Cover Image: Blitzscaling

Blitzscaling

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Member Reviews

In the world of startups, scale can mean everything to success. With competition everywhere, those who are able to achieve scale fastest often win. How do you capture this competitive advantage? In Blitzscaling; The Lighting-Fast Path To Building Massively Valuable Companies, Reid Hoffman gives you the tools you'll need.

When you're a small company in the startup world, there are countless threats to your business. Other companies can quickly duplicate what you're doing or strategically outflank you. Big growth may be the only way you can overcome the opposition. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman gives you the knowledge you need to guide your business while growing a breakneck speed.

Blitzscaling builds your company at a far greater pace than the normal growth most businesses experience. Stability is sacrificed for scale at nearly all-costs. Though it burns capital far faster, it also helps you achieve the competitive advantage needed in today's market.

The tools needed to blitzscale are laid out and explained. Insight from experienced founders included. Easy to understand how and why, as you scale your operation.

While it brings about faster growth, it also presents unique challenges. When charging ahead, there's less time to perfect everything you do, and your focus has to narrow on what matters now. Reid attempts to give you the tools needed to keep your focus where it's needed most and not sweat the unimportant things now.

It reads easily, with the lessons in blitzscaling being applicable to businesses of all sizes.

There are a couple small annoyances throughout the book. They aren't a big deal but their representative nature makes them stick out more and you feel yourself going over the same thing over and over.

In the first couple chapters, I can't begin to count how often you hear, "We'll talk about that in a later chapter." We get it, it'll be addressed later on. Don't worry, you don't have to tell us that repeatedly. Removing all the instances of reassurance wouldn't cause anyone to worry.

Quotes from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings are found throughout the book. While they're relevant, it would be nice to see a range of experienced blitzscalers weigh in, rather than the same one over and over again.

At times it also felt like the book was a piece of content marketing for Reid's Masters of Scale podcast. The podcast was mentioned countless times throughout the book. While I'm sure it's a fine podcast, it isn't really relevant what program someone was talking on when quoting them. Instead it becomes a bit of an annoyance that slows the story down.

In a high-speed world of business, those that grow to scale quickest have a real advantage and often become the dominant industry player. Blitzscaling gives you the knowledge needed to grow your business at super-speed and reap the benefits.

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If you are familair with growth hacking, you will love reading this book.

At first the theory of Blitzsaling is laid down along with different examples for each way of doing it. They are brought together as a whole with the author's own example of how the network effects worked for Linkedin., Amazon, Google, Facebook.

You will learn a lot about how to grow a business in extreme detail and how to change it depending on the stage of the business. At the end of the book is a list of essays by students who took a class on Blitzscaling in Stanford.

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