Blitzscaling - The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

Wimdu was founded in March 2011, and, within weeks, the Berlin-based company had hired a staggering four hundred employees and opened twenty offices across Europe.

The Samwer brothers had named their price: Airbnb could have Wimdu in exchange for a 25-percent stake in Airbnb. Now Brian faced a difficult decision, with painful consequences regardless of what option he chose.

Blitzscaling is a strategy and set of techniques for driving and managing extremely rapid growth that prioritize speed over efficiency in an environment of uncertainty.

Take on the additional risk and discomfort of blitzscaling your company,

Blitzscaling is what separates the start-ups that get disrupted and disappear as the world changes from the ones that scale up to become market leaders and shape the future.

my podcast, Masters of Scale.)

Sure, Silicon Valley is the leading hub for high-tech talent and venture capital, but it didn’t start out that way. Sure, it is blessed with great universities, such as Stanford and Berkeley, but so are plenty of other regions. The answer can’t be simply the combination of venture capital, research universities, and smart people. This combination of ingredients is far from unique. In fact, the same basic ingredients can easily be found in numerous start-up clusters in the United States and around the world: Austin, Boston, New York, Seattle, Shanghai, Bangalore, Istanbul, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, and Dubai.

While Silicon Valley certainly has many key networks and resources that make it easier to apply the techniques we’re going to lay out for you, blitzscaling is made up of basic principles that do not depend on geography.