Blitzscaling
Foreword by Bill Gates
From the authors of New York Times bestsellers, 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 bourgeoning 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, readers 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.
Reid Hoffman is a partner at the leading VC firm Greylock Partners and an early investor in Facebook, Flickr, and Zynga. He co-founded LinkedIn in 2003; it now has more than 200 million members globally, and was acquired by Microsoft for $26 billion, the biggest acquisition in the tech giant's history. He serves on the boards of Airbnb, Convoy, Edmodo, and Microsoft and leads the Greylock Discovery Fund, which invests in seed-stage entrepreneurs and companies. He was previously a founding member and executive vice president at PayPal. A strong believer in the ability of entrepreneurship and technology to improve the world, he sits on the boards of Biohub, Kiva, Endeavor, and DoSomething.org. He earned his master's degree in philosophy from Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar, and his bachelor's degree from Stanford University.
Chris Yeh is an entrepreneur, writer, and mentor. He earned two Bachelor's degrees with distinction from Stanford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar. He is the VP of Marketing at PBworks and general partner at Wasabi Ventures.