Rather, blitzscaling is prioritizing speed over efficiency in the face of uncertainty.”īlitzscaling does call for prioritizing speed over profits, but the more important question to consider is: when and why blitzscale? In any industry, you live and die by the numbers- user acquisition, margins, growth rate, and so on. The precise definition of blitzscaling, which you can find in our book’s first chapter, is: “Blitzscaling isn’t simply a matter of rapid growth.
This analysis will show that despite the company’s remarkable revenue hypergrowth, the WeWork business model as implemented always lacked some of the key growth factors required for successful blitzscaling. (Disclosure: * denotes a current or former Greylock portfolio company.)īut to answer the question, “Is WeWork an example of blitzscaling, and perhaps even more importantly, is blitzscaling appropriate for its business model?” requires a deeper understanding of how we define blitzscaling, which is substantially more than just “get big fast.” If you add together Apple, Alphabet, eBay, Facebook*, Lyft, Palo Alto Networks*, PayPal, Salesforce, ServiceNow*, Twitter, Uber, and Workday*, these twelve companies alone have a market capitalization of $3 Trillion, a little bit more than the annual GDP of the United Kingdom in 2018. We argued extensively in our book, Blitzscaling, that these strategies and tactics describe why Silicon Valley Bay Area – which has a population of less than 4 million – generates such a massively disproportionate number of global technology companies. We certainly appreciate their awareness of blitzscaling, the term we coined for the strategies and tactics for value-creating hypergrowth. New York Magazine offers a vivid example, writing in a WeWork profile: “The 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”: pumping up a company to a market-dominating size as fast as possible, without worrying about profit.“ Prominent news organizations, ranging from The Economist to Wired ( multiple times), have been describing WeWork as an example of blitzscaling.
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