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Reid Hoffman's Blitzscaling Toolkit
Reid Hoffman's Blitzscaling Toolkit: How your team can put blitzscaling into action
What is blitzscaling?
Should we blitzscale?
How do we blitzscale?
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What is blitzscaling?

It's time to establish some common ground.

First, a bit of pre-reading

We're ready to have a team discussion on Blitzscaling. We'll start by coming to some common ground on what Blitzscaling means to us, and then ask
Should we blitzscale?
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and
How do we blitzscale?
⁠
. Before we do, we all need a common understanding of what Blitzscaling is. Pick your form of pre-reading and then we can reflect.

Recommended: Read the
book
⁠
.

To really grasp the blitzscaling framework and establish common ground with your fellow stakeholders, you'll need to
read the book
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.
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Short on time? Here's an outline.

Part 1: What Is Blitzscaling?
Blitzscaling: the framework and techniques that allow companies to achieve massive scale at incredible speed.
Three key techniques of Blitzscaling:
Business model innovation
Strategy innovation
Management innovation

Part 2: Business Model Innovation
"Design an innovative business model that can truly grow."
Four key business model growth factors:
market size
distribution
high gross margins
network effects
Two key business growth limiters
lack of product/market fit
operational scalability
Proven business model patterns
bits rather than atoms
platforms
free or freemium
marketplaces
subscriptions
digital goods
feeds
Principles of business model innovation
Moore's law
automation
adaption, not optimization
Contrarian principle

Part 3: Strategy Innovation
"Strategy innovation supports its own ecosystem of rapid growth in the face of risk and uncertainty."
When should you blitzscale?
a substantial & new opportunity
use your first-scaler advantage
learning curve
threat of competition
When should you stop blitzscaling?
Declining rate of growth (relative to the market and competition)
Worsening unit economics
Decreasing per-employee productivity
Increasing management overhead
Blitzscaling extends the simple three-step process of “Do Things That Don’t Scale” as follows:
Step 1: Do things that don’t scale.
Step 2: Reach the next stage of Blitzscaling.
Step 3: Figure out how to do one set of things that scale, while somehow also finding a way to do a completely different set of things that don’t scale.
Step 4: Reach the next stage of Blitzscaling.
Step 5: Repeat over and over until you reach complete market dominance.
5 Stages of Scale
Family: The Founder Personally Pulls the Levers of Hypergrowth
Tribe: The Founder Manages the People Who Are Pulling the Levers
Village: The Founder Designs an Organization That Pulls the Levers
City: The Founder Makes High-Level Decisions About Goals and Strategies
Nation: The Founder Figures Out How to Pull the Organization Back from Blitzscaling and Start Blitzscaling New Product Lines and Business Units

Part 4: Management Innovation
"One of the key features that sets global giants apart from those companies that flame out or implode before they can reach market dominance is an ability to evolve and optimize their management practices at each stage of growth."
8 key transitions
small teams to large teams
generalists to specialists
contributors to managers to executives
dialogue to broadcasting
inspiration to data
single focus to multithreading
pirate to navy
scaling yourself - founder to leader
9 counterintuitive rules of blitzscaling
embrace choas
hire Ms. Right Now, and not Ms. Right
tolerate "bad" management
launch a product that embarrasses you
let fires burn
do things that don't scale
ignore your customers
raise too much money
evolve your culture

Part 5: The Broader Landscape of Blitzscaling
"While blitzscaling is probably most applicable to high tech, its techniques can benefit any industry in which opportunities can demonstrate strong growth factors (market size, distribution, gross margins, and network effects) and overcome the growth limiters (lack of product/market fit and operational scalability)."
4 advantages of established companies who want to Blitzscale
scale
iteration
longevity
mergers & acquisitions
3 disadvantages of established companies who want to Blitzscale
incentives
unstaged commitment
public market pressure
3 options to defend against Blitzscaling
beat them
join them
avoid them

Part 6: Responsible Blitzscaling
"In an ideal world, blitzscaling organizations would embody all the virtues that society might desire from its businesses—a diverse and inclusive workforce, a strong sense of responsibility to shareholders and stakeholders, an ample supply of well-paying middle-class jobs, and executives who serve as moral role models and leaders of society. The unfortunate truth is that for all the good that blitzscaling produces, blitzscaling organizations can be guilty of the sins that afflict other types of companies, and actually face some inherent challenges even when trying to behave responsibly."

Even shorter on time? Here are the highlights.

Blitzscaling: the framework and techniques that allow companies to achieve massive scale at incredible speed.
You need to maximize four growth factors: market size, distribution, high gross margins, and network effects.
You'll need to overcome challenges of product/market fit and operational scalability.

Then, reflect & discuss

What stuck with you from the book? What kept you up at night? Add your top takeaways below.
Takeaway
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👉 Next up:
Should we blitzscale?
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