Devotees of Silicon Valley, on the other hand, will eat it up. This is zero-sum, law-of-the-jungle stuff, and readers with a low tolerance for the attendant obnoxiousness-as when the authors write approvingly of the strategy of ignoring customers at PayPal, temporary expedient or no-will want to consult Muhammad Yunus instead. The blitzscale success of Uber may have come with unfortunate moral deficits, but the company does have “a dominant market position in the cities in which it operates,” and investors will be happy when autonomous vehicles are similarly blitzscaled so that the business of paying those pesky drivers can be dispensed with. Bleeding money until one attains scale invokes one of the authors’ key observations, namely that while it has some astonishing possibilities and massive payoffs, it “also comes with massive risks.” Though the authors make a few nods to playing nice in the marketplace, this is a book of which Gordon Gekko would doubtless approve.

Airbnb is a great idea, for example, but what makes it really work is the ubiquity of the enterprise, so that “each additional Airbnb host makes the service a tiny bit more valuable for every Airbnb guest and vice versa.” Attaining success at “blitzscaling”-a somewhat unfortunate term, the authors allow, given the connotations of “blitzkrieg”-can involve forgetting everything that one learned at business school, to say nothing of received wisdom, but it’s what got Amazon its market dominance. You, too, can be ultrawealthy-if you can take your startup from zero to a billion in 60 seconds flat.īuilding on a popular course at Stanford, tech-investment guru Hoffman, who co-founded LinkedIn, and entrepreneur Yeh (co-authors: The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age, 2014) note that it’s not enough to have a good idea or be first to market a business must scale to attain maximum global market share in the just-in-time, flash-fast atmosphere of the internet.

Blitzscaling book