Reid Hoffman Quotes

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When you’re growing quickly, there will always be fires — inventory shortfalls, servers crashing, customers whose calls aren’t answered. You won’t always know which fire to stamp out first. And if you try to put out every fire at once, you’ll only burn yourself out. That’s why entrepreneurs have to learn to let fires burn — and sometimes even very large fires. When you have a fast-scaling company, the focus must be on moving forward. And you can’t do that if time is spent dealing with spontaneous, scattered eruptions. Fighting every fire can cause you to miss critical opportunities to build your business — you’ll be all reaction and no action.

Entrepreneurial employees possess what eBay CEO John Donahoe calls the founder mind-set. As he put it to us, “People with the founder mind-set drive change, motivate people, and just get stuff done.

Blitzscaling means that you’re willing to sacrifice efficiency for speed, but without waiting to achieve certainty on whether the sacrifice will pay off. If classic start-up growth is about slowing your rate of descent as you try to assemble your plane, blitzscaling is about assembling that plane faster, then strapping on and igniting a set of jet engines (and possibly their afterburners) while you’re still building the wings.

Successful blitzscaling is an exercise in serial problem solving.

While you don’t want to make career moves on 0 percent information, you also don’t want to wait till you have 100 percent information — or else you’ll wait forever. Jetting off to vacation in Hawaii with no set itinerary introduces many uncertainties about what will transpire, but it’s not particularly risky. After all, how likely are you to have a bad time in Hawaii? But the biggest and best opportunities frequently are the ones with the most question marks. Don’t let uncertainty lull you into overestimating the risk.

As he was doing his home visits, Brian developed a clever method for extracting valuable feedback. Instead of just asking what people thought about the product as it existed now, he’d ask what they thought about the product he might build. “If I ask, ‘What can I do to make this better?’ they’ll say something small,” Brian explains. So instead, he’d ask bigger, bolder questions, like “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?” In doing so, he invited users to join him in imagining a bigger, bolder version of Airbnb.

Regular e-mails to all employees are a common best practice. Blitzscaling masters Patrick Collison and YouTube’s Shishir Mehrotra also employed this technique to manage their rapidly growing organizations. “I was a big believer in writing a weekly email,” Shishir told our Blitzscaling class at Stanford. “Leaders [who] write things down tend to deal with [fewer] communications issues. You have to clarify your thought processes in a completely different way.

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

The Rise of Portfolio Careers Around the world, we see increasing fragmentation of a single individual’s career into several different jobs, and their earnings coming from multiple sources. The popular name for this phenomenon is “the gig economy”:

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.

Novelist Jonathan Franzen gets it right when he says inauthentic people are obsessed with authenticity

The most meaningful way to differentiate your company from your competition, the best way to put distance between you and the crowd, is to do an outstanding job with information. How you gather, manage, and use information will determine whether you win or lose.

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.

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.