founders and early employees live happily ever after, using the wealth they’ve amassed to fund both a new generation of entrepreneurs and a set of eponymous buildings for Stanford University’s Computer Science Department.
It’s an exciting and inspiring story. We get the appeal. There’s only one problem. It’s incomplete and deceptive in several important ways.
First, while “Silicon Valley” and “start-ups” are used almost synonymously these days, only a tiny fraction of the world’s start-ups actually originate in Silicon Valley, and this fraction has been getting smaller as start-up knowledge spreads around the globe. Thanks to the Internet, entrepreneurs everywhere have access to the same information. Moreover, as other markets have matured, smart founders from around the globe are electing to build companies in start-up hubs in their home countries rather than immigrating to Silicon Valley.
Second, simply starting a company is obviously insufficient. The start-ups that achieve massive value are those that have found a way to grow into scale-ups at an exponentially faster pace than their competitors.
So what secret alchemy is at work in Silicon Valley to fuel such rapid-fire growth of so many of the world’s most valuable tech companies? And if there is a secret, can it be identified, analyzed, understood, and, most important, applied elsewhere?
Blitzscaling is that secret. And the reason blitzscaling matters so much is that nothing about it is inherent to Silicon Valley.
There’s a common misconception that Silicon Valley is the accelerator of the world. The real story is that the world keeps getting faster—Silicon Valley is just the first place to figure out how to keep pace. While Silicon Valley certainly has many key networks and resources that make it easier to apply the techniques we’re going to lay out for you, blitzscaling is made up of basic principles that do not depend on geography. We’re going to show you examples from overlooked parts of the United States, such as Detroit (Rocket Mortgage) and Connecticut (Priceline), as well as from international companies, such as WeChat and Spotify. In the process you’ll see how the lessons of blitzscaling can be adapted to help build great companies in nearly any ecosystem, albeit with differing degrees of difficulty.
That’s the mission of this book. We want to share the secret weapon that has allowed Silicon Valley to punch so much (more than a hundred times) above its population index so that those lessons can be applied far beyond the sixty-mile stretch between the Golden Gate Bridge and San Jose.
It is sorely needed.
Here’s a startling fact: the global economy will need to create six hundred million new jobs by 2030 to meet the United Nations’ sustainable development goals. That’s less than fifteen years away. The world needs more than just new companies and new jobs; it’s going to need entire new industries.
Those industries better generate scale-ups as well as start-ups. It seems to us that it will be a lot easier to add six hundred million new jobs worldwide by creating sixty thousand new ten-thousand-person companies rather than sixty million new ten-person companies.
The late, great Andy Grove, Intel’s legendary CEO, understood and explained this when he wrote in a 2010 op-ed for Bloomberg:
Start-ups are a wonderful thing, but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment. Equally important is what comes after that mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology goes from prototype to mass production. This is the phase where companies scale up. They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories, and hire people by the thousands. Scaling is hard work but necessary to make innovation matter.
Recognizing what powers the rapid growth from start-up to scale-up, and understanding the principles behind how it works, will help entrepreneurs and companies apply these principles not just in small pockets of the United States and China but around the world.
WHO SHOULD READ THIS BOOK?
This book is for anyone who wants to understand the techniques that allow a business to grow from zero to a multibillion-dollar market leader in a handful of years.
These techniques should be of interest to entrepreneurs who want to build massive companies, venture capitalists who want to invest in them, employees who want to work for them, and governments and communities who wish to encourage the growth of these companies in their own regions. And even if you don’t want to build, invest in, or work for any of these companies, you’ll still need to navigate the world that they’re building.
If you are a manager or a leader who is trying to rapidly scale a project or a business unit within a larger company, blitzscaling can help you too. And while we draw these lessons primarily from the world of high tech, many of the principles and frameworks the book lays out (especially regarding people management) are applicable to high-growth companies in most industries worldwide, from European fast-fashion retailers to Texan oil shale companies.
Even organizations outside the business world can use blitzscaling to their advantage. Upstart presidential campaigns and nonprofits serving the underprivileged have used the levers of blitzscaling to overturn conventional wisdom and achieve massive results. You’ll read all these stories, and many more, in the pages of this book.
Whether you are a founder, a manager, a potential employee, or an investor, we believe that understanding blitzscaling will allow you to make better decisions in a world where speed is the critical competitive advantage.
With the power of blitzscaling, the adopted son of a Syrian immigrant (Steve Jobs), the adopted son of a Cuban immigrant (Jeff Bezos), and a former English teacher and volunteer tour guide (Jack Ma) were all able to build businesses that changed—and are still changing—the world.
The strategy and techniques we describe in this book are based on my experiences as a member of the founding team at PayPal; as the cofounder, CEO, and now executive chairman at LinkedIn; as a leading investor in Facebook and Airbnb; and as an investor at Greylock Partners, where I worked with many other billion-dollar companies, such as Workday, Pandora, Cloudera, and Pure Storage. My partners at Greylock and I have helped these companies go from garage to global dominance, and, in this book, we’ll share with you what we believe are important frameworks for understanding and addressing the challenge of blitzscaling across the different elements of your organization.
Yet as many good business books disclaim, while this is a playbook and a strategy guide, it isn’t a book of precise recipes. Regardless of how the popular press portrays things, each formula for building a great company is unique and depends on the market opportunity, the founders, and the network in which they operate. The truth is there is absolutely nothing guaranteed as a one-size-fits-all, must-follow rulebook for everyone. However, there are patterns. So in addition to individual tips and tricks, this book offers a set of frameworks and strategies for leaders, entrepreneurs, and intrapreneurs to adapt to their own needs and circumstances.
A QUICK NOTE ON THE TERM “BLITZSCALING”
The term “blitzscaling” derives from the twentieth-century usage of “blitz” as a way of describing a sudden, all-out effort. The first usage of blitz in this way was to describe the “blitzkrieg” (“lightning war”) strategy that General Heinz Guderian devised for the initial military campaigns of Nazi Germany during World War II. Ironically enough, Guderian was heavily influenced by British military thinkers like Basil Liddell Hart and J. F. C. Fuller, and the term “blitzkrieg” was actually popularized by the British press; the German military never formally adopted it.
The advancing armies in these campaigns abandoned the traditional approach of moving at the slow pace at which they could
