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This is when there are just a handful of employees at the company ( between 1-9). The game changes as you progress to each new stage – how management works, how recruiting works, what kind of structure the organization needs, etc.Īnd what may have worked for you before to progress from stage #1 – #2 isn’t going to be the best practice for jumping from stage #2 to stage #3, for example. “The chessboard keeps adding new pieces and new dimensions over time.” – Drew Houston, Dropbox Now, transitioning between stages is much like a game of strategy…
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Seeing as the most obvious change a business undertakes when scaling up is the number of employees, this is the determining factor of a company’s growth “stage”. Typically, startups go through a five-stage process of growth as they blitzscale their way to the top of the market: It provides a solid framework for companies wanting to scale harder and faster than the competition, backed by examples from tech incumbents such as Amazon, LinkedIn, Airbnb, and Google. He coined the term from the German blitzkrieg (lightning war), a reference to the Wehrmacht’s prioritization of speed over all else as they rampaged across Europe in World War Two.īlitzscaling gained increased popularity after the publication of the book Blitzscaling – The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies in 2018, written by Hoffman and co-author Chris Yeh.
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The concept of Blitzscaling was first introduced to us in September 2015 by Reid Hoffman – the co-founder of LinkedIn – at a Stanford University course.
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