Reid Hoffman Quotes

Relationship builders, on the other hand, try to help other people first. They don’t keep score. They’re aware that many good deeds get reciprocated, but they’re not calculated about it. And they think about their relationships all the time, not just when they need something.

No business can grow forever, simply because no market is infinite. You blitzscale when your market is big or growing fast

The truth is, most entrepreneurs pivot many times before they find their footing. And often, even after they find their footing. And it can feel perilous. You have to steer toward a new opportunity, often before it comes into clear focus. And, equally challenging, you have to turn away from something — specifically, an idea that previously inspired hopes, dreams, and investment of time and money. Human beings don’t let go of old ideas easily. In pivoting, you risk blowback from your co-founders, your staff, your investors, and your users. For those reasons, it can be the single greatest test of your leadership skills.

What happened? Many things. But the overriding problem was this: The auto industry got too comfortable. As Intel cofounder Andy Grove once famously proclaimed, “Only the paranoid survive.” Success, he meant, is fragile — and perfection, fleeting. The moment you begin to take success for granted is the moment a competitor lunges for your jugular. Auto industry executives, to say the least, were not paranoid. Instead of listening to a customer base that wanted smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, the auto executives built bigger and bigger. Instead of taking seriously new competition from Japan, they staunchly insisted (both to themselves and to their customers) that MADE IN THE USA automatically meant “best in the world.” Instead of trying to learn from their competitors’ new methods of “lean manufacturing,” they clung stubbornly to their decades-old practices. Instead of rewarding the best people in the organization and firing the worst, they promoted on the basis of longevity and nepotism. Instead of moving quickly to keep up with the changing market, executives willingly embraced “death by committee.” Ross Perot once quipped that if a man saw a snake on the factory floor at GM, they’d form a committee to analyze whether they should kill it. Easy success had transformed the American auto

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.

Peter doesn’t believe in beating the competition, he believes in escaping it altogether — either by entering an emerging field with no natural competitors or by moving so quickly and decisively that competitors have no hope of catching up.

When you are blitzscaling your start-up, growth is so rapid and your organization is pushing its limits in so many ways that multiple things are always breaking. It’s tempting to fix these things with money, but you have to resist that temptation. Only spend money to fix things that are on the critical path to reach the next phase of scale; everything else can wait. As I described earlier, at PayPal we deliberately avoided spending money on customer service because we knew it wasn’t a critical path. The more you can keep juggling and defer spending, the more likely you’ll be able to raise money without the pressure of a short runway.

An entrepreneur is someone who will jump off a cliff and assemble an airplane on the way down.

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.

Viral” distribution occurs when the users of a product bring more users, and those users bring additional users, and so on, much like an infectious virus spreads from host to host. Virality can either be organic — occurring during the course of normal usage of the product — or incentivized by some kind of reward.

You’ve got to keep your personal learning curve ahead of the company’s growth curve.

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.

Twitter came close to melting down in the same way, but managed to recover in time to build a massive business. When Twitter began its rise in the late 2000s, it became infamous for its “Fail Whale,” a whimsical error message that appeared whenever its servers couldn’t handle the load. Unfortunately for Twitter, the Fail Whale made fairly regular appearances, especially when big news hit, such as the death of the recording artist Michael Jackson in 2009 (to be fair, Twitter was hardly the only website that had these issues when the King of Pop passed away) or the 2010 World Cup. Twitter invested serious resources into rearchitecting both its systems and its engineering processes to be more efficient. Even with this strenuous effort, it took several years to “tame” the Fail Whale; it wasn’t until after Twitter made it through the 2012 US presidential election night without melting down that the company’s then–creative director Doug Bowman announced that the Great Blue Whale had been put to death.

A team in the business world will tend to perform at the level of the worst individual team member

Laser Careers. Main Thing Careers. Portfolio Careers.