Reid Hoffman is one of Silicon Valley’s grown-ups. After helping to
found PayPal, he moved on to launch LinkedIn in 2002—an endeavor that
turned him into a billionaire. He was an early investor in Facebook and
now serves as a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock. In this
edited interview with Tim Sullivan, of HBR Press, Hoffman explores his
idea of “blitzscaling”—the discipline of getting very big very fast. In
today’s networked landscape, the path to high-growth, high- impact
entrepreneurship can be chaotic and grueling. It involves rapidly
building out a company to serve a large and usually global market, with
the goal of becoming the first mover at scale. And there’s no playbook
to guide you, Hoffman notes. “You throw yourself off a cliff and
assemble your airplane on the way down.” Hoffman emphasizes that
blitzscaling is not just about growing revenues and the customer base
but also about scaling the organization. People naturally focus on the
first two, and “if you don’t get those right, then nothing else
matters.” But very few businesses can succeed on those fronts without
also building an organization that has the capability and the capacity
to execute at a high level in the face of extremely rapid growth. The
challenges, risks, and headaches of blitzscaling go beyond the
operational; they can take a toll on organizational happiness. “But the
thing that keeps these companies together—whether it’s PayPal, Google,
eBay, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter,” Hoffman says, “is the sense of
excitement about what’s happening and the vision of a great future.”
[ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]