on sharing files means that the number of files Dropbox has to store (or in the past, pay Amazon to store) increases far more slowly than the value created for the customer and thus the revenues Dropbox can collect from those customers. Uber and Airbnb also built large businesses at incredible speed based on novel business models rather than unprecedented new technologies. If technological innovation alone were enough, federal research labs would produce $100 billion companies on a regular basis. Spoiler alert: they don’t.
This is not to say that technology innovation is unimportant. Technology innovation is the most common trigger for launching a new market or upending an existing one. Uber wasn’t the first company to try to improve the experience of hailing a taxi. But prior to the technological innovation of the smartphone, complete with wireless Internet connection and GPS-enabled location-based services, Uber’s business model simply wouldn’t have worked. These innovations reduced the friction for both driver and rider, making Uber’s core UberX ridesharing model a mass-market possibility for the first time.
Nor can companies afford to ignore technology innovation after they successfully blitzscale their way to City or Nation stage. Each and every one of the technology companies worth over $100 billion has used technology leadership to reinforce its competitive advantages. Amazon may have started as a simple online retailer with no unique technology, but today its technological prowess in cloud computing, automated logistics, and voice recognition help to maintain its dominance. In fact, the megacompanies built by blitzscaling are often the ones buying the technology innovators, much as Google bought DeepMind and Facebook bought Oculus.
Technology innovation is a key factor in retaining the gains produced by business model innovation. After all, if one technology innovation can create a new market, another technology innovation can render it obsolete, seemingly overnight. While Uber has achieved massive scale, the greatest threat to its future doesn’t come in the form of direct competitors like Didi Chuxing, though these are formidable threats. The greatest threat to Uber’s business is the technology innovation of autonomous vehicles, which could make obsolete one of Uber’s biggest competitive advantages—its carefully cultivated network of drivers—essentially overnight.
The key is to combine new technologies with effective distribution to potential customers, a scalable and high-margin revenue model, and an approach that allows you to serve those customers given your probable resource constraints.
Ideally, you design your business model innovation before you start your company. This is what happened when I cofounded LinkedIn. The key business model innovations for LinkedIn, including the two-way nature of the relationships and filling professionals’ need for a business-oriented online identity, didn’t just happen organically. They were the result of much thought and reflection, and I drew on the experiences I had when founding SocialNet, one of the first online social networks, nearly a decade before the creation of LinkedIn. But life isn’t always so neat. Many companies, even famous and successful ones, have to develop their business model innovation after they have already commenced operations.
PayPal didn’t have a business model when it began operations (I was a key member of the PayPal executive team). We were growing exponentially, at 5 percent per day, and we were losing money on every single transaction we processed. The funny thing is that some of our critics called us insane for paying customers bonuses to refer their friends. Those referral bonuses were actually brilliant, because their cost was so much lower than the standard cost of acquiring new financial services customers via advertising. (We’ll discuss the power and importance of this kind of viral marketing later on.)
The insanity, in fact, was that we were allowing our users to accept credit card payments, sticking PayPal with the cost of paying 3 percent of each transaction to the credit card processors, while charging our users nothing. I remember once telling my old college friend and PayPal cofounder/CEO Peter Thiel, “Peter, if you and I were standing on the roof of our office and throwing stacks of hundred-dollar bills off the edge as fast as our arms could go, we still wouldn’t be losing money as quickly as we are right now.” We ended up solving the problem by charging businesses to accept payments, much as the credit card processors did, but funding those payments using automated clearinghouse (ACH) bank transactions, which cost a fraction of the charges associated with the credit card networks. But if we had waited until we had solved this problem before blitzscaling, I suspect we wouldn’t have become the market leader.
TECHNIQUE #2: STRATEGY INNOVATION
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 of an actual strategy that will get them there. To achieve your goals, you have to know what you plan to do and, just as important, what you plan not to do. Also, growth doesn’t create value in and of itself; for that, it has to be paired with a working business model. It’s easy to achieve extreme customer and revenue growth if your company sells $20 bills for $1, but “we’ll make it up in volume” won’t allow you to build any sustainable value.
For successful blitzscaling, the competitive advantage comes from the growth factors built into the business model, such as network effects, whereby the first company to achieve critical scale triggers a feedback loop that allows it to dominate a winner-take-all or winner-take-most market and achieve a lasting first-scaler advantage. For example, Uber’s strategy of aggressive city-by-city expansion allows its customers to hail rides with fewer delays than its competitors. Uber wants you to be able to get a ride faster with Uber than with anyone else. This attracts more customers, which attracts more drivers, which increases the liquidity of the marketplace, which allows customers to hail rides even more quickly, which attracts more customers, and so on. Early Uber investor Bill Gurley laid out Uber’s strategy in his 2012 blog post “All Markets Are Not Created Equal.”
As the company grows, they are able to facilitate more cars on the road, and along with their investment in route and load optimization, this allows for shorter and shorter pickup times. The experience gets better and better the longer they are in the market.
Blitzscaling goes beyond just a strategy of aggressive growth because it involves doing things that don’t make sense according to traditional business thinking, such as prioritizing speed over efficiency despite an uncertain environment. At the same time, blitzscaling also goes beyond just risk taking. It may be risky to bet the company, as Walt Disney did when he borrowed against his own life insurance to build Disneyland, but it’s not blitzscaling. Blitzscaling would have involved inefficiencies like paying construction crews to work twenty-four hours a day in order to get Disneyland open a few months earlier, or reducing ticket prices 90 percent to get to one million visitors faster—knowing that those one million visitors were networked to ten million more.
Here is one of the ruthless practices that has helped make Silicon Valley so successful: Investors will look at a company that is on an upward trajectory but doesn’t display the proverbial hockey stick of exponential growth and conclude that they need to either sell the business or take on additional risk that might increase the chances of achieving exponential growth. Achieving 20 percent annual growth, which would delight Wall Street analysts covering any other industry, simply isn’t enough to transform a start-up into a multibillion-dollar company fast enough. Silicon Valley venture capitalists want entrepreneurs to pursue exponential growth even if doing so costs more money and increases the chances that the business could fail, resulting in a bigger loss. Dropping below even 40 percent annual growth is a warning sign for investors.
This mindset can be difficult for people to understand. “Why should I risk it all and potentially blow up what is a successful, growing business?” they might rightfully ask. The answer is that blitzscaling businesses tend to play in winner-take-most or winner-take-all markets. The greater risk for a successful, growing business is to move
