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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 blitzscalers work with an intensity that few in Silicon Valley can match. Rather than staying open during the standard American business hours of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Xiaomi operates on a “996” model—get in at 9 a.m., leave the office at 9 p.m., and work six days a week. I saw the same thing at LinkedIn China. To make a tight deadline for our “Red Horse” project, our China team leader Derek Shen simply moved the entire development team to a hotel for two weeks so that its members could work around the clock without any of the distractions of normal life.
oh boy
In an ideal world, blitzscaling organizations would embody all the virtues that society might desire from its businesses—a diverse and inclusive workforce, a strong sense of responsibility to shareholders and stakeholders, an ample supply of well-paying jobs, and executives who serve as moral role models and leaders of society. The unfortunate truth is that for all the good that blitzscaling produces, blitzscaling organizations can be guilty of the same sins committed by other types of companies, and face some inherent challenges even when trying to behave responsibly.
hahahaha
Skeptics might argue that the kind of scale that blitzscaling produces is inherently bad, and that society should simply prevent companies from growing too big. Testifying before Congress in 1911, future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis argued, “I think we are in a position, after the experience of the last twenty years, to state two things: In the first place, that a corporation may well be too large to be the most efficient instrument of production and of distribution, and, in the second place, whether it has exceeded the point of greatest economic efficiency or not, it may be too large to be tolerated among the people who desire to be free.”
We disagree with this position on the harmfulness of scale in today’s world. First, Brandeis was speaking during the era of “trusts,” when figures like J. P. Morgan consolidated American industry into powerful, giant companies like U.S. Steel. But we believe that today’s blitzscalers are qualitatively different than Gilded Age trusts. Those trusts held virtual monopolies over the supply of key physical resources like steel and oil. Consumers had no alternatives and were forced to do business with them. In contrast, companies like Apple and Amazon have to win their customers every day, and if they fail to do so, those consumers can simply buy Dell laptops and order books from Barnes & Noble.
Second, we believe that while big can sometimes be bad, big can also be great. Scale creates dominant companies, but scale also creates enormous value. The smartphones we love, for example, are mass-market consumer electronics that depend on economies of scale. While Brandeis is right that society needs to prevent monopolies that block technology or business innovation in the way that the old AT&T monopoly suppressed the progress of telecommunications, today’s largest companies have actually enabled innovation and the creation of even more value by providing a platform for everything from business productivity software (Slack) to entertainment (Netflix). Even the concentration of capital that scale has produced isn’t all bad; it has allowed blitzscalers to tackle “moonshots” like space travel (SpaceX) and autonomous vehicles (Google’s Waymo) that may dramatically improve our lives.
idk about that chief
Responsible blitzscaling matters because successful blitzscalers often reach a point where they are more than just a business; they actually affect the fabric of the society in which they operate. Social media like Facebook and Twitter have changed how we consume information and how we communicate. Marketplaces like Alibaba and eBay provide economic opportunity—some dedicated sellers even rely on them for their livelihoods. Sharing economy services like Airbnb can bring more tourism and diversity into the cities in which they operate. And Amazon is changing the entire retail industry, which affects everyone. As Spider-Man teaches us, with great power comes great responsibility.
i just
Applying this analysis shows that a number of common fears about blitzscaling are actually nonsystemic risks. For example, one common fear is that blitzscaling will produce an oligarchy of powerful technology executives with too much power over our government and our society. But even today, with technology firms dominating the ranks of the world’s most valuable companies, traditional business moguls such as Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers have had a far greater influence over public policy than tech leaders such as Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, or Mark Zuckerberg.
just you wait brother
The economic reform and growth of China over the past thirty years has lifted eight hundred million people out of poverty—more than any other policy or program during that time. Despite the very real social and environmental price of that growth, the world is much better off for it. Blitzscaling also improves social mobility. Compared with a child born to parents in Detroit’s poorest 20 percent, a child born to parents in San Francisco’s poorest 20 percent has double the chance of ending up in the richest 20 percent as an adult. We believe that blitzscaling can bring that kind of economic miracle to other areas of the world, and that educated blitzscalers will be more likely to fulfill their ethical obligations to strive for positive societal impact.
orrrr what if you made it so that being in the poorest 20% wasn't such a tragedy
For the anthology Homewrecker, in which A had a story years before becoming an Adulteress herself, the editor, Daphne Gottlieb, wrote: “I am a few years older now and I know this: There are tastes of mouths I could not have lived without; there are times I’ve pretended it was just about the sex because I couldn’t stand the way my heart was about to burst with happiness and awe and I couldn’t be that vulnerable . . . That waiting to have someone’s stolen seconds can burn you alive. That the shittiest thing you can do in the world is lie to someone you love; also that there are certain times you have no other choice—not honoring this fascination, this car crash of desire, is also a lie. That there is power in having someone risk everything for you. That there is nothing more frightening than being willing to take this freefall. That it is not as simple as we were always promised. Love—at least the pair-bonded, prescribed love—does not conquer all.”
I tried to keep myself away from him by using con words like ‘fidelity’ and ‘adultery,’ by telling myself that he would interfere with my work, that if I had him I’d be too happy to write. I tried to tell myself I was hurting [him], hurting myself, making a spectacle of myself. I was. But nothing helped. I was possessed. The minute he walked into a room and smiled at me, I was a goner.
from fear of flying
“Art cannot save anybody from anything,” wrote Gilbert Sorrentino in perhaps the first sentence from a book that I ever underlined, ever committed to memory, suspecting it would somehow both belie and also exemplify the many truths of me. Who was that girl, barely nineteen, who knew so little of both herself and the transient, tumultuous world that unmakes and reforges us? Who am I, now, on the other side of so much wreckage, still loving, still typing, still here?
If I believe that art can, in fact, save us, over and over again, then does it follow that I risk the audacity of believing that you might be the very one who needs my words to save your life?
“And it seemed to them that they were within an inch of arriving at a decision, and that then a new, beautiful life would begin,” Chekhov concluded his seminal 1899 adultery story “The Lady with the Dog,” which Nabokov considered one of the greatest pieces ever written. “And they both realized that the end was still far, far away, and that the hardest, the most complicated part was only just beginning.”
So it was for me, some one hundred and fifteen years later. And there, I begin.