Blitzscaling

The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

By: Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

Narrated by: Chris Yeh

Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins

Publisher's Summary

Foreword by Bill Gates. 

From the authors of New York Times best sellers The Alliance and The Start-up of You comes a smart and accessible must-have guide for budding entrepreneurs everywhere. 

Silicon Valley is renowned for its striking number of businesses which have grown from garage start-ups into global giants - Apple, Cisco, Google, HP and Intel, to name a few. But what is the secret to their outstanding success? Hoffman and Yeh explain that it’s simple: they’ve learnt how to blitzscale. 

Featuring case studies from numerous prominent tech businesses such as Airbnb and WeChat, this book offers a specific set of practices for catalysing and managing dizzying growth in burgeoning start-ups. Prioritising speed over efficiency in an environment of uncertainty, Blitzscaling illustrates how businesses can accelerate to the stage in a company’s life cycle where the most value is generated. 

Using the framework provided by Hoffman and Yeh, listeners will learn how to design business models which simultaneously support growth at a furious pace and capture the market as well as how to navigate the necessary shifts in strategy needed at each level of scale.

©2018 Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers

Critic Reviews

"The case studies you’re about to explore and the tools you’re about to gain have never been more relevant. This is an ideal moment to be reading this book." (Bill Gates)

"The book the start-up world has been waiting for. I can’t think of any other that so perfectly captures the specific challenges - and opportunities - that a company faces at every stage of growth. This book shares some of the key secrets for building mission-oriented, global businesses at speed." (Brian Chesky, cofounder and CEO, Airbnb)

"Blitzscaling shows how companies can build value for customers and shareholders in the digital age. A compelling inside view of how the new economy is being built and is transforming global business." (Sheryl Sandberg, New York Times best-selling author of Lean In and Option B) 

PDF Download

Excellent book, practical and insightful and would highly recommend it to anyone in business. My only disappointment is that the narrator mentioned that there is a PDF supplement with diagrams, which was not available for download on Audible.

GET THIS BOOK!

this is a book you should have in your library if you serious about running, growing, and flying your business.

Interesting

Very interesting ebook. Full of useful info and real world examples. Highly recommended for an entrepreneur looking to scale up their business.

good but....

It would have been great to have some tactical takeaways from the book as opposed to simply strategic philosophy.

The true insights to scaling your business

Ried, is spot on in every chaper of his book. Read it over and over!

Useful but not super practical

Hearing about other's success is always motivating and there were a few good explanations about how companies managed to scale but the deep diving into methodologies used was missing. This felt more like a consistent introduction to blitzscaling rather than a step by step of how to implement.

Great food for action and thought

Loved the book and the strategies discussed in it. It is inspiring and thought provoking for an entrepreneur based in a changing Europe/UK. I would love to have both authors on my board to help guide us through the next levels.

Best book on scaling!!

Best book by far on scaling. Lots of valuable lessons. A must read for anyone looking to grow their business fast.

The most unethical book I have ever read

Reid Hoffman's books is a bible of illegality. That he celebrates his technique as being the same as the Nazi's during the Blitzkrieg should set off enough alarm bells but the fact that throughout the book Hoffman encourages wholesale law breaking as an acceptable tactic to scale a company is just beyond words. In his own words, Hoffman does not consider laws to be relevant to the business world and shrugs them off as "little fires" that you can just leave burning because they are irrelevant.

Hoffman teaches these techniques at Stanford which goes a long way into explaining why the technology sector in Silicon Valley is so awash with illegal practices and frankly Stanford should be held to account for holding at least some responsibility for the emergence of illegal surveillance capitalism as a business model - a model which causes massive harm to human rights and society as a whole.

I recommend reading this book as an exercise in how not to create and scale a business and to give you some insights into the minds of these ruthless and criminal Silicon Valley execs.

Great book

Interesting and inspiring book with a lot of insights on blitzscaling and successfully expanding business operations internationally.

Not much content

Full of buzzwords and Not much meaningful content.
Perhaps a book for 10 years ago.

exceptional

- numerous strategic takeaways to lingering questions I've had

- reid and chris have interesting mental modals of the world

- academic style discourse makes for a substantial read on more philosophical topics

Envisioning

I found it to be very engaging and memorable.
I would probably listen to it again sometime in the future.

Great!

A perfect book if you're looking for inspiration and to think big! A compelling listen and fantastically well narrated.

Another book for the toolkit

Great book with great learnings. Move fast and break things, hyper growth at all costs and blitzscale all have their place.
Technology startups are by their very nature are cash burning machines that do not see profit for many years. So partner with investors that understand your space, the problem that you are addressing and that are prepared to go the distance.
Reid Hoffman is still ahead of his time and has had great exposure to ideas ahead of their time.