Blitzscaling

Lesson 1. Introduction.

The hotcakes of the 21st century - start-ups. Many entrepreneurs see the Apples, Googles, and Facebooks of the world and run to win the race without putting on their shoes of understanding. The growth of tech start-ups can be massive by the standards of other industries, especially in a humble town called Palo Alto, but the failures are buried deep under the mountains of their own wasted efforts, and eventually are forgotten by their successors who go on to making the same mistakes.

  Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn, former CEO of PayPal, currently a partner at Greylock Partners, and a board member of various organizations and companies, along with Chris Yeh, explains the mystery of start-ups using a simple term ‘Blitzscaling’, in their 2018 book “Blitzscaling - The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies”.

         The authors explain numerous well-known case studies to convey their views and essentially prove the methods and strategies used by them to be some of the best. The examples of companies vary in their target markets and time periods and accordingly the ideas used. However, all of them tend to have relied on Blitzscaling at some point to reach their current status.

Lesson 2. What is Blitzscaling?

“Blitzscaling is what you do when you need to grow really, really quickly. It’s the science and art of rapidly building out a company to serve a large and usually global market, with the goal of becoming the first mover at scale.” - Reid Hoffman.

To understand the term ‘Blitzscaling’, we’ll head back to the similarly competitive, but much less forgiving era of World War II. The superpower nations were more often than not defeated by the underdogs. To put it simply, the party who acted first, won. The forces who moved fast and were ready to put their soldiers at risk were good at offense, and the forces who anticipated the moves of their opponents and were ready for counter-attacks were better at defense. This strategy was termed ‘Blitzkrieg’. This clearly was an inspiration to Reid Hoffman, as stated by him in an interview with Harvard Business Review.

The significance of blitzscaling can be seen especially after Globalization. The competitive nature of businesses is at its peak in the era of networking. The start-up culture is booming around the globe. The culture ignited by the likes of Robert Noyce and Steve Jobs has been carried over through the coming decades by the likes of Elon Musk and Hoffman himself. Palo Alto is a place saturated with great