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

Blitzscaling drives “lightning” growth by prioritizing speed over efficiency, even in an environment of uncertainty.

The first technique of blitzscaling is to design an innovative business model that can truly grow. This sounds like a Start-ups 101–level insight, but it’s astounding how many founders miss this key element. A major mistake made by many start-ups around the world is focusing on the technology, the software, the product, and the design, but neglecti

Product/market fit enables rapid growth, while the lack of it makes growth expensive and difficult. The concept of product/market fit originates in Marc Andreessen’s seminal blog post “The Only Thing That Matters.” In his essay, Andreessen argues that the most important factor in successful start-ups is the combination of market and product. His de

Early Uber investor Bill Gurley laid out Uber’s strategy in his 2012 blog post “All Markets Are Not Created Equal.”

photographers. Founder Brian Chesky describes this strategy succinctly: “Do everything by hand until it’s too painful, then automate it.”

We also recognize that the number of employees is only one of several measures of an organization’s scale. Some of the other measures of scale include the number of users (user scale), the number of customers (customer scale), and total annual revenues (business scale). These measures usually, but don’t always, move in lockstep. While it’s nearly i

Some software companies employ business models that allow them to achieve massive success with minimal numbers of employees. The founders of WhatsApp, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, designed a clever business model that addressed some of the key growth factors (their messaging service leveraged both classic network effects and the existing distribution

product or service is subject to positive network effects when increased usage by any user increases the value of the product or service for other users.

Internet as a whole. As the Internet grew and the amount of content increased at a superlinear rate, so did the difficulty of filtering and finding relevant information, making search increasingly important. Combine that effect with the rapid growth of the Internet itself, and the result was a massive market. Google has astutely expanded the market

“Don’t try a second channel until you have your main flywheel working. Most successful companies dominate one channel.”