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

As Andrea Ovans aptly put it in her January 2015 Harvard Business Review article, “What Is a Business Model?”, it’s enough to make your head swim! For the purposes of this book, we’ll focus on the basic definition: a company’s business model describes how it generates financial returns by producing, selling, and supporting its products.

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

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

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

When you start a new company, the key product/market fit question you need to answer is whether you have discovered a nonobvious market opportunity where you have a unique advantage or approach, and one that competing players won’t see until you’ve had a chance to build a healthy lead. It’s usually difficult to find such an opportunity in a “hot” s

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

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

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

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.