's life cycle, such as: how to design business models for igniting and sustaining relentless growth; strategies for hiring and managing; how the role of the founder and company culture must evolve as the business matures, and more.

Whether your business has ten employees or ten thousand, Blitzscaling is the essential playbook for winning in a world where speed is the only competitive advantage that matters.

Our thoughts on Blitzscaling

Want to know the growth strategies that Uber, Facebook, and Airbnb employed to achieve enormous valuations in such a short amount of time? Blitzscaling, written by the founder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman, explains the counterintuitive business strategy of sacrificing confidence and efficacy for pure speed.

Learn the common traits of the most profitable tech company models of today, when blitzscaling is successful and when it isn't, as well as the counterintuitive transgressions of business common sense. Although Blitzscaling is ostensibly a business strategy book, it is also important to investors looking to identify the next big firm, employees interested in learning how to work for one, and everyone interested in learning how today's organizations expand at an unheard-of rate.

Our favourite quote from Blitzscaling

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.

10 recommendations for Blitzscaling

10 recommendation for Blitzscaling

Book Summary

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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.

— Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling