Reid Hoffman Quotes

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

Blitzscaling requires you to move at a pace that is almost certainly uncomfortable for your team. You will definitely make many mistakes as you navigate an environment full of uncertainty; the art lies in developing the skill to learn quickly from those mistakes and return to a relentlessly rapid advance.

Your competitive advantage is formed by the interplay of three different, ever-changing forces: your assets, your aspirations/values, and the market realities, i.e., the supply and demand for what you offer the marketplace relative to the competition.

But even when performance deteriorates, it’s still important to remember that the alliance is a relationship, not a transaction. Ups and downs are inevitable, and both sides should maintain a long-term investment perspective rather than responding in knee-jerk fashion to short-term turbulence. A baseball team would never cut a player simply because he had a bad game. But if the player experienced a month-long slump, the team might very well trade or release him.

a company’s business model describes how it generates financial returns by producing, selling, and supporting its products.

Which plan offers the most learning potential?

Laser Careers. Main Thing Careers. Portfolio Careers.

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

If your company lacks meaningful official values, take the liberty of defining those values for your team.

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.

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.

we suspect that the market for food delivery from existing restaurants — a pure commodity business — is unlikely to offer any lasting competitive advantages that would justify an expensive blitzscaling campaign.

Technology innovation is a key factor in retaining the gains produced by business model innovation. After all, if one technology innovation can create a new market, another technology innovation can render it obsolete, seemingly overnight. While Uber has achieved massive scale, the greatest threat to its future doesn’t come in the form of direct competitors like Didi Chuxing, though these are formidable threats. The greatest threat to Uber’s business is the technology innovation of autonomous vehicles, which could make obsolete one of Uber’s biggest competitive advantages — its carefully cultivated network of drivers — essentially overnight.

Chesapeake moved faster than any other company in its industry, deploying an army of land men to aggressively lease as much land as possible, with instructions to pay whatever was necessary, without knowing whether the gas deposits would justify the price. Hiring an army of land men and paying top dollar for leases sight unseen seemed inefficient…until the wells started producing.

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.