It’s become fashionable among some entrepreneurs, and even some venture capitalists, to badmouth the venture capital industry. The industry certainly has many flaws. But to paraphrase Winston Churchill, venture capital is the worst method for financing scaling startups except for all the others. One of the conversations I had with Wences Casares (founder and CEO of Xapo), during…
Silicon Valley can frequently be too provincial in its views of entrepreneurship, strategy, and markets. Part of why I’m on this trip with Wences Casares (founder and CEO of Xapo) is to learn (and share) a broader view of entrepreneurship, where the strategies of Blitzscaling can be applied outside of Silicon Valley and China, and participate in Endeavor’s critical global mission for…
I’ve come down to Argentina with my friend and portfolio company CEO, Wences Casares, the founder of Xapo. Wences and I have served on the board of Endeavor together, which enables high impact entrepreneurship around the world. As part of connecting with local Argentinian entrepreneurs and part of the amazing Endeavor networks here and South America, Wences and I…
Successful entrepreneurs have to find a way to combine both incredible patience and explosive speed. Sounds paradoxical? Perhaps, but that same, seemingly conflicting combination has powered the success of fashion designer Tory Burch. In this episode of Masters of Scale, you’ll hear how Tory’s remarkable story combines patience and speed. You’ll hear how Tory went from a tomboy who…
Prominent news organizations, ranging from The Economist to Wired (multiple times), have been describing WeWork as an example of blitzscaling. New York Magazine offers a vivid example, writing in a WeWork profile: “The [Softbank] Vision Fund began making enormous bets on Uber, Slack, DoorDash, and dozens of other companies, employing a strategy that has come to be known, with some derision, as “blitzscaling”:…
During the 2016 presidential campaign, a truism emerged that the best way to understand Donald Trump is to take him seriously, not literally. This has always struck me as nonsense, for two reasons. First, it creates an artificial divide where there is in fact a natural unity: Taking someone literally is an obvious early step in…
Today, there is a vigorous debate raging between cryptocurrency and centralized currencies. Bitcoin celebrated its tenth anniversary this year, and cryptocurrency values overall were climbing again after a period of decline. Media interest increased again too, and with it, arguments about cryptocurrency’s volatility and ultimate value to society. Was it still just a speculative fad…
How I’m working with Harvard Business School Online to teach the counterintuitive truths of scaling up As a founder, you rarely have enough time to step back and strategize. Entrepreneurs feel the pressure to execute, often prioritizing daily firefighting over long-term planning. You put your blinders on and stay laser-focused on what’s directly ahead. But…
More than 122 million lives saved. Hundreds of millions people lifted out of extreme poverty. Over the course of its existence, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has helped drive massive positive outcomes like that by focusing on what it calls “actionable measurement” – aka a commitment to collecting and analyzing data about its activities and interventions, and then…
This episode in our Greymatter Blitzscaling capsule series, with Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh, focuses on the topic of competitive strategy. In an ideal world, you won’t have any competition. But the world is far from ideal. How should a blitzscaling company think about and respond to the competition? Below is an edited transcript of Reid…
Welcome to the next production of Blitzscaling! Since the launch of our book, and after the Stanford class, Chris Yeh and I have received many questions from entrepreneurs who want more details on how to blitzscale their companies. We want to answer the questions at scale! That’s why we’re working with the team at Greylock Partners to release the…
The best way to combat global poverty at scale is to put money directly into the hands of millions of people who have very little of it. That’s the simple, powerful vision that Segovia CEO Michael Faye and his co-founder Paul Niehaus pitched me in 2015, and the reason I was excited to lead their Series A round with a personal…
In Silicon Valley, intelligence is both abundant and coveted. Because of this fact, Silicon Valley job interview questions have gotten tougher — and weirder — as interviewers devise queries designed to identify the best of the brightest. Consider, these brainteasers that various companies have asked job candidates in recent years: How many golf balls can…
Tim O’Reilly’s recent article, “The fundamental problem with Silicon Valley’s favorite growth strategy,” makes an impassioned argument that the ideas in our book, Blitzscaling, encourage entrepreneurs to behave in ways that are irresponsible or even dangerous in the pursuit of what he characterizes as “runaway growth.” Instead, he argues for the virtues of going slow and…
The Utopian Vision of AI In the late 1800s, in what’s known as the Second Industrial Revolution, multiple major new technologies initiated an era marked by even more rapid transformation than the century that preceded it — especially in the United States. Electrification, railroads, telegraphs, and eventually the automobile all helped unleash unprecedented productivity gains,…