Startup Series Quotes

When telling a story you can utilize numerous ways to create an attractive narrative that will enchant your audience aka ideal customers and clients.

Branding is a process that aims to shape how people view your company or product through its image and its foundational purpose. Ultimately, the idea is to create an emotional response.

Natalie, who was the author of a series of wildly successful Hunger Games meets Gossip Girl YA books about a clique of girls at a postapocalyptic prep school who have to simultaneously fight for popularity and for the survival of the planet—hadn

Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic series, explains his success this way: I succeeded as a cartoonist with negligible art talent, some basic writing skills, an ordinary sense of humor and a bit of experience in the business world. The “Dilbert” comic is a combination of all four skills. The world has plenty of better artists, smarter writers, funnier humorists and more experienced business people. The rare part is that each of those modest skills is collected in one person. That’s how value is created.

The story of Whole Foods Market provides dramatic evidence of the power of macro trends to create opportunities that savvy entrepreneurs can capitalize on. Such trends – in this case, sociocultural ones – create groups of customers having needs not served well by incumbent companies. The trend towards health and nutrition that began in the 1980s is still going strong,

While a 10x improvement is gargantuan, Teller has very specific reasons for aiming exactly that high. “You assume that going 10x bigger is going to be ten times harder,” he continues, “but often it’s literally easier to go bigger. Why should that be? It doesn’t feel intuitively right. But if you choose to make something 10 percent better, you are almost by definition signing up for the status quo—and trying to make it a little bit better. That means you start from the status quo, with all its existing assumptions, locked into the tools, technologies, and processes that you’re going to try to slightly improve. It means you’re putting yourself and your people into a smartness contest with everyone else in the world. Statistically, no matter the resources available, you’re not going to win. But if you sign up for moonshot thinking, if you sign up to make something 10x better, there is no chance of doing that with existing assumptions. You’re going to have to throw out the rule book. You’re going to have to perspective-shift and supplant all that smartness and resources with bravery and creativity.” This perspective shift is key. It encourages risk taking and enhances creativity while simultaneously guarding against the inevitable decline. Teller explains: “Even if you think you’re going to go ten times bigger, reality will eat into your 10x. It always does. There will be things that will be more expensive, some that are slower; others that you didn’t think were competitive will become competitive. If you shoot for 10x, you might only be at 2x by the time you’re done. But 2x is still amazing. On the other hand, if you only shoot for 2x [i.e., 200 percent], you’re only going to get 5 percent and it’s going to cost you the perspective shift that comes from aiming bigger.” Most critically here, this 10x strategy doesn’t hold true just for large corporations. “A start-up is simply a skunk works without the big company around it,” says Teller. “The upside is there’s no Borg to get sucked back into; the downside is you have no money. But that’s not a reason not to go after moonshots. I think the opposite is true. If you publicly state your big goal, if you vocally commit yourself to making more progress than is actually possible using normal methods, there’s no way back. In one fell swoop you’ve severed all ties between yourself and all the expert assumptions.” Thus entrepreneurs, by striving for truly huge goals, are tapping into the same creativity accelerant that Google uses to achieve such goals. That said, by itself, a willingness to take bigger risks

Take the New York–based Lemonade, arguably the best funded of today’s crowdsurance startups. Via an app, Lemonade brings together small groups of policyholders who pay premiums into a central “claim pool.” Artificial intelligence does the rest. The entire experience is mobile, simple, and fast. Ninety seconds to get insured, three minutes to get a claim paid, and zero paperwork. Adding more technology to this arrangement, companies like the Swiss firm Etherisc sell “bespoke insurance products” on the Ethereum blockchain. Because smart contracts remove the need for employees, paperwork, and all the rest, all sorts of new insurance products are being created. Etherisc’s first offering is something not covered by traditional insurers: flight delays and cancellations. Individuals sign up via credit card, and if their plane is more than forty-five minutes late, they’re paid instantly, automatically, and without the need for any paperwork.

Mosseri’s answer to the important question was perfect by Facebook standards: “Technology isn’t good or bad—it just is,” he wrote. “Social media is a great amplifier. We need to do all we can responsibly to magnify the good and address the bad.” But nothing “just is,” especially Instagram. Instagram isn’t designed to be a neutral technology, like electricity or computer code. It’s an intentionally crafted experience, with an impact on its users that is not inevitable, but is the product of a series of choices by its makers about how to shape behavior. Instagram trained its users on likes and follows, but that wasn’t enough to create the emotional attachment users have to the product today. They also thought about their users as individuals, through the careful curation of an editorial strategy, and partnerships with top accounts. Instagram’s team is expert at amplifying “the good.” When it comes to addressing “the bad,” though, employees are concerned the app is thinking in terms of numbers, not people. Facebook’s top argument against a breakup is that its “family of apps” evolution will be better for users’ safety. “If you want to prevent interference in elections, if you want to reduce[…]

I intuitively did well when I was leading the whole team, but once we got past 25 people, you can't do that. And so I made a series of classic mistakes in hiring. And not building a good middle management structure. And not recruiting a board that could help me build the company. Big mistakes in picking a successor, big mistakes in having an undisciplined product strategy—I was much more interested in having distinctive, innovative products and thinking about what would make sense for a product line for our business overall—and big mistakes in expanding too fast and not having discipline about what we were doing. So I give myself a C or C– on all that stuff.

I nostri cinque peccati che scoraggiano ricerca e innovazione Dalla politica all’università, il sistema italiano continua a ostacolare l’economia della conoscenza Start-up al palo Dai laboratori al business: in Italia è ancora difficile riuscire a trasferire le scoperte teoriche nell’industria Riccardo Viale | 831 parole Da quando è stato introdotto il concetto di economia e di società della conoscenza, come importante elemento delle politiche pubbliche, si è iniziato ad analizzare l’insieme delle condizioni di contorno - le «framework condition» - in grado di stimolare o di ostacolare lo sviluppo di questo modello. La strategia di Lisbona del 2000 aveva lo scopo di rendere l’Europa l’area più competitiva a livello mondiale proprio come economia e società della conoscenza. Oggi abbiamo i risultati: in media c’è stato un arretramento, secondo la maggior parte degli indicatori, rispetto ai principali concorrenti internazionali. E l’Italia? Come si può immaginare, non ha realizzato alcun serio passo in avanti: non solo per le condizioni dirette (come finanziamento alla ricerca, numero di ricercatori e di brevetti, indici bibliometrici o rapporto università-impresa), ma per le «framework conditions». Ma più che dare dati vorrei riferirmi ad una serie di situazioni tipiche, ragionando con il modello degli incentivi dal macro al micro. Per mostrare come la dinamica sociale ed economica italiana sia intrisa di incentivi negativi. La logica del breve termine Innanzitutto, a livello di sistema politico e di governo nazionale e regionale, gli obiettivi dell’economia e della società della conoscenza sono in genere percepiti di medio e lungo termine. Di conseguenza, in un Paese che vive lo «shortermismo» della logica emergenziale, nulla è più marginale del sistema della Ricerca&Sviluppo. Questo «bias», d’altra parte, non è solo italiano, se si considera la recente scelta di Juncker di indebolire il fondo «Horizon 2020» per potenziare quello di stimolo immediato all’economia. Seconda tipologia. Le università italiane sono fuori da tutte le graduatorie internazionali. Anche le migliori, come il Politecnico di Milano e Torino o la Bocconi, sono a metà classifica. Si sa che uno degli strumenti prioritari per stimolare l’eccellenza e la diversificazione accademica è la «premialità economica» dei migliori atenei, secondo un sistema simile a quello del «Rae» britannico: lasciando da parte il problema del mediocre sistema italiano della valutazione, mentre in Gran Bretagna l’incentivo economico arriva a un terzo del finanziamento pubblico, da noi si ferma a molto meno (anche se dai tempi del ministro Moratti si vede un certo progresso). Non esiste, quindi, un sufficiente effetto incentivante di tipo meritocratico sulla produzione di conoscenza. Terza tipologia. Anni fa, in Lombardia, una multinazionale della telefonia aveva proposto un centro di ricerca avanzato. Ciò avrebbe consentito una collaborazione con i centri di ricerca già presenti nel territorio, in primis il Politecnico di Milano. Cosa successe dopo? Una lista di problemi, ostacoli ed incoerenze tipiche della pubblica amministrazione. Tutto questo era in contrasto con il programma dell’azienda, che decise di trasferire il progetto in un altro Paese. Quarta tipologia. Spesso si parla di sostenere le nuove idee per garantire la nascita di start-up ed imprese innovative. Ma quale incentivo può avere un ingegnere o un biochimico a creare una «newcom», quando è quasi impossibile trovare il «seed money» (quello per le fasi iniziali) nelle banche ed è quasi inesistente il capitale di rischio del venture capital, mentre non si ha la possibilità di valorizzare finanziariamente una start-up a livello di Borsa, dato che manca, in Italia ma anche in Europa, un analogo del Nasdaq? La crisi del fund raising Infine - quinta ed ultima (tra le molte) tipologia di disincentivi - è la capacità di «fund raising» per la ricerca dei

Successful entrepreneurial ventures are about serving customers and their needs and resolving their pain. Not just any customers. Target customers. It

Practice telling the story of your startup. Write it down so the words are succinct. Make each one count. Create a 30 second, 3 minute, and 30 minute version.

One individual can typically care for no more than 10 people. Creating a 1:10 people system from the beginning allows you to provide the depth of spiritual relationship and mentoring people need and desire, while also scaling for growth.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune . . . We must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures. William Shakespeare1

Some lead by example, like Rand Fishkin of Moz (formerly SEOmoz), who says his goal is to create a hundred new millionaires — then issued additional stock grants for every Moz employee as a part of the Series B funding, directly out of his personal holdings, to ensure that a financing round wouldn’t be dilutive.

Winners throw out the traditional product management and introduction processes they learned at existing companies. Instead, they combine agile engineering and Customer Development to iteratively build, test and search for a business model, turning unknowns into knowns. Winners also recognize their startup “vision” as a series of untested hypotheses in need of “customer proof.” They relentlessly test for insights, and they course-correct in days or weeks, not months or years, to preserve cash and eliminate time wasted on building features and products that customers don’t want.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, success in entrepreneurship isn’t necessarily related to being the best at any particular activity. Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic series, explains his success this way: I succeeded as a cartoonist with negligible art talent, some basic writing skills, an ordinary sense of humor and a bit of experience in the business world. The “Dilbert” comic is a combination of all four skills. The world has plenty of better artists, smarter writers, funnier humorists and more experienced business people. The rare part is that each of those modest skills is collected in one person. That’s how value is created.2

Enter Light Field Lab, a California-based startup manufacturing the first-ever display technology able to generate those trillions of photons. While their initial displays are only four- by six-inches across, they’re capable of projecting a holographic image two inches thick, viewable

If we are diligent about building well-formed and robust systems, we should never let little, convenient idioms lead to modularity breakdown. The startup process of object construction and wiring is no exception.

Through the seemingly impossible Loudcloud series C and IPO processes, I learned one important lesson: Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.

Business ideas are like human reproduction – they never cease to be birthed as long as there is constant interaction between the brain and questions of life.

Many of these students seem to have a blinkered view of their options. There’s crass but affluent investment banking. There’s the poor but noble nonprofit world. And then there is the world of high-tech start-ups, which magically provides money and coolness simultaneously. But there was little interest in or awareness of the ministry, the military, the academy, government service or the zillion other sectors. Furthermore, few students showed any interest in working for a company that actually makes products. . . . [C]ommunity service has become a patch for morality. Many people today have not been given vocabularies to talk about what virtue is, what character consists of, and in which way excellence lies, so they just talk about community service. . . . In whatever field you go into, you will face greed, frustration and failure. You may find your life challenged by depression, alcoholism, infidelity, your own stupidity and self-indulgence. . . . Furthermore . . . [a]round what ultimate purpose should your life revolve? Are you capable of heroic self-sacrifice or is life just a series of achievement hoops? . . . You can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck. You can spend your life on Wall Street and be a hero. Understanding heroism and schmuckdom requires fewer Excel spreadsheets, more Dostoyevsky and the Book of Job. 110

Winners also recognize their startup “vision” as a series of untested hypotheses in need of “customer proof.

Actualmente la Banca apuesta por la tecnología Blockchain. BBVA participa en el grupo de bancos internacionales para explorar las posibilidades de dicha tecnología en su negocio y han confiado a una startup americana R3 el desarrollo de aplicaciones utilizando esta tecnología en el sector financiero. Un proyecto que incluye actualmente unos 30 bancos globales, entre los que están BBVA (que estuvo entre los fundadores en septiembre de este año), Bank of America, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Société Générale, BNP Paribas, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, ING, Commerzbank, UBS…. También, a principios de 2015, BBVA invertía en la cartera virtual de criptomonedas más grande del mundo, Coinbase, que cuenta con un servicio de intercambio que permite a los usuarios comprar y vender bitcoin al instante.

I never built that contingency plan. Through the seemingly impossible Loudcloud series C and IPO processes, I learned one important lesson: Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.

Sam Altman is the current president of Y-Combinator and was previously a founder at Loopt, which sold to Green Dot Corporation for $ 43M. As head of YC, Sam often dispenses an entire guide’s worth of information through his blog. Sam’s “Startup Playbook” will walk you through everything a great startup should have from ideation to product instantiation, and is an invaluable tool for aspiring venture investors. Additionally, Sam’s been kind enough to host the 20-episode video series, How to Start a Startup—originally a lecture at Stanford—on his blog. The series includes talks from luminaries like Paul Graham, Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz and Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn.

Some of the most noted angel investors are Alexis Ohanian (founder of Reddit), Marc Benioff (founder of Salesforce) and Max Levchin (founder of Paypal, Slide and Affirm) who on occasion invest in early stage and growth rounds as well. If the core product of the business begins to gain market share, and it seems the company has a lasting opportunity to scale and become an emerging leader, investors like First Round Capital and 500 Startups step in at the seed or Series A round. Growth equity firms like Stripes Group, General Atlantic and Insight Venture Partners typically come in at the Series C or D stage when the business becomes the number one or two player in the industry and is ripe for an IPO or strategic acquisition.

If a networked product can begin to win over a series of networks faster than its competition, then it develops an accumulating advantage. These advantages, naturally, manifest as increasing network effects across customer acquisition, engagement, and monetization. Smaller networks might unravel and lose their users, who might switch over. Naturally, it becomes important for every player to figure out how to compete in this type of high-stakes environment. But how does the competitive playbook work in a world with network effects? First, I’ll tell you what it’s not: it’s certainly not a contest to see who can ship more features. In fact, sometimes the products seem roughly the same—just think about food-delivery or messaging apps—and if not, they often become undifferentiated since the features are relatively easy to copy. Instead, it’s often the dynamics of the underlying network that make all the difference. Although the apps for DoorDash and Uber Eats look similar, the former’s focus on high-value, low-competition areas like suburbs and college towns made all the difference—today, DoorDash’s market share is 2x that of Uber Eats. Facebook built highly dense and engaged networks starting with college campuses versus Google+’s scattered launch that built weak, disconnected networks. Rarely in network-effects-driven categories does a product win based on features—instead, it’s a combination of harnessing network effects and building a product experience that reinforces those advantages. It’s also not about whose network is bigger, a counterpoint to jargon like “first mover advantage.” In reality, you see examples of startups disrupting the big guys all the time. There’s been a slew of players who have “unbundled” parts of Craigslist, cherry-picking the best subcategories and making them apps unto themselves. Airbnb, Zillow, Thumbtack, Indeed, and many others fall into this category. Facebook won in a world where MySpace was already huge. And more recently, collaboration tools like Notion and Zoom are succeeding in a world where Google Suite, WebEx, and Skype already have significant traction. Instead, the quality of the networks matters a lot—which makes it important for new entrants to figure out which networks to cherry-pick to get started, which I’ll discuss in its own chapter.

The platforms screen out a lot of companies and only list the best ones because they want to gain a reputation for being the platform with the highest-quality deals. If they can gain this preeminent reputational position, they will stand a better chance of attracting and retaining a large investor audience, and with that, more high-quality companies will choose to list on their platform. But wait a minute. Isn’t equity crowdfunding meant to be all about improving access to capital, not restricting it? Understanding this issue will be useful for forming your pitch. One of the oft-repeated benefits of equity crowdfunding is meant to be the so-called ‘democratization of finance’ – smashing down the barriers, giving investors and companies unrestricted access to each other. But if we have got the platforms curating the deals that are shown to the public, then aren’t we right back where we started – with gatekeepers restricting access? The platforms may have ditched the suits, blue shirts, and dark ties for jeans, T-shirts, and stylish blazers… but there is no doubt that some of the old barriers are reappearing.

Today, small start-up teams can profoundly change behavior by guiding users through a series of experiences I call hooks. The more often users run through these hooks, the more likely they are to form habits.

In America, immigrants are twice as likely to start a new business than natives, and are responsible for 25 percent of all new jobs. Between 2006 and 2012, 33 percent of venture-backed companies that went public had at least one immigrant founder. Among Fortune 500 companies, 40 percent were founded by immigrants or their children. In 2016, half of all unicorns—those rare startups valued at more than $1 billion—were founded by immigrants, and each provided at least 760 new jobs.

Had anyone from Detroit stopped by Tesla Motors at this point, they would have ended up in hysterics. The sum total of the company’s automotive expertise was that a couple of the guys at Tesla really liked cars and another one had created a series of science fair projects based on technology that the automotive industry considered ridiculous. What’s more, the founding team had no intention of turning to Detroit for advice on how to build a car company. No, Tesla would do what every other Silicon Valley start-up had done before it, which was hire a bunch of young, hungry engineers and figure things out as they went along.

after raising a Series D round, fewer than 40 percent of startups still have a founder as their CEO. I will keep founders’ personal goals in sharp focus throughout this book, but we shouldn’t use founders’ goal fulfillment as our main measure of success.

Es básicamente un sistema informático con una serie determinada de reglas que las partes contractuales deben seguir para llevar el contrato a término. Cuando todas las condiciones se cumplen (firmas, documentación, etc.), la transacción tiene lugar. Cuando todas las condiciones se cumplen (firmas, documentación, etc.), la transacción tiene lugar. Todo automatizado, sin necesidad de agentes, abogados, notarios… lo que se necesita es que las partes realicen su respectivo trabajo a priori de forma correcta. En caso de que las reglas estipuladas no se cumplan, queda cancelada la operación. Y lo mejor del sistema es que una vez que se ha creado, se puede reutilizar una y otra vez para todas las transacciones inmobiliarias. Esto significa el inicio de la compra online de inmuebles. En un futuro no muy lejano el smart contract será el centro del universo de la compra venta inmobiliaria.

The idea of dividing our work into smaller units isn’t new. You’ve probably heard this advice a hundred times: if you’re stuck on a task, break it down into smaller steps. Every profession and creative medium has its own version of “intermediate steps” on the way to full-fledged final works. For example: “Modules” in software development “Betas” tested by start-ups “Sketches” in architecture “Pilots” for television series “Prototypes” made by engineers “Concept cars” in auto design “Demos” in music recording

examples of some common suppliers required for start-up companies in the education/ information/ media/ consulting and training industries:

About the Bacharach Leadership Group: Training for Pragmatic Leadership™ “Vision without execution is hallucination.”—Thomas Edison The litmus test of pragmatic leadership is results. The Bacharach Leadership Group (BLG) focuses on the skills necessary to lead and move agendas. Whether in corporations, nonprofits, universities, or entrepreneurial start-ups, BLG instructors train leaders in the core competencies necessary to execute change and innovation. At all levels of the organization, leaders must master ideation skills for innovation, political skills for moving change, negotiation skills for building support, coaching skills for engagement, and team leadership skills for going the distance. The BLG approach: 1. ASSESSMENT BLG will assess your organizational challenges and leadership needs. 2. ALIGNMENT BLG will align its training solutions with your organization’s challenges and culture. 3. TRAINING BLG training includes options for mixed-modality delivery, interactive activities, and collaboration with an emphasis on application. 4. OWNERSHIP BLG provides continuous follow-up, access to the exclusive BLG mobile apps library, and coaching. Whether delivering a complete leadership academy or a specific program or workshop, BLG will partner with you to get the results you need. To keep up to date with the BLG perspective, visit blg-lead.com or contact us at info@blg-lead.com.

Lightwave, another emotional-computing startup, can capture not just the emotional state of an individual, but that of a whole crowd. It’s already been utilized by Cisco to judge a startup pitch competition, helped DJ Paul Oakenfold increase listener engagement at a concert in Singapore, and measured viewer reactions during a pre-screening of The Revenant.

In my study, I found Elad Gil to be one of the most successful angel investors. He has made investments in twenty-four billion-dollar companies—including Airbnb, Airtable, Brex, Coinbase, Gusto, Instacart, Opendoor, Pinterest, Stripe, Square, and Wish—most in the seed or series A stage.

As you think about which industries to work in, which skills to obtain, and which books to read, study the types of tech startups that were recently funded by venture capitalists at the Series A and Series B stages because these tend to be on the cutting edge of emerging trends.

As you think about which industries to work in, which skills to obtain, and which books to read, study the types of tech startups that were recently funded by venture capitalists at the Series A and Series B stages because these tend to be on the cutting edge of emerging trends. For example, Coinbase raised its Series A and Series B funding in 2013. If you invested in learning about cryptocurrencies in the years following Coinbase’s Series A, there would have been an abundance of life-changing crypto career opportunities for you, in part because at that time crypto knowledge was rare in a growing market. Study what venture capitalists are investing in to glimpse the trends or markets on the rise.

Seek established companies with a record of profitability and dividend payments - avoid start-ups and biotech or exploration stocks.

The engineers were constantly baffled by what Musk would fund and what he wouldn’t. Back at headquarters, someone would ask to buy a $200,000 machine or a pricey part that they deemed essential to Falcon 1’s success, and Musk would deny the request. And yet he was totally comfortable paying a similar amount to put a shiny surface on the factory floor to make it look nice. On Omelek, the workers wanted to pave a two-hundred-yard pathway between the hangar and the launchpad to make it easier to transport the rocket. Musk refused. This left the engineers moving the rocket and its wheeled support structure in the fashion of the ancient Egyptians. They laid down a series of wooden planks and rolled the rocket across them, grabbing the last piece of wood from the back and running it forward in a continuous cycle. The whole situation was ludicrous. A start-up rocket company had ended up in the middle of nowhere trying to pull off one of the most difficult feats known to man, and, truth be told, only a

We live in an exponential era. This kind of disruption is a constant. For anyone running a business—and this goes for both start-ups and legacy companies—the options are few: Either disrupt yourself or be disrupted by someone else.

Your Website Is Not Your Business - Represent Yourself.

The most important thing you can do for your business is just get started. Just launch.

A passion without a need is simply a hobby; when your passions align with the needs of a community, you have a mission.

couple of the guys at Tesla really liked cars and another one had created a series of science fair projects based on technology that the automotive industry considered ridiculous. What’s more, the founding team had no intention of turning to Detroit for advice on how to build a car company. No, Tesla would do what every other Silicon Valley start-up had done before it, which was hire a bunch of young, hungry engineers and figure things out as they went along.

An entrepreneur seeks to test a series of unproven hypotheses (guesses) about a startup’s business model: who the customers are, what the product features should be, and how this scales into a hugely successful company.

[L]ean start-ups are the small furry mammals competing with the large dinosaurs—meaning they're one asteroid strike away from world dominance. Exponential technology is that asteroid.

Branding is a key communication tool and technique, which provides both consumers and manufactures with a way of differentiating their product or service.

Social Media Marketing is just one part within the Digital Marketing ecosystem and both enable you to share your brand story with the world.

YOU MUST USE ANY AND EVERY CHANCE TO BE SEEN AND HEARD, by creating as many digital marketing touchpoints as possible, to get KNOWN, LIKED AND TRUSTED!

Failure is an event, not a person. That is, if you try and fail at something it doesn’t mean that YOU are a failure. It just means that either you have a little learning or growing to do, or that the thing you’re trying to do truly cannot be done. If you’re trying to sell Underwater Basket Weaving lessons and no one is buying your ten-lesson package, it may well mean that you should try your hand at selling lemonade instead.

This is possible, in part, because the structure of exponential organizations is very different. Rather than utilize armies of employees or large physical plants, twenty-first-century start-ups are smaller organizations focused on information technologies, dematerializing the once physical and creating new products and revenue streams in months, sometimes weeks. As a result, these lean start-ups are the small furry mammals competing with the large dinosaurs—meaning they’re one asteroid strike away from world dominance.

People should be part of building the future rather than feeling like the future is being forced upon them. Blitzscaling is what separates the start-ups that get disrupted and disappear as the world changes from the ones that scale up to become market leaders and shape the future. This book was born out of a class we taught at Stanford in which we dissected the process that went into growing the world’s largest technology companies and then codified a series of tactics and choices that made it work. The result was a specific set of principles that describes how to grow multibillion-dollar companies in a handful of years. While writing this book, we talked to hundreds of entrepreneurs and CEOs, including those of the world’s most valuable companies, such as Facebook, Alphabet (Google), Netflix, Dropbox, Twitter, and Airbnb. (You can hear a number of these conversations on my podcast, Masters of Scale.) Even though the stories of their companies’ rise were very different in many ways, the one thing they all had in common was an extreme, unwieldy, risky, inefficient, do-or-die approach to growth.