Reid Hoffman Quotes

Zara takes only two weeks to develop a new product and get it into stores — the industry average is six months — and launches over ten thousand new designs per year, a rate several times that of competitors like H&M and Gap. Zara holds just six days of inventory, while rival H&M holds nearly ten times as much.

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.

Ideally, most of the top executives of a company should be on Foundational tours.

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. Put another way, it’s an accelerant that allows your company to grow at a furious pace that knocks the competition out of the water.

What can we do to surprise you?” or “What would it take for me to design something that you would literally tell every single person you’ve ever encountered?

When the Naysayers Are Loud, Turn Up the Music

Permanent beta is about the power of yet.

To change the world, startup entrepreneurs need to capitalize on the relatively small number of transformative opportunities they encounter early on in their journeys. This is equally true when it comes to your career.

You remake yourself as you grow and as the world changes. Your identity doesn’t get found. It emerges.

The person passionate about what he or she is doing will outwork and outlast the guy motivated solely by making money.

When you’re letting a fire burn, it’s important that your team realizes that, yes, you see the problem, and yes, your neglect is deliberate. If your team accepts this, it’s a good sign that you’ve hired the right people: people who can recognize and then calmly deal with problems as they arise — and who have a good sense of which fires are critical enough to require immediate attention, and which ones can be allowed to just burn for a while.

What you say 'no' to is more important than what you say 'yes' to.

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.

If you are not receiving or making at least one introduction a month, you are probably not fully engaging your extended professional network.

The ideal, of course, is to hire an executive with past experience at a blitzscaling start-up that has already dealt with the challenges your company currently faces. This is why investors have more confidence in serial entrepreneurs. One of the major advantages that companies in Silicon Valley enjoy is generations of rapidly scaling companies that have produced a rich supply of executives with blitzscaling experience. Yet even if you can’t land an ideal candidate, second best is to hire a manager who has previously worked with successful executives in a very rapidly growing company, or an executive who earned her executive experience at a larger or more traditional business but who also worked at a blitzscaling start-up at another time in her career.