Peter doesn’t believe in beating the competition, he believes in escaping it altogether — either by entering an emerging field with no natural compet… - Reid Hoffman

We don’t know of a single start-up that succeeded without starting out as single-threaded. That focus is the key to beating larger competitors in the early stages of a company’s existence.

A good mission and values statement should be specific and rigorous enough so that some competent players will feel a strong alignment, while others will understand that the company just isn’t a good fit. You may lose people who do not feel strong alignment with your company or group, but you want to lose those people — this allows you to build much stronger alignment with those who choose to join.

Craig Newmark simply started e-mailing his friends about local events in 1995; almost twenty-two years later, network effects have kept Craigslist a dominant player in online classifieds despite operating with a skeleton crew and making seemingly no changes to the website design during that entire period! This is where an emphasis on speed also plays an important role. Because Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs focus on designing business models that can get big fast, they are more likely to incorporate network effects. And because the fierce local competition forces start-ups to grow so aggressively (i.e., blitzscale), Silicon Valley start-ups are more likely to reach the tipping point of network effects before start-ups from less aggressive geographies. One of the motivations for this book is to help entrepreneurs from around the world emulate these successes by teaching them how to systematically design their businesses for blitzscaling. When you design your business model to leverage network effects, you can succeed anywhere.