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For example, China’s speed demonstrates the value of intense competition as a motivator. On one occasion, Xiaomi’s Lei Jun told me, “You American entrepreneurs are lazy. The vast majority of my company is still working at nine o’clock on a Saturday night.” In some ways, he’s right. Chinese blitzsca…

In Lewis Carroll’s classic book Through the Looking-Glass, the Red Queen tells Alice, “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” Sometimes blitzscaling a company might feel a b…

A strong commitment to a culture will sometimes mean passing on hiring “A players” who don’t fit that culture. At PayPal, for example, Max Levchin instituted a problem-solving test as part of the hiring process for joining our engineering group. He wanted a culture that was focused on solving big-p…

At the time, potential Series A investors wanted to see a business model that showed how LinkedIn would get to profitability. I told potential investors that we weren’t going to generate revenue until after the next round of funding, and that therefore it shouldn’t matter to them. They insisted any…

We were also fortunate in our timing. One thing that holds teams together in the absence of management is an opportunity to win. After the dot-com bust began, a lot of tech companies were failing, but PayPal still had a chance to succeed. All you had to do was to look at the chart showing the conti…