Blitzscaling

The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

By: Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh, Bill Gates - foreword

Narrated by: Chris Yeh, Reid Hoffman

Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins

Publisher's Summary

Foreword by Bill Gates

LinkedIn cofounder, legendary investor, and host of the award-winning Masters of Scale podcast reveals the secret to starting and scaling massively valuable companies.

What entrepreneur or founder doesn't aspire to build the next Amazon, Facebook, or Airbnb? Yet those who actually manage to do so are exceedingly rare. So what separates the start-ups that get disrupted and disappear from the ones who grow to become global giants? The secret is blitzscaling: a set of techniques for scaling up at a dizzying pace that blows competitors out of the water. 

The objective of blitzscaling is not to go from zero to one but from one to one billion as quickly as possible. When growing at a breakneck pace, getting to next level requires very different strategies from those that got you to where you are today. In a book inspired by their popular class at Stanford Business School, Hoffman and Yeh reveal how to navigate the necessary shifts and weather the unique challenges that arise at each stage of a company's life cycle, such as: how to design business models for igniting and sustaining relentless growth; strategies for hiring and managing; how the role of the founder and company culture must evolve as the business matures, and more.

Whether your business has 10 employees or 10,000, Blitzscaling is the essential playbook for winning in a world where speed is the only competitive advantage that matters. 

©2018 Reid Hoffman and Chris Yen (P)2018 Random House Audio

Critic Reviews

“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)

“The secret of Silicon Valley is that it keeps updating the playbook. Each new success - from Google to Facebook to Airbnb and Uber - develops new techniques for world-transforming products. Reid Hoffman paints the picture, with key case studies, of what it really takes to build a market-leading company. If you want to learn how to manage growth amid the controlled chaos that has become the new normal for startups and legacy businesses alike, read this book.” (Eric Schmidt, technical advisor and former CEO, Alphabet)

not much here.

Struggling to finish. This book is all filler with a few repetitve anecdotes that you probably already know from just being in industry, plenty of talk around blitz scaling and why you should or shouldn't do it, not much concrete info on how to do it. Blitzscaling is basically betting the farm, accruing lots of organizational and technical debt in order to win in a winner takes all or winner takes most market. You can acquire a competitor, hire outside talent, incur operational overhead doing stuff manually instead of automate, throw marketing dollars at the problem, pivot your company or whatever it takes to win. Usually involves massive risk and if you do make it big it's probably down to dumb luck or fortunate timing as much as strategy and vision. There, I saved you 9hours and 1 credit.

Could go deeper

I don't feel that the cases explained in the book goes, deep enough, I have heard all Master of Scale, and I feel there's missing something.

Nothing new

I'm a big Reid Hoffman fan, which might be why I was a little disappointed his latest book Blitzscaling. This book truly fell short of the remarkable reputation Reid has for advising startup founders. I would heavily recommend saving your Audible credits if you are on the fence.

Not worth it

Honestly, I expected much more quality from a legend such as Reid Hoffman. It’s more a very long essay on why VC firms are right, rather than a real how to book for entrepreneurs. Much better to read the Lean Startup series by Eric Ries.

Rich information but NOT a guideline

Good information but definitely by far it’s not a guideline, too abstract in a actionable way.

Great Stories and Examples

Although the principle of Blitzscaling isn't for everyone - everyone in business should read this book. RH has "been there and done that" so many times in business that his experiences are always a must read. DR

Waste

Perhaps the broad stroked anecdotes could be useful to a tiny fraction of business leaders. Even for them I would doubt this book would be useful. I must speculate that the leaders of well funded hyper growth businesses would have direct access to well informed advisors.
So I suspect this is a book without an audience.
The only utility I have gotten from this is some understanding of the “growth > cash flow” dysfunction of highly funded startups.

Save your money... Geezus

If you like wasting money and time, then buy this book. Yawn. Want a real book to read, they Built To Sell. That will change your life, also LinkedIn is over priced $8+ per lead & $10k up front just to get started. Please... People are better off with Google & Facebook for advertising.

Good speed of story, great insights

Love the book because of good examples, fresh mind thinking and explaining the concept of blitzscaling in a easy manner.

Reckless and repetitive

This book is great if you are willing to waste other peoples money and have an “all on black” first at the table Vegas mindset but the concepts could be summarized on a bumper sticker. Worse LinkedIn remains a total mess to this day as a result of this go for it fast model.