Raise tons of capital and fight them in their own market. Co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky was faced with two options: Play ball with the Samwers by giving them a 25 percent stake in his company. Airbnb knew that without Europe it was doomed to fail in the tourism market. The book opens with Airbnb at a critical moment, when German copycats the Samwer brothers started Airbnb knockoff Wimdu in Europe. Hoffman argues in today’s fast-paced market, you need to be open to abandoning best practices, like solving all problems or putting out all fires, to put on the jet fuel to to accelerate growth: “Blitzscaling is prioritizing speed over efficiency in the face of uncertainty.” (Think Google, Amazon, and Facebook.) It’s filled with real-life, ride-or-die choices that some of today’s biggest tech companies have had to face and overcome, including Hoffman’s involvement in helping grow his companies PayPal and LinkedIn.īlitzscaling is also not for people who are risk-averse. Blitzscaling is a no-nonsense business book extension of a class that was taught at Stanford about what it took for the world’s largest tech companies to grow fast and become the dominant player in their markets. If you’re looking for a fuzzy, story-filled book of hand-holding through your startup’s next stages, this is not it.

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman’s latest book, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies, co-written with Chris Yeh, is that master plan to get you from fledgling, struggling company to blowing your competition out of the water and becoming your market’s leader by growing your company at “lightning” speed. But what happens after you actually get that done? And where are you supposed to go from there? In the startup world, getting a marketable idea and then getting it to market poses some of the biggest hurdles for most entrepreneurs. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, a VC investor with Greylock Partners, during a 2017 Seattle appearance.

Blitzscaling book