Reid Hoffman - Leader at Paypal and LinkedIn, one of the founders of Greylock Partners

Reid Hoffman and Chris yeh - Blitzscaling

I drive a lot. To pass the time and help me ignore the traffic, I listen to Audible. Usually non-fiction, and usually business-related. I am also an entrepreneurship junkie. I have been lucky enough to be part of a number of companies that were out to change the world. From waterbeds to microcomputers to the first commercial email product to enterprise software to the first SaaS venture to Medicare Part D, I have often chased the dream of big growth and occasionally caught it.

This week I started listening to Blitzscaling by one of the founders of Paypal and LinkedIn and a legendary partner at one of our investors, Greylock, Reid Hoffman. I had listed to Reid on Tim Ferriss’ podcast and his own Masters of Scale.

On one of those podcasts, Reid had told a story about a company they invested in called Airbnb. When the venture was in very early stages, the board asked the founders what was working and what was not working. The answer was a bit lacking. “We don’t really know” was the answer. They explained, “We are in San Francisco. The properties that have high rental rates are in NYC.” Reid said to the founders of Airbnb, “While you are small, you can do things that are very valuable but won’t scale once you are larger.” The founders themselves flew to NYC, dropped in on a property and asked the owner “What do you like, and what don’t you like about Airbnb?” The answers became their product roadmap for the next year.

“What can you do now that won’t scale later?” What a great question. Blitzscaling is full of this type of wisdom. For example,

My Greylock colleague Jerry Chen, who helped Diane Greene scale VMware’s virtualization software into a massive business, likes to point out, “Every billion-dollar business started as a ten-million-dollar business.” But whether you are creating a new market, expanding an existing market, or relying on adjacent markets to get to those “B’s” that investors want, you need to have a plausible path to get from here to there.

Hoffman, Reid; Yeh, Chris. Blitzscaling (p. 56).

This is a great read or listen…

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