Reid Hoffman

When blitzscaling, speed is more important than having a “well-run” organization. Under normal circumstances, you should strive for organizational coherence and stability. Chaotic, unstable organizations make employees nervous and hurt morale. But when you’re scaling up at lightning speed, you may need to reorganize the company three times in a single year, or repeatedly churn through members of your management team.

starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down. If you run out of money for the fuel and parts you need to get airborne, no one will ever get to find out how efficiently you spent it along the way!

Third, blitzscaling opens up access to capital, because investors generally prefer to back market leaders.

If a market leader like Adobe gets complacent one year, it will still count billions of dollars in the bank, but if a startup gets complacent, it’s game over.

Life is a team sport, not an individual sport. Pick your team.

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.

Second, you can leverage your lead to build long-term competitive advantages before other players are able to respond.

In a sentence, as you meet your friends and new people, shift from asking yourself the very natural question of “What’s in it for me?” and ask instead, “What’s in it for us?” All follows from that.

Keeping your options open” is frequently more of a risk than committing to a plan of action.

blitzscaling is prioritizing speed over efficiency in the face of uncertainty.

Even if the money doesn’t prove to be necessary, a major financing round can also have positive signaling effects — it helps convince the rest of the world that your company is likely to emerge as the market leader, and can discourage investors from backing additional competitors

This book is for anyone who wants to understand the techniques that allow a business to grow from zero to a multibillion-dollar market leader in a handful of years. These techniques should be of interest to entrepreneurs who want to build massive companies, venture capitalists who want to invest in them, employees who want to work for them, and governments and communities who wish to encourage the growth of these companies in their own regions. And even if you don’t want to build, invest in, or work for any of these companies, you’ll still need to navigate the world that they’re building. If you are a manager or a leader who is trying to rapidly scale a project or a business unit within a larger company, blitzscaling can help you too. And while we draw these lessons primarily from the world of high tech, many of the principles and frameworks the book lays out (especially regarding people management) are applicable to high-growth companies in most industries worldwide, from European fast-fashion retailers to Texan oil shale companies.

Blitzscaling requires more than just courage and skill on the part of the entrepreneur. It also requires an environment that is willing to finance intelligent risks with both financial capital and human capital, which are the essential ingredients for blitzscaling. Think of them as fuel and oxygen; you need both to propel the rocket skyward. Meanwhile, the infrastructure of your organization is the actual structure of your rocket, which you’re rebuilding on the fly as you rise. Your job as a leader and an entrepreneur is to make sure that you have sufficient fuel to propel your growth while making the necessary mechanical adjustments to the actual rocket ship to keep it from flying apart as it accelerates. Fortunately, this is more possible today than it has ever been in the past.

Making a decision reduces opportunities in the short run, but increases opportunities in the long run. To move forward in your career, you have to commit to specific opportunities as part of an iterative plan, despite doubt and despite inconvenience.

Get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’. If you’re not growing, you’re contracting. If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward.