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

The most obvious element of blitzscaling is the pursuit of extreme growth, which, when combined with an innovative business model, can generate massive value and long-term competitive advantage. Many start-ups believe they are pursuing a strategy of extreme growth, when in fact they have the goal and the wish for extreme growth but no understanding

The real value creation comes when innovative technology enables innovative products and services with innovative business models. Even though the business models of Google, Alibaba, and Facebook might seem obvious—even inevitable—after the fact, they weren’t widely appreciated at the time they launched.

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

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

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.

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

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

It’s not easy to judge the size of a market, or what pitch decks and venture capitalists often refer to as TAM (total available market). Predicting TAM and how it will grow in the future is one of the main sources of uncertainty in blitzscaling. But predicting it correctly and investing accordingly when others are still paralyzed by fear is also on

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