The Art of Blitzscaling
The term blitzscaling draws inspiration from the German concept of lightning warfare (“blitzkrieg”). While at first I thought this comparison was a bit of grandstanding, I eventually came to see the parallels between the art of blitzscaling and the Art of War. We imagine blitzkrieg to begin and end with the panzer tank, a superior technology enabling victory through fast movement. Similarly, when we see these tech unicorns we see the end result, the amazing product that seems destined to dominate its market. That core technology is important, but it takes a larger blueprint to achieve success. Finding that blueprint is what blitzscaling is all about.
When to Commit your Troops to Battle
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” — Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Nothing matters if you don’t have product market fit. You can build something truly great, but that doesn’t mean people want it. Product market fit is the nexus of understanding — knowledge of your users and knowledge of self. You need to come to understand the exact identity of your user, and the minutiae of their needs. This understanding becomes your underlying assumption of the market. As Ann Miura-Ko said: “every great startup has one fundamental assumption that has less than a 50% chance of being correct, but will give you a 20x advantage in the market”. From this assumption you must also seek clarity in yourself. How does your product work to solve that user’s needs? Is your value proposition as clear and compelling to the user as you might believe? This is the work of the family stage, and correctly answering these questions will lay the foundation for all future battles.
“He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks.”
Family. Tribe. Village. It’s no coincidence that the stages of blitzscaling are all about people. To extend the warfare conceit, one of blitzkrieg’s core innovations was organizational — realizing that distributed decision-making was key to outmaneuvering opponents. Thus building a strong company culture that enables quick and precise decisions to be made across the entire enterprise is essential to success. Before you scale, you (and your co-founders) can be involved in everything, and remain agile enough to compensate when people are not on the same page. As you grow, your CEO cannot be (nor should they be) in every room or meeting. Instead, you must articulate a clear vision for how employees interact with each other, and how decisions will be made. Doing this before hitting the gas pedal ensures that your returns to scale are positive — you can trust new troops will move and think with common cause.
“Even the finest sword plunged into salt water will eventually rust.”
Having product-market fit is important, but it’s not the end-all, be-all of blitzscaling. If you’re going to extend your (financial) front to the point of no return, where you either fail spectacularly or emerge victorious, then you must ensure you have the necessary firepower. It’s not enough to know that a market need exists and that your product fulfills that need — there must be some group that loves your product enough to make it truly successful. This love serves as the catalyst, the activation energy to move people to your platform and retain them. Some people will want your product, but who will need it? Once you’ve answered that question, it’s time to advance.
Doing Things That Don’t Scale
“Do not repeat the tactics which have gained you one victory, but let your methods be regulated by the infinite variety of circumstances.”
A principle tenet of blitzscaling is to do things that do not scale — these can often be your special advantage, your “secret sauce” that makes the difference between listing the startup on your B School application and including it in your memoir. The most poignant example of this concept comes from AirBnB founder Brian Chesky, who went door to door photographing people’s apartments to create the curb appeal necessary to drive adoption of the service. However, recognizing when to scale also means recognizing when and how to stop this unscalable behavior, and build something scalable in its place.
Mariam Naficy at Minted understood the impossible challenge of fighting a war on two fronts — running a consumer-facing online store while simultaneously managing a vital community of independent designers. She made a risky decision in the early stages to essentially put the creator community on life support (make the experience simple and intuitive, put some social incentives in place, and back off) to focus on getting the store itself rolling. This ultimately paid off, and when resources permitted they began to focus more on minted’s vibrant creator community. Yet their approach to the community now speaks to the lessons learned from doing things that don’t scale. The hypothesis that giving creative people a simple experience to create, while creating social rewards (being featured on the front page, etc.) is paramount to how they engage that community today. Rather than doing something completely different, Minted’s current strategy exists more as an evolution of that basic premise, adapted to different circumstances and needs.
For Google it was their hiring process, in which Larry & Sergey personally reviewed every single hire for years. This practice bespeaks a commitment to a certain culture, a certain profile of employee, and a commitment to quality in the pursuit of those ideals. Yet I believe the evolution of this practice is more informative. Over time they began to develop advanced metrics to predict employee performance to inform the hiring process, refined over time by the duo themselves. So even as they transitioned away from the decision-making process, they found a way to institutionalize their thinking into the very fabric of the hiring process. In their own way, they actually made the unscalable scale.
On Speed & Timing
“The worst calamities that befall an army arise from hesitation.”
When people think of blitzkrieg, they often focus only on blinding speed. Sure, the speed of advance is undoubtedly important, but the central innovation of that strategy was under the hood: organizational and technological innovation enabling fast, decisive, distributed action across multiple fronts. Similarly, I feel as though when people think of blitzscaling we may tend to envision speed for the sake of speed. Indeed, there were constant overtures to the necessity of speed throughout this course. Failing to capitalize on market opportunities is obviously bad, and moving slow is a death wish. Yet I find myself wondering, “is blitzscaling really about speed, or about moving with purpose, clarity, and direction?” Startup life is naturally chaotic and frenetic. In a way, blitzscaling is less about moving quickly, and more about bringing order and purpose to that chaos, enabling you to see the battlefield more clearly than your opponent and claim victory.
Closing Thoughts
“If you fight with all your might, there is a chance of life; whereas death is certain if you cling to your corner.”
As I move forward from this course, I will take these lessons and many more on my journey. Yet if I’ve learned one thing, it’s that blitzscaling is grueling, lonely work. As Reid once said, “Only start a startup if you can’t not start that startup”. Unless the idea grabs you and ignites your passion, your creativity, and your determination, all of these lessons are for naught. You may enter battle with all the weapons, tactics, and strategy in the world, but you still need the resolve to continue fighting in the thick of battle.
