“When a startup matures to the point where it has a killer product, a clear and sizable market and a robust distribution channel, it has the opportunity to become a “scaleup,”- a world changing company that touches millions or even billions of lives. Often the fastest and most direct path from startup to scaleup is the hypergrowth produced by blitzscaling.” — Reid Hoffman

What separates the startups that become enduring, market-defining companies from the ones who don’t? Successful startups get to scale as fast as possible, which solidifies their competitive and enduring advantage over the long-term. Blitzscaling is how companies achieve massive scale at incredible speed.

In their new book, Blitzscaling: The Lightning Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies, Reid Hoffman and co-author Chris Yeh share a set of techniques and strategies for pursuing rapid growth by prioritizing speed over efficiency in an environment of uncertainty. This book charts what it takes to scale a startup company from garage to global scale.

At Greylock, we partner with entrepreneurs early on and support them through their entire journey — or, as we like to say, “from startup to scaleup.” We understand the unique challenges entrepreneurs face because we have lived them personally as operators.

I talked to several of our partners and gathered some of their personal insights from their own experiences with blitzscaling.

“Distribution is vital to the success of a company. Companies including Dropbox and Slack have succeeded in securing and keeping users through virality and the kicker is they also have a product that users keep coming back to. Focus your business model on maximizing growth through distribution channels such as virality and by leveraging existing networks. And also create a product that people can’t live or work without. When I initially invested in Dropbox, I was drawn in by their combination of organic and incentivized virality. They were on track to triple its user base within months of their initial launch and retaining customers not only because individuals were sharing the product but Drew and the team coupled this growth with a great product that users needed daily.” — John Lilly

“Solving for the go-to-market problem is critical to the success of a startup against incumbent companies that have advantages in sales, marketing and distribution. One of the keys to crafting a successful go-to-market strategy is picking a pricing and packaging that is scalable. For example, Blend’s business model was designed to originally dominate the mortgage market. But as the company scaled, their business model grew in parallel with the company and enabled them to take on more products including homeowner’s insurance.” — Jerry Chen

“It’s important to understand the true market you serve and what winning that market will strategically enable you to do. Some of the best entrepreneurs begin by focusing on the sharpest pain in an industry full of fertile problems, vs. an attack on the ‘biggest’ market — your initial success will earn you the right to serve your customer more broadly. Focus and speed of execution is a repeatedly undervalued competitive advantage against incumbents who may initially overlook your ‘small market.’

Entrepreneurs building new experiences also have to imagine market expansion and industry restructuring. Airbnb, for example, could have been easy to write off as narrowly targeting a fringe creative market renting out air mattresses. However, the number of people with underutilized real estate who were interested in sharing their homes was larger than many anticipated. Now Airbnb is one of the biggest hospitality businesses in the world.” — Sarah Guo

“Opportunity is the primary factor when considering whether and when to blitzscale. I suggest companies adopt a strategy of blitzscaling when becoming the first player to achieve scale means strong and lasting competitive advantages. Blitzscaling is unlikely to prove successful if another company has already achieved this advantage, or if the market itself doesn’t offer compelling sources of lasting competitive advantages, such as network effects.” — John Lilly

“Blitzscaling as a strategy can be successful under any market conditions — whether the market is good or bad. I left a career as Product Manager at Google to start TellApart, just two weeks before the financial crisis had peaked in 2008. Fundraising is about momentum, you need momentum of the business, team and idea before you can expect momentum of investors. The key is to use capital as a weapon. If you spend money in smart ways, you can deploy capital to beat out your competitors, get to market faster and claim market dominance.” — Josh McFarland

“Blitzscaling is most appropriate when you can foresee a potential qualitative change in your strategic position, good or bad. Sometimes it’s a matter of survival, sometimes you are trying to dominate a space early and solidify certain advantages. Blitzscaling isn’t appropriate if you are spending money in the same way your competitors are and there’s no ‘endgame.’ That’s just aggressive spending.” — Sarah Guo

“Successful technology companies scale very, very quickly — often growing 2–4x in employees each year. And so there are, literally, 5 orders of magnitude difference in employee scale between a 3 person startup and the 60,000 employees that Google has today for example. What works at 1–10 might work for a while, but then totally break at 50 or 100. To make sense & survive any of it, you have to have a profoundly change-oriented approach. You have to understand that any process or organization will work for awhile, then it won’t. So you go in with a sense of intentionality and thinking about what you want your organization to do at any given stage, and you try to design to that, while keeping the wheels on the bus/wings on the plane through some chaotic times.” — John Lilly

“To build a sustainable and profitable business, you need strong defensive moats around your company. No moat is absolute or permanent, and will evolve as your company grows, but having a thesis on your defensibility is essential. Traditional wisdom continues to tell us that building in direct competition with cloud leaders such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft you will not succeed. But I believe there are many missed opportunities to build great technologies on top of these platforms that are passed by our of fear of competing.” —Jerry Chen

“One of the typical challenges at a scaling company is the transition from small teams to large teams. When it comes to hiring executives everyone is the wrong person, because no one besides you and the founding team has shared the experiences of growing your company. It was a challenge for me as a founder. TellApart could have scaled faster by hiring more leaders early on. The learning lesson I took is that the founder can’t do everything forever. You need to bring on executives who challenge you as a leader and question your decisions. The characteristic I most look for in an executive hire is confident humility- someone who is assertive in their skills, but not arrogant in their management approach. — Josh McFarland

“Blitzscaling is an iterative process so don’t be afraid. When thinking about your go-to-market strategy: hypothesize, try new things and don’t be afraid to walk away if things aren’t working. Define your unit of value and then create a road map to increase that value as you scale. Determine how you can layer and stack your services and technology on top of each other to create non-linear value over time. — Jerry Chen

“It’s important to consider the moral and social obligations, and potential impact your company might have on the market and people. While building an organization, a well-developed moral compass will help set the rules for the good of humanity rather than just for the good of your own profits.” — Reid Hoffman

To learn more about successful blitzscaling, subscribe to Greymatter. In the coming weeks, Greylock will release a blitzscaling-focused five podcast capsule series. On each episode, you’ll hear different Greylock partners discuss personal experiences from building — and blitzscaling — their own companies. Guests include Reid Hoffman, Sarah Guo, John Lilly, Josh McFarland and Jerry Chen. Chris Yeh moderates each conversation.