Reid Hoffman

Your competitive advantage is formed by the interplay of three different, ever-changing forces: your assets, your aspirations/values, and the market realities, i.e., the supply and demand for what you offer the marketplace relative to the competition.

If you’re willing to accept the risks of blitzscaling when others aren’t, you’ll be able to move faster than they will. If the prize to be won is big enough, and the competition to win it is intense enough, blitzscaling becomes a rational, even optimal strategy.

The real value creation comes when innovative technology enables innovative products and services with innovative business models.

In this sense, the world of tomorrow will be more like the Silicon Valley of today: constant change and chaos.

Years later, Steve Blank and Eric Ries would dub this a “minimum viable product” (MVP). For LinkedIn, the MVP included a user’s professional profile, the ability to connect to other users, a search function to find other users, and a mechanism for sending messages to friends.

A lot of smart people are prone to over-analysis and tend to become paralyzed by indecision

If you aren’t embarrassed by the first version of your product, you shipped too late.

Blitzscaling requires more than just courage and skill on the part of the entrepreneur. It also requires an environment that is willing to finance intelligent risks with both financial capital and human capital, which are the essential ingredients for blitzscaling. Think of them as fuel and oxygen; you need both to propel the rocket skyward. Meanwhile, the infrastructure of your organization is the actual structure of your rocket, which you’re rebuilding on the fly as you rise. Your job as a leader and an entrepreneur is to make sure that you have sufficient fuel to propel your growth while making the necessary mechanical adjustments to the actual rocket ship to keep it from flying apart as it accelerates. Fortunately, this is more possible today than it has ever been in the past.

you need to think and act like you’re running a start-up: your career.

They scribbled observations in notebooks.

As with her previous tours, the process of defining the tour was a collaboration between Gultekin and her manager. “Dan always asks, ‘What do you want to do in five years?’ and we work backwards from there,” Gultekin told us. “I want to be a general manager, so we decided that I needed to add sales to my toolkit. I had never done sales in my life but he knew that my fresh perspective could be useful.” Notice how the mission had to serve the needs of both the employee and the business; Gultekin and LinkedIn have a strong alliance because they have the mutual trust to commit to a mutual investment (shifting to sales) that will provide mutual benefit (a more well-rounded skill set for Gultekin, and a fresh perspective for LinkedIn).

Third, blitzscaling opens up access to capital, because investors generally prefer to back market leaders.

When blitzscaling, speed is more important than having a “well-run” organization. Under normal circumstances, you should strive for organizational coherence and stability. Chaotic, unstable organizations make employees nervous and hurt morale. But when you’re scaling up at lightning speed, you may need to reorganize the company three times in a single year, or repeatedly churn through members of your management team.

What can we do to surprise you?” or “What would it take for me to design something that you would literally tell every single person you’ve ever encountered?

Start a personal blog and begin developing a public reputation and public portfolio of work that’s not tied to your employer.