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

Classic start-up growth prioritizes efficiency in the face of uncertainty. Starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down; being resource-efficient lets you “glide” to minimize the rate of descent, giving you the time to learn things about your market, technology, and team before you hit the ground. This k

modularity.” As Baldwin and Clark describe in their book, Design Rules, Vol 1: The Power of Modularity, this principle makes it possible for a company like Amazon and its customers to build complex products out of smaller, standardized subsystems. But the power of modularity goes beyond just software development and engineering. By building easy-to

Airbnb built a system that allowed and encouraged its hosts to cross-post their listings to the much-larger Craigslist. Hosts were told, “Reposting your listing from Airbnb to Craigslist increases your earnings by $500 a month on average,” and were allowed to do so by clicking a single button.

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

When evaluating market size, it’s also critical to try to account for how lower costs and product improvements can expand markets by appealing to new customers, in addition to seizing market share from existing players.

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

Given the desire for home runs like eBay, most venture capitalists filter investment opportunities based on market size. If a company can’t achieve “venture scale” (generally, a market of at least $1 billion in annual sales), then most VCs won’t invest, even if it is a good business. It simply isn’t large enough to help them achieve their goal of r

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

Another important organizational arc is moving from generalists to specialists. During the early stages of blitzscaling, the need for speed and adaptability places a hefty premium on hiring smart generalists who can get many different things done in an uncertain and rapidly changing environment. But as the company grows, it needs to shift to hiring