I’ve known Reid Hoffman for years. Our friendship started on my visits to Silicon Valley to meet with Greylock Partners, the venture capital firm where Reid is a partner, so I could learn about the companies they were investing in. I was always impressed by his sharp mind and brilliant business sense. Reid is famous for hosting long dinners where the conversation runs late into the night, and we’ve spent many meals breaking down the technology industry, analyzing the promise of artificial intelligence, and more. When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella started talking about acquiring LinkedIn, I knew it would be an amazing fit.

Here was the question weighing heavily on Brian and his team: Should Airbnb follow Groupon’s strategy and just buy the knockoff company? Brian’s gut instinct was to say no. Integrating Wimdu’s finance-centric and metric-driven team could harm Airbnb’s design-driven culture. He was also reluctant to reward what he saw as a legal extortion racket rather than a sincere attempt to create value in the market.

Blitzscaling requires hypergrowth but goes beyond the blunt strategy of “get big fast” because it involves purposefully and intentionally doing things that don’t make sense according to traditional business thinking. In the Blitzscaling Era, you have to make a tough call:

• Take on the additional risk and discomfort of blitzscaling your company,
• Or accept what might be the even greater risk of losing if your competition blitzscales before you do.

Disruption on its own is neither good nor bad, but it always involves change. Replacing a $10 product with a $1 product of equal or better quality looks like a disaster to an incumbent player, but, for society as a whole, it means greater productivity. The buyer gets the desired product, and now also has $9 available to invest in other things. Netflix has been bad news for broadcast and cable networks, but it has been great news for fans and creators of movies and television. Yes, disruption produces losers as well as winners, but, as a whole, it is a vital source of growth and opportunity that you can’t afford to ignore.

Here’s a startling fact: the global economy will need to create six hundred million new jobs by 2030 to meet the United Nations’ sustainable development goals. That’s less than fifteen years away. The world needs more than just new companies and new jobs; it’s going to need entire new industries.

With the power of blitzscaling, the adopted son of a Syrian immigrant (Steve Jobs), the adopted son of a Cuban immigrant (Jeff Bezos), and a former English teacher and volunteer tour guide (Jack Ma) were all able to build businesses that changed—and are still changing—the world.

The term “blitzscaling” derives from the twentieth-century usage of “blitz” as a way of describing a sudden, all-out effort. The first usage of blitz in this way was to describe the “blitzkrieg” (“lightning war”) strategy that General Heinz Guderian devised for the initial military campaigns of Nazi Germany during World War II. Ironically enough, Guderian was heavily influenced by British military thinkers like Basil Liddell Hart and J. F. C. Fuller, and the term “blitzkrieg” was actually popularized by the British press; the German military never formally adopted it.

The advancing armies in these campaigns abandoned the traditional approach of moving at the slow pace at which they could establish secure lines of supply and retreat. Instead they fully committed to an offensive strategy that accepted the possibility of running out of fuel, provisions, and ammunition, risking potentially disastrous defeat in order to maximize speed and surprise. The speed of these armies’ advance shocked and overwhelmed their opponents, allowing the blitzkriegers to outmaneuver and outfight the defending forces.

The early success of the German army helped spread the lessons of blitzkrieg to all the forces in the war. For example, the American general George S. Patton later put these lessons to good use in leading the US Third Army’s advance from the beaches of Normandy all the way to Berlin. Since then, the term “blitz” has been used to describe everything from an American football play to the way in which large corporations roll out new products. Like the all-out blitz defense in football—which involves the risky move of sending every available defender to pursue the quarterback—or the proverbial marketing blitz of television, print, and online advertising that accompanies the release of a new blockbuster movie, blitzscaling strives for a relentless and dizzying speed that overwhelms the market.

While we are wary of the negative connotations of “blitz,” especially in those nations that felt the effects of blitzkrieg in World War II, we believe that the strength of the metaphor and the widespread and colloquial use of the term in nonmilitary contexts make it the best fit for the concepts discussed in this book.

Blitzscaling isn’t simply a matter of rapid growth. Every company is obsessed with growth. In any industry, you live and die by the numbers—user acquisition, margins, growth rate, and so on. Yet growth alone is not blitzscaling. Rather, blitzscaling is prioritizing speed over efficiency in the face of uncertainty . We can better understand blitzscaling by comparing it to other forms of rapid growth.

Was this dumb luck on Twitter’s side? Perhaps. Luck always plays a larger role than founders, investors, and the media would like to admit. But a major difference was that Twitter could draw on numerous networks for advice and help that Tumblr could not. For example, Twitter was able to bring in Dick Costolo, a savvy executive with prior scaling experience at Google. In contrast, even though Tumblr was arguably the most prominent start-up in its New York City ecosystem, it couldn’t easily draw upon a pool of local talent who had experience dealing with rapid growth. According to Greylock’s John Lilly, for every executive role that Tumblr needed to fill, there were less than a handful of candidates in all of New York City. This paucity of talent made hiring difficult; the company was reluctant to replace existing employees due to a lack of better alternatives. Without the ability to hire an executive team that could blitzscale, Tumblr decided to sell the company.

These success stories are technology companies, sure. But as we’ve seen, technological innovation alone is insufficient—even when its impact on the future is huge. Services like Craigslist, Wikipedia, and IMDb (the Internet Movie Database) were early, influential Internet innovators, but they still never became massively (financially) valuable on their own.