Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

Data-driven design is great at optimizing products with incremental changes, but it could steer you to the top of a local hill rather than the highest peak. Genius-driven design may be the only way to build a revolutionary product, but it usually needs to be supplemented with data-driven refinement.

The classic rule of thumb in Silicon Valley is to raise enough cash for eighteen to twenty-four months of operations. This is because it usually takes about six months to raise your next round of venture capital, which means unless you have at least eighteen months of “runway,” you’ll have less than a year to make enough progress to convince ventur

Most companies, even in the highly competitive world of the consumer Internet, still think it’s sufficient to conduct a lot of A/B tests and iterate accordingly. This is an effective tactic but poor strategy, since local optimizations do not necessarily lead to a globally optimal result.