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.”
