How might that market have developed differently? Blitzscaling isn’t really a recipe for success but rather survivorship bias masquerading as a strategy. Imagine, for a moment, a world in which Uber and Lyft hadn’t been able to raise billions of dollars in a winner-takes-all race to dominate the online ride-hailing market. So, for startups, this strategy typically involves raising lots of capital and moving quickly to dominate a new market, even when the company’s leaders may not know how they are going to make money in the long term. Many of these businesses depend on network effects, which means that the company that gets to scale first is likely to stay on top.

By their definition, blitzscaling (derived from the blitzkrieg or “lightning war” strategy of Nazi general Heinz Guderian) “prioritizes speed over efficiency,” and risks “potentially disastrous defeat in order to maximize speed and surprise.”

If LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and entrepreneur Chris Yeh’s new book Blitzscaling is to be believed, the Uber-style race to the top (or the bottom, depending on your point of view) is the secret of success for today’s technology businesses.īlitzscaling promises to teach techniques that are “the lightning fast path to building massively valuable companies.” Hoffman and Yeh argue that in today’s world, it’s essential to “achieve massive scale at incredible speed” in order to seize the ground before competitors do. Most monopolies or duopolies develop over time, and have been considered dangerous to competitive markets now they are sought after from the start and are the holy grail for investors.

Blitz scaling