It’s the quintessential question: how do the principles of blitzscaling change as we go from the fabled village to the even more fabled city?
Alas, I cannot deign to know the answer, but I at the same time expect that you’ll read the following words in which I speak on topics I have absolutely no authority over. Such is life.
First, we must describe the principles of blitzscaling in the village stage to understand how they change in moving to the city stage. To my understanding, in order to blitz to the village we need to get something on the order of 100s of people. This involves things like asking your friends to tell their friends to join your company, assuming you have at least 10 friends who each have at least 10 friends, this should work reasonably well (I think). If you’re like me and have no friends, don’t take this route. Thus, friendship is a principle of village blitzscaling.
Let’s talk more about friendship! This seems to be something that falls apart at the city scale — I’ll tell you a quick anecdote about me blitzscaling my Facebook friendships. Back in the golden days of 7th grade, I had a “village” of friends on Facebook. I shared my thoughts liberally, broadcasting everything from when I last got my haircut to how “ugh” the latest homework in social studies was. Things were intimate, close, and moving fast. However, once I started blitzscaling my disruptive social network of peers, I began to sense the culture of my Facebook friends changing. I stopped liking pages like “when u flip the pilow 2 the other side and it is cold” and started adding angsty music choices that I thought would make other people think I was thoughtful and cool. The relation to startups is left as an exercise for the reader.
Elizabeth Holmes has truly blitzed the scale out of Theranos. She’s blitzscaled her media presence, her blitz, her scale — a better name at this point would be Thera-yaaaaaaaaass queen.
I plan to apply these principles to my own life. I already have thousands of Facebook friends, so I suppose I’ve basically already made it in that sense. There’s still room to grow, though! There are so many opportunities to blitzscale things my life. I think of blitzscaling less as a set of principles, and more as a life philosophy. “To blitz is to scale,” as I once said. Ask not what your country can blitz for you, ask what you can scale for your country.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less blitzscaled,
And that has made all the difference.
Huge thanks to the 183C teaching team (John Lilly, Reid Hoffman, Allen Blue, and Chris Yeh) for blitzscaling my world.
