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. - Reid Hoffman

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

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.

There’s a common misconception that Silicon Valley is the accelerator of the world. The real story is that the world keeps getting faster — Silicon Valley is just the first place to figure out how to keep pace. While Silicon Valley certainly has many key networks and resources that make it easier to apply the techniques we’re going to lay out for you, blitzscaling is made up of basic principles that do not depend on geography. We’re going to show you examples from overlooked parts of the United States, such as Detroit (Rocket Mortgage) and Connecticut (Priceline), as well as from international companies, such as WeChat and Spotify. In the process you’ll see how the lessons of blitzscaling can be adapted to help build great companies in nearly any ecosystem, albeit with differing degrees of difficulty. That’s the mission of this book. We want to share the secret weapon that has allowed Silicon Valley to punch so much (more than a hundred times) above its population index so that those lessons can be applied far beyond the sixty-mile stretch between the Golden Gate Bridge and San Jose. It is sorely needed.