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1-Page Summary of Blitzscaling

Overview

At the end of 1996, businesses that were founded in the industrial age were still some of the most valuable companies in the world. These included General Electric, Royal Dutch Shell, The Coca-Cola Company, ExxonMobil and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone.

The world is different today. The top five companies in the past are no longer so. They’ve been replaced by Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. These companies have taken over the world economy with a $3.5 trillion valuation from Silicon Valley alone.

Many tech companies have grown from small, scrappy start-ups to large corporations in just a few years. The main reason for this is blitzscaling. In these key points, you’ll learn what the word “blitzscaling” means; why fortune favors the bold in today’s economy; and how one of the keys to making money is often losing money.

Big Idea #1: Blitzscaling is a form of very rapid sustainable business growth that lets companies quickly reach a massive scale.

Blitzscaling is a recently invented word. It’s made up of two words: Blitz and Scaling. The easiest way to define blitzscaling is to break it down into its components: blitz, which means “fast” or “quick”, and scaling, which refers to growing something large in a short amount of time.

In German, “blitz” means lightning. In modern English, it has become an informal way to describe what happens when a company tries to achieve something at lightening speed. For example, if a company suddenly floods the airwaves with a full-throttle advertising campaign, that would be considered blitz marketing. Scaling in business refers to scaling up and growing your company in a sustainable manner without losing proportionality among its parts (i.e., infrastructure, resources and labor force).

If you want to expand your lemonade business, you need to invest in more lemons, cups and workers. If one of those areas is lacking, the expansion won’t be sustainable.

If you are able to avoid the problem of having a bad product, and your lemonade stand expands to every block in the city, then you’ve achieved scaling.

Put all of these ideas together, and you get a good idea of what blitzscaling is: it’s business growth that’s both very rapid and proportional. It happened when Amazon went from having 151 employees in 1996 to 7,600 employees in 1999 — an increase of 50 times their workforce and 322 times their revenue.

While every company wants to grow, it’s not always easy. However, if you want to be successful and grow your business, there are certain things that you need to do in order for that to happen. We’ll find out what those things are in the rest of this article.

Big Idea #2: Blitzscaling embraces uncertainty and risk.

The word blitz has a negative connotation because of the military strategy it represents. The German army used this tactic in World War II, which is now known as blitzkrieg in English.

Inspired by British military thinkers, the Allies developed a new strategy to fight in World War II. It was different from what they had done before because it required them to advance quickly and aggressively into enemy territory.

Blitzkrieg is a military strategy that involves swift and decisive attacks by an army. It can be risky, but it often pays off in the end.

Blitzscaling is a new form of scaling that involves taking risks and being bold. It’s different from traditional scaling because it requires you to embrace uncertainty. For example, if an American company wants to expand overseas, it would typically set up an office in one country and wait for it to establish itself before setting up another office in another country.