Blitzscaling

description: a strategy for rapid business growth at the risk of operational scalability

25 results

pages: 286 words: 87,401

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh
Published 14 Apr 2018

Software Is Eating (and Saving) the World The Types of Scaling The Three Basics of Blitzscaling The Five Stages of Blitzscaling The Three Key Techniques of Blitzscaling Part II: Business Model Innovation Designing to Maximize Growth: The Four Growth Factors Designing to Maximize Growth: The Two Growth Limiters Proven Business Model Patterns The Underlying Principles of Business Model Innovation Analyzing a Few Billion-Dollar Business Models Part III: Strategy Innovation When Should I Start to Blitzscale? When Should I Stop Blitzscaling? Can I Choose Not to Blitzscale? Blitzscaling Is Iterative How Blitzscaling Strategy Changes in Each Stage How the Role of the Founder Changes in Each Stage Part IV: Management Innovation Eight Key Transitions Nine Counterintuitive Rules of Blitzscaling The Never-ending Need for Change Part V: The Broader Landscape of Blitzscaling Blitzscaling Beyond High Tech Blitzscaling Within a Larger Organization Blitzscaling Beyond Business Blitzscaling in Greater Silicon Valley Other Blitzscaling Regions to Watch China: The Land of Blitzscaling Defending Against Blitzscaling Part VI: Responsible Blitzscaling Blitzscaling in Society Framework for Responsible Blitzscaling The Response Spectrum Balancing Responsibility and Velocity as the Organization Grows Conclusion Acknowledgments Appendix A: Disclosures Appendix B: The Blitzscalers Appendix C: CS183C Essays FOREWORD BY BILL GATES I’ve known Reid Hoffman for years.

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Blitzscaling Is Iterative How Blitzscaling Strategy Changes in Each Stage How the Role of the Founder Changes in Each Stage Part IV: Management Innovation Eight Key Transitions Nine Counterintuitive Rules of Blitzscaling The Never-ending Need for Change Part V: The Broader Landscape of Blitzscaling Blitzscaling Beyond High Tech Blitzscaling Within a Larger Organization Blitzscaling Beyond Business Blitzscaling in Greater Silicon Valley Other Blitzscaling Regions to Watch China: The Land of Blitzscaling Defending Against Blitzscaling Part VI: Responsible Blitzscaling Blitzscaling in Society Framework for Responsible Blitzscaling The Response Spectrum Balancing Responsibility and Velocity as the Organization Grows Conclusion Acknowledgments Appendix A: Disclosures Appendix B: The Blitzscalers Appendix C: CS183C Essays FOREWORD BY BILL GATES I’ve known Reid Hoffman for years. Our friendship started on my visits to Silicon Valley to meet with Greylock Partners, the venture capital firm where Reid is a partner, so I could learn about the companies they were investing in.

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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. In this book, we draw lessons from these world-leading companies to explain the nuts and bolts of how to blitzscale, when to blitzscale, why to blitzscale, and the global impact of the companies that are blitzscaling all around you right this second. This quest will take us all over the globe, but one place in particular stands out. SILICON VALLEY: THE PERFECT PLACE TO DECODE BLITZSCALING Although companies have successfully blitzscaled on every continent except for Antarctica, the most prominent and most concentrated set of examples comes from California’s Silicon Valley.

pages: 309 words: 96,168

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs
by Reid Hoffman , June Cohen and Deron Triff
Published 14 Oct 2021

“This really became a foundational story for us,” Rana says, “a story of strategic patience—of knowing who we are and what we stand for.” I generally favor blitzscaling, or superfast growth. It’s a proven method of getting explosive momentum behind your idea. I believe that blitzscaling, or the pursuit of rapid growth by prioritizing speed over efficiency, even in the face of uncertainty, is the way that the great technology companies of the future will be built. When you’re trying to win a winner-take-most market, the right strategy is to reach critical scale first, generating long-term competitive advantages that make it nearly impossible for any competitor to overtake you. In order to blitzscale, you need a war chest—and you need it fast, so you can outpace your competition.

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So show your work early. Show it often. And above all, don’t hole up in your garage and try to perfect your product on your own. You’ll be wasting not only your time; you’ll also be wasting your window of opportunity. You can read more about this topic in Blitzscaling, where “Launch a Product That Embarrasses You” is #4 on my list of Counterintuitive Rules of Blitzscaling. * * * — One of the biggest champions of experimentation in Silicon Valley has been Mark Zuckerberg, whose early mantra—“Move fast and break things”—was a foundation for Facebook’s success. And the company continues to experiment constantly today, even at its current size—though its mantra now is “Move fast with stable infrastructure.”

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As an angel investor and later an investor with Greylock Partners, he was among the first to spot the potential in paradigm-shifting companies like Airbnb, Facebook, Zynga, Aurora, and Dropbox, among many others. Reid has even created new and original language on the subject, such as the term “blitzscaling,” which refers to the pursuit of aggressive growth by prioritizing speed over efficiency, or risk-intelligent scaling. So as the host of the Masters of Scale podcast, it makes sense that he would help to scale the podcast series itself, turning it into one of the most popular and influential of its kind—a dependable place to find hard-fought wisdom, a resource entrepreneurs and business leaders turn to in times of opportunity and in times of crisis.

pages: 935 words: 197,338

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future
by Sebastian Mallaby
Published 1 Feb 2022

Theoretically, a really huge amount of venture dollars might represent an overcorrection: when buccaneers like Masayoshi Son are setting the pace, the anti-blitzscaling critique may have merit. But buccaneer blitzscaling is not the fault of venture capital as it is usually practiced: recall that Bill Gurley was horrified by Uber’s burn rate. After the humiliation of WeWork, even Son claimed to be chastened. One last point about blitzscaling is worth noting. The goal of the blitzscaler is to establish market power—something approaching monopoly. This can harm society in three ways: overmighty companies may underpay suppliers and workers, overcharge consumers, and stifle innovation.

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The moral and political justification for tough market competition is that it should be fair. If the market is rigged, it loses legitimacy. No economic system is perfectly free from distortions, so the question is whether blitzscaling rises to the level where the distortions are pernicious. If it could be shown that subsidized unicorns are elbowing aside more efficient incumbents, then blitzscaling might be harming the overall efficiency of the economy. At the height of the blitzscaling frenzy in 2018, two academics tried to make this claim. “Money-losing firms can continue operating and undercutting incumbents for far longer than previously,” they wrote.

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Finally, there is the third broad area of complaint: that venture capital encourages out-of-control disrupters. This line of criticism is often a reaction against “blitzscaling” at companies such as Uber. Coined by Reid Hoffman, a venture capitalist at Greylock and before that the founder of LinkedIn, the term referred originally to an obligation more than a choice: in network industries, winner-takes-all logic obliges startups to race for scale before competitors achieve it.[28] But, in the hands of less thoughtful investors, “blitzscaling” has come to mean little more than “get rich quick,” a phrase to be filed alongside other notorious war cries, from Masayoshi Son’s injunction to be “crazier, faster, bigger” to Mark Zuckerberg’s call to “move fast and break things.”

pages: 303 words: 100,516

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork
by Reeves Wiedeman
Published 19 Oct 2020

But practically every atmospheric force of the 2010s was encouraging Adam to do precisely what Masa was enabling. WeWork’s growth-at-all-costs plan epitomized an increasingly popular Silicon Valley strategy known as blitzscaling, a term coined by Reid Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn, who had begun teaching a course on the subject at Stanford—“CS183C: Technology-Enabled Blitzscaling.” In a follow-up book, Hoffman acknowledged that blitzscaling could seem counterintuitive. “It involves purposefully and intentionally doing things that don’t make sense according to traditional business thinking,” he wrote. The idea was to not worry too much about risks and costs that might bother a traditional businessperson.

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In a perfect world, you became too big to fail. Hoffman admitted that blitzscaling had its dangers. In a final section, titled “Responsible Blitzscaling,” he said there was a difficult balance required “in marrying responsibility and velocity” and that while start-up founders “may benefit from behaving like ethical pirates, they should never behave like sociopathic criminals.” He was worried less about ethics than the kind of negative PR that befell Kalanick and Uber. Adam expressed little interest in slowing down. One morning in early 2018, with his own blitzscaling campaign fully operational, Adam flew to Seattle to meet with Howard Schultz, the former CEO of Starbucks.

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For someone like Gomel, and the other mid-career executives joining WeWork’s senior ranks from more traditional companies, this was a rare opportunity to experience blitzscaling outside the tech world, and to reap the riches that could come with it. It quickly became clear to many of Gomel’s new colleagues that he was being groomed to potentially be WeWork’s next CEO: Adam would step down, having led the company through its blitzscaling phase, becoming chairman of WeWork’s board, where he could continue pushing his vision while a seasoned operator like Gomel led WeWork into a new phase as a public company.

pages: 290 words: 87,549

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy
by Leigh Gallagher
Published 14 Feb 2017

Siegler, “Airbnb Tucked In Nearly 800% Growth in 2010; Caps Off The Year with a Slick Video,” TechCrunch, January 6, 2011, https://techcrunch.com/2011/01/06/airbnb-2010/. 47 just $7.8 million: Tricia Duryee, “Airbnb Raises $112 Million for Vacation Rental Business,” AllThingsD, July 24, 2011, http://allthingsd.com/20110724/airbnb-raises-112-million-for-vacation-rental-business/. 48 Lacy, then at TechCrunch: “Brian Chesky on the Success of Airbnb,” interview by Sarah Lacy, TechCrunch, video, December 26, 2011, https://techcrunch.com/video/brian-chesky-on-the-success-of-airbnb/517158894/. 49 claimed ten thousand listings: Alexia Tsotsis, “Airbnb Freaks Out Over Wimdu,” TechCrunch, June 9, 2011, https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/09/airbnb. 49 (“Technology-Enabled Blitzscaling”): Reid Hoffman, “Blitzscaling 18: Brian Chesky on Launching Airbnb and the Challenges of Scale,” Stanford University, November 30, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W608u6sBFpo. 55 “‘How do I not die?’”: Ibid. Chapter 3: Airbnb Nation 59 Punta Mita, Mexico: Francesca Bacardi, “No Resort Necessary!

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It comprised only forty people at the time, and they knew they needed to claim the European market, and fast—Airbnb couldn’t call itself a travel company and not be available all over the world, particularly in Europe. (“It would be like a cell phone without a signal—there would be no reason to exist,” Chesky said during an interview with Reid Hoffman at Hoffman’s Stanford University class “Technology-Enabled Blitzscaling.”) Sure enough, soon the Samwer brothers made a proposition to Airbnb to sell it Wimdu. It prompted a major moment of soul-searching for Airbnb. By now having access to the top minds in Silicon Valley, as Chesky recounted to Hoffman’s students, he asked for advice from a growing panel of high-octane advisers: Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Mason, Paul Graham, and Hoffman.

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They were readying the launch of the next chapter in their company’s history, the entry into the market for the rest of the trip beyond accommodations. It was a project two years in the making and, as we will see, a significant departure. “I know how to start a product—I started one,” Chesky told an audience at Reid Hoffman’s “Blitzscaling” course at Stanford. “But how do you start a new product inside an existing business that’s successful?” Chesky assumed it would be just like getting the original product going the first time, he said, but, as he discovered, it was much more complicated: you may have more funding and many more resources, but people don’t understand why you’re pushing them to do something else; they want to stay focused on their original mission.

pages: 354 words: 118,970

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream
by Nicholas Lemann
Published 9 Sep 2019

Foundations of Sociometry, Group Psychotherapy and Sociodrama, Beacon, 1953. “The Strength of Weak Ties”: Mark S. Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology, Volume 78, Number 6 (May 1973), 1360–80. “much as levies were imposed”: Hoffman, Blitzscaling, 84. As a young engineer: Author’s interview with Bob Metcalfe. “First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado”: Hoffman, Blitzscaling, 11. In 2014 Hoffman and two of his protégés: See Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age, Harvard Business Review Press, 2014. The Start-Up of You: Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha, The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career, Crown Business, 2012.

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Five years on, LinkedIn had thirty-two million members—but Facebook had a hundred million. What if Facebook decided to start a business-oriented offshoot? LinkedIn kept pushing. To the distress of its public relations department, which didn’t appreciate the association with the Third Reich, Hoffman likes to use the term “blitzscaling” to describe his preferred way of doing business. That was the ethos at LinkedIn. Hoffman hired a chief executive officer named Jeff Weiner, a man so obsessed with the company that a system check by LinkedIn’s engineers revealed that he was logged off of the site for only thirty minutes a day, between 3:30 and 4:00 in the morning.

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Most days, including on weekends, he would also meet someone for breakfast at a coffee shop and someone else, usually a person who was more of a peer, for dinner at a restaurant. Those meals would usually begin with Hoffman pulling a small notebook out of his pocket and reading an agenda of topics he’d written beforehand in a tiny, indecipherable scrawl: the course on blitzscaling he was teaching at Stanford; the latest video games; politics; wealth management; whether artificial intelligence was more promising than augmented reality, or vice versa. Then he’d ask for the other person’s list, and they’d start the conversation. Moonfaced, with small, animated features, thick glasses, and an unruly tousle of brown hair, he would become more excited and pay less attention to his food as he talked, roughly in proportion to the grandiosity and world-changing aspects of the idea he and his companion were discussing.

System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
by Rob Reich , Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein
Published 6 Sep 2021

Reid Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn and also a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners, explained this through the concept of blitzscaling: “To prioritize speed, you might invest less in security, write code that isn’t scalable, and wait for things to start breaking before you build QA tools and processes. It’s true that all these decisions will lead to problems later on, but you might not have a later on if you take too long to build the product.” Hoffman is no disciple of Milton Friedman, however, as he also wrote, “We believe that the responsibilities of a blitzscaler go beyond simply maximizing shareholder value while obeying the law; you are also responsible for how the actions of your business impact the larger society.”

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The award, presented at a company all-hands meeting, led to audible gasps when the prize amount was revealed: $10 million to be split among the team. The marriage of technology and capital has come to define the “move fast and break things” culture of Silicon Valley. The countercultural notion of a free and uncontrolled cyberspace has given way to the new mantra of “blitzscaling,” where companies grow as quickly as possible to grab a dominant market position, demonstrate hockey-stick growth to their investors, and lock in any potential network effects before competitors can respond. The monopolistic tendencies of two-sided markets that often appear on the internet only serve to reinforce the “winner-take-all” dominance of the largest players in each market.

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he would later offer an apology: Will Sturgeon, “‘It Was All My Fault’: VC Says Sorry for Dot-Com Boom and Bust,” ZDNet, July 16, 2001, https://www.zdnet.com/article/it-was-all-my-fault-vc-says-sorry-for-dot-com-boom-and-bust/. “OKRs have helped”: John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs (New York: Penguin, 2018), xii. The countercultural notion: Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies (New York: HarperCollins, 2018). “Competition,” he says, “is for losers”: Peter Thiel, “Competition Is for Losers with Peter Thiel (How to Start a Startup 2014: 5),” Y Combinator, uploaded March 22, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

pages: 482 words: 121,173

Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age
by Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne
Published 9 Sep 2019

The economics of information technology turn on spreading R&D and infrastructure costs over the largest number of users possible. This is what drives down prices and creates the network effects needed to turn new applications into market leaders. As LinkedIn cofounder (and Microsoft board member) Reid Hoffman has shown, the ability to “blitzscale” quickly to global leadership is fundamental to technology success.20 But it’s impossible to pursue global leadership if products can’t leave the United States. All this makes a new generation of potential US export controls even more challenging than in the past. It argues for both proceeding with caution and considering new export approaches.

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For a lot of good reasons, tech companies have traditionally focused first on developing a product or service that is exciting and then on attracting as many users as possible as quickly as possible. There has often been little time or attention beyond this. As Reid Hoffman has captured accurately in his term blitzscaling, a “lightning-fast path” that prioritizes speed over efficiency provides the best approach to developing market-leading technology on a global scale.6 Even when companies achieve this type of leadership position, there remains an ongoing need to move quickly. It’s easy to imagine the concerns that would arise in Silicon Valley when weighty demands threatened to slow down innovation.

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Sean Gallagher, “Photos of an NSA ‘upgrade’ factory shows Cisco router getting implant,” ARS Technica, May 14, 2014, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa-upgrade-factory-show-cisco-router-getting-implant/. Back to note reference 19. Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Businesses (New York: Currency, 2018). Back to note reference 20. CHAPTER 15: DEMOCRATIZING THE FUTURE Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), 21.

pages: 387 words: 106,753

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success
by Tom Eisenmann
Published 29 Mar 2021

Instead, management often chooses to 1) fill the ranks with any “warm body”; 2) pressure current employees to work faster; and 3) scrimp on training, pushing new hires straight into the fray. Under these conditions it’s no surprise that errors keep piling up. Sometimes, to conserve manpower, a startup will simply let the backlog of unanswered queries grow unchecked, frustrating customers. As Reid Hoffman says, “For many blitzscaling companies, the key rule is ‘Provide whatever customer service you can as long as it doesn’t slow you down…and that may mean no service!’ ” Problems can also play out in other operational areas that are short of staff. For example, mistakes may be made in the final inspection at the end of a production line, or in packing orders at a warehouse.

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The framework adapts elements of McKinsey’s “7-S” framework, described in Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies (New York: Harper & Row, 1982). Growth can be self-reinforcing: In addition to the references cited for Ch. 2’s discussion of network effects, for analysis of factors that encourage startups to accelerate customer acquisition, see Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies (New York: Currency, 2018); Albert Wenger, “Hard Choices: Growth vs. Profitability,” Continuations blog, Oct. 12, 2015; Michael Skok, “Scaling Your Startup: The Deliberator’s Dozen,” LinkedIn blog, July 16, 2013; Thomas Eisenmann, “Scaling a Startup: Pacing Issues,” HBS course note 812099, Nov. 2011 (Nov. 2014 rev.); and Eisenmann, “Internet Companies’ Growth Strategies: Determinants of Investment Intensity and Long-Term Performance,” Strategic Management Journal 27, no. 12 (2006): 1183–1204.

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The first three S’s pertain: Portions of the sections on Staff and Structure that follow are adapted from Thomas Eisenmann and Alison Wagonfeld, “Scaling a Startup: People and Organizational Issues,” HBS course note 812100, Jan. 2012 (Feb. 2012 rev.). Other perspectives on human capital management challenges in scaling startups are available in Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing about Hard Things (New York: HarperCollins, 2014); Hoffman and Yeh, Blitzscaling, Part IV; Blumberg, Startup CEO, Part 2; Sam Altman, “Later Stage Advice for Startups,” Y Combinator blog, July 6, 2016; Brian Halligan, “Scale-Up Leadership Lessons I’ve Learned over 9 Years as HubSpot’s CEO,” Medium, Jan. 10, 2016; Mark Suster, “This Is How Companies ‘Level Up’ after Raising Money,” Both Sides blog, Apr. 10, 2014; and Wasserman, Founder’s Dilemmas, Chs. 8 and 10, which address hiring challenges and CEO succession, respectively.

pages: 447 words: 111,991

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It
by Azeem Azhar
Published 6 Sep 2021

Reid Hoffman, who co-founded PayPal and LinkedIn, is fluent in this language. One afternoon in 2016, over mineral water in his offices in Sunnyvale, California, he gave me his new explanation for how tech start-ups grow quickly – ‘blitzscaling’. Entrepreneurs who understand blitzscaling, he said, approach their companies very differently to the older titans of industry. Companies that blitzscale emphasise growth over efficiency. Practically, this means throwing out the traditional manager’s rule book of optimising spending. Instead, aim for growth, even if it is expensive to do so. Peter Thiel, one of Hoffman’s co-founders at PayPal, also has an ideology that focuses on growth.

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Abu Dhabi, UAE, 250 Acemoglu, Daron, 139 Acorn Computers, 16, 21 Ada Lovelace Institute, 8 additive manufacturing, 43–4, 46, 48, 88, 166, 169, 175–9 Adidas, 176 advertising, 94, 112–13, 116, 117, 227–8 AdWords, 227 aeroponics, 171 Afghanistan, 38, 205 Africa, 177–8, 182–3 Aftenposten, 216 Age of Spiritual Machines, The (Kurzweil), 77 agglomeration, 181 Air Jordan sneakers, 102 Airbnb, 102, 188 aircraft, 49–50 Alexandria, Egypt, 180 AlexNet, 33 Algeciras, HMM 61 Alibaba, 48, 102, 108, 111, 122 Alipay, 111 Allen, Robert, 80 Alphabet, 65, 113–14, 131, 163 aluminium, 170 Amazon, 65, 67–8, 94, 104, 108, 112, 122, 135–6 Alexa, 25, 117 automation, 135–6, 137, 139, 154 collective bargaining and, 163 Covid-19 pandemic (2020–21), 135–6 drone sales, 206 Ecobee and, 117 Go stores, 136 Kiva Systems acquisition (2012), 136 management, 154 Mechanical Turk, 142–3, 144, 145 monopoly, 115, 117, 122 Prime, 136, 154 R&D, 67–8, 113 Ami Pro, 99 Amiga, 16 Anarkali, Lahore, 102 anchoring bias, 74 Android, 85, 94, 117, 120 Angola, 186 Ant Brain, 111 Ant Financial, 111–12 antitrust laws, 114, 119–20 Apache HTTP Server, 242 Appelbaum, Binyamin, 63 Apple, 47, 62, 65, 85, 94, 104, 108, 112, 122 App Store, 105, 112, 115 chip production, 113 Covid-19 pandemic (2019–21), 222–3 data collection, 228 iOS, 85 iPhone, 47, 62, 85, 94, 105 media subscription, 112 watches, 112 APT33 hacker group, 198 Aral, Sinan, 238 Aramco, 108, 198 Armenia, 206–7 Arthur, William Brian, 110, 123 artificial intelligence, 4, 8, 31–4, 54, 88, 113, 249 academic brain drain, 118 automation, 125–42 data and, 31–2, 142 data network effect, 106–7 drone technology and, 208, 214 education and, 88 employment and, 126–7 healthcare and, 88, 103 job interviews and, 153 regulation of, 187, 188 arXiv, 59 Asana, 151 Asian Development Bank, 193 Aslam, Yaseen, 148 Assembly Bill 5 (California, 2019), 148 asymmetric conflict, 206 AT&T, 76, 100 Atari, 16 attack surfaces, 192–3, 196, 209, 210 Aurora, 141 Australia, 102, 197 automation, 125–42 autonomous weapons, 208, 214 Azerbaijan, 173, 206–7 Ballmer, Steve, 85 Bangladesh, 175 banking, 122, 237 Barcelona, Catalonia, 188 Barlow, John Perry, 184 Barrons, Richard, 195, 211 Bartlett, Albert, 73 batteries, 40, 51, 53–4, 250, 251 Battle of the Overpass (1937), 162 Bayraktar TB2 drone, 206 Bee Gees, 72 Bekar, Clifford, 45 Bell Labs, 18 Bell Telephone Company, 100 Benioff, Marc, 108–9 Bentham, Jeremy, 152 Berlin Wall, fall of (1989), 4 Bermuda, 119 Berners-Lee, Timothy, 55, 100, 160, 239 Bessen, James, 46 Bezos, Jeffrey, 135–6 BGI, 41 Biden, Joseph, 225 Bing, 107 biological weapons, 207, 213 biology, 10, 39, 40–42, 44, 46 genome sequencing, 40–41, 90, 229, 234, 245–7, 250, 252 synthetic biology, 42, 46, 69, 174, 245, 250 biopolymers, 42 bits, 18 Black Death (1346–53), 12 BlackBerry, 120 Blair, Tony, 81 Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, 22 blitzscaling, 110 Blockbuster, 138 BMW, 177 Boeing, 51, 236 Bol.com, 103 Bollywood, 181 Boole, George, 18 Bork, Robert, 114–15, 117, 119 Bosworth, Andrew, 233 Boyer, Pascal, 75 Boyle, James, 234 BP, 92, 158 brain, 77 Braudel, Fernand, 75 Brave, 242 Brazil, 202 Bremmer, Ian, 187 Bretton Woods Conference (1944), 87 Brexit (2016–20), 6, 168 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 87, 129, 191 Brookings Institution, 130 BT, 123 Bulgaria, 145 Bundy, Willard Legrand, 149 Busan, South Korea, 56 business, 82, 92–124 diminishing returns to scale, 93, 108 economic dynamism and, 117 economies of scale, 50, 92 growth, 110–13 increasing returns to scale, 108–10 intangible economy, 104–7, 118, 156, 175, 180 linear value chains, 101 market share, 93–6, 111 monopolies, 10, 71, 94, 95, 114–24 network effect, 96–101 platform model, 101–3, 219 re-localisation, 11, 166–79, 187, 252, 255 state-sized companies, 11, 67 superstar companies, 10, 94–6 supply chains, 61–2, 166–7, 169, 175, 187, 252, 255 taxation of, 96, 118–19 Butler, Nick, 179 ByteDance, 28 C40 initiative, 189 Cambridge University, 127, 188 cancer, 57–8, 127 Capitol building storming (2021), 225 car industry, 93 carbon emissions, 35, 90, 251 Carlaw, Kenneth, 45 Carnegie, Andrew, 112 Carnegie Mellon University, 131 Catholic Church, 83, 88 censorship, 216–17, 224–6, 236 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 194 Cerebras, 34 cervical smears, 57–8 chemical weapons, 207, 213 Chen, Brian, 228 chewing gum, 78 Chicago Pile-1 reactor, 64 Chile, 170 China automation in, 127, 137 brainwave reading in, 152 Covid-19 pandemic (2019–21), 245 drone technology in, 207 Great Firewall, 186, 201 Greater Bay Area, 182 horizontal expansion in, 111–12 manufacturing in, 176 misinformation campaigns, 203 raw materials, demand for, 178 Singles’ Day, 48 social credit systems, 230 superstar companies in, 95 US, relations with, 166 chips, 19–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52, 113, 251 Christchurch massacre (2019), 236 Christensen, Clayton, 24 CIPD, 153 cities, 11, 75, 169, 179–84, 188, 255 Clegg, Nick, 225–6, 235 climate change, 90, 169, 187, 189, 251, 252 cloud computing, 85, 112 Cloudflare, 200 cluster bombs, 213 CNN, 185, 190 coal, 40, 65, 172 Coase, Ronald, 92 Coca-Cola, 93 code is law, 220–22, 235 cold fusion, 113–14 Cold War (1947–91), 194, 212, 213 collective bargaining, 147, 149, 154, 156, 162–5 Colombia, 145 colonialism, 167 Columbus, Christopher, 4 combination, 53–7 Comical Ali, 201 commons, 234–5, 241–3, 256 companies, see business comparative advantage, 170 complex systems, 2 compounding, 22–3, 28 CompuServe, 100 computing, 4, 10, 15–36, 44, 46, 249 artificial intelligence, 4, 8, 31–4, 54, 88 cloud computing, 85, 112 internet, 47–8, 55, 65, 84 Law of Accelerating Returns, 30–31, 33, 35 machining, 43 Moore’s Law, see Moore’s Law quantum computing, 35 transistors, 18–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52 conflict, 87, 189, 190–215 attack surfaces, 192–3, 196, 209, 210 cyberattacks, 11, 114, 140, 181, 187, 190–200, 209–14, 256 de-escalation, 212–13 drone technology, 11, 192, 204–9, 214, 256 institutional change and, 87 misinformation, 11, 191, 192, 200–204, 209, 212, 217, 225 new wars, 194 non-proliferation, 213–14 re-localisation and, 189, 193, 194, 209 consent of the networked, 223 Costco, 67 Coursera, 58 Covid-19 pandemic (2019–21), 12–13, 59, 78–9, 131, 245–9 automation and, 127, 135, 136 cities and, 183 contact-tracing apps, 222–3 gig economy and, 146 lockdowns, 12, 152, 176, 183, 246 manufacturing and, 176 misinformation and, 202–4, 247–8 preprint servers and, 60 recession (2020–21), 178 remote working and, 146, 151, 153 supply chains and, 169, 246 vaccines, 12, 202, 211, 245–7 workplace cultures and, 151, 152 cranks, 54 credit ratings, 162, 229 critical thinking skills, 212 Croatia, 145 Crocker, David, 55 crowdsourcing, 143–4 Cuba, 203 Cuban missile crisis (1962), 99, 212 cultural lag, 85 cyberattacks, 11, 114, 140, 181, 187, 190–200, 209–14, 256 CyberPeace Institute, 214 Daniel, Simon, 173–4 Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 183 Darktrace, 197 data, 8, 11, 71, 217–19, 226–31, 235, 237–42, 256 AI and, 8, 32, 33, 58, 106 compensation for, 239 commons, 242 cyberattacks and, 196 doppelgängers, 219, 226, 228, 239 interoperability and, 237–9 network effects, 106–7, 111 protection laws, 186, 226 rights, 240 Daugherty, Paul, 141 DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroe thane), 253 death benefits, 151 Dediu, Horace, 24, 30 deep learning, 32–4, 54, 58, 127 deforestation, 251 dehumanisation, 71, 154, 158 deindustrialisation, 168 Deliveroo, 154, 163 Delphi, 100 dematerialised techniques, 166, 175 Denmark, 58, 160, 199–200, 257 Deutsche Bank, 130 Diamandis, Peter, 5 Dickens, Charles, 80 digital cameras, 83–4 Digital Geneva Convention, 211 Digital Markets Act (EU, 2020), 122 digital minilateralism, 188 Digital Nations group, 188 Digital Services Act (EU, 2020), 123 diminishing returns, 93, 108 disinformation, see misinformation DoorDash, 147, 148, 248 dot-com bubble (1995–2000), 8, 108, 150 Double Irish tax loophole, 119 DoubleClick, 117 drone technology, 11, 192, 204–9, 214, 256 Dubai, UAE, 43 Duke University, 234 dystopia, 208, 230, 253 Eagan, Nicole, 197 eBay, 98, 121 Ecobee, 120 economies of scale, 50, 92 Economist, The, 8, 65, 119, 183, 239 economists, 63 Edelman, 3 education artificial intelligence and, 88 media literacy, 211–12 Egypt, 145, 186 Elance, 144 electric cars, 51, 69, 75, 173–4, 177, 250 electricity, 26, 45, 46, 54, 157, 249–50 see also energy Electronic Frontier Foundation, 184 email, 6, 55 embodied institutions, 82 employment, 10, 71, 125–65 automation, 125–42 collective bargaining, 147, 149, 154, 156, 162–5 dehumanisation and, 71, 154, 158 flexicurity, 160–61, 257 gig economy, 10, 71, 142–9, 153, 162, 164, 239, 252, 255 income inequality, 155–8, 161, 168 lump of labour fallacy, 139 management, 149–54, 158–9 protections, 85–6, 147–9 reskilling, 159–60 universal basic income (UBI), 160, 189 Enclosure, 234–5, 241 energy, 11, 37–8, 39–40, 44, 46, 172–4, 250 cold fusion, 113–14 fossil fuels, 40, 159, 172, 250 gravitational potential, 53 solar power, 37–8, 53, 65, 77, 82, 90, 171, 172, 173, 249, 250, 251 storage, 40, 53, 114, 173–4, 250, 251 wind power, 39–40, 52 Energy Vault, 53–4, 173 Engels, Friedrich, 81 Engels’ pause, 80, 81 environmental movement, 73 Epic Games, 116 estate agents, 100 Estonia, 188, 190–91, 200, 211 Etzion Airbase, Sinai Peninsula, 195 European Commission, 116, 122, 123 European Space Agency, 56 European Union, 6, 82, 147, 186, 226 Excel, 99 exogeny, 2 exponential gap, 9, 10, 67–91, 70, 89, 253 cyber security and, 193 institutions and, 9, 10, 79–88, 90 mathematical understanding and, 71–5 predictions and, 75–9 price declines and, 68–9 superstar companies and, 10, 94–124 exponential growth bias, 73 Exponential View, 8–9 externalities, 97 extremism, 232–4 ExxonMobil, 65, 92 Facebook, 27, 28, 65, 94, 104, 108, 122, 216–17, 218, 219, 221–2, 223 advertising business, 94, 228 censorship on, 216–17, 224–6, 236 collective bargaining and, 164 data collection on, 228, 239–40 extremism and, 233–4 Instagram acquisition (2012), 117, 120 integrity teams, 234 interoperability, 237–8 Kenosha unrest shooting (2020), 224 misinformation on, 201, 225 network effect and, 98, 223 Oculus acquisition (2014), 117 pay at, 156–7 Phan photo controversy (2016), 216–17, 224, 225 platform model, 101 polarisation and, 233 relationship status on, 221–2 Rohingya ethnic cleansing (2018), 224, 225 US presidential election (2016), 217 WhatsApp acquisition (2014), 117 facial recognition, 152, 208 Factory Act (UK, 1833), 81 Fairchild Semiconductor, 19, 21 fake news, 201–4 family dinners, 86 farming, 170–72, 251 Farrar, James, 148 fax machines, 97 Federal Aviation Administration (US), 236 feedback loops, 3, 13 fertilizers, 35, 90 5G, 203 Financial Conduct Authority, 122 Financial Times, 183 Finland, 160, 211–12 Fitbit, 158 Fiverr, 144 flashing of headlights, 83 flexicurity, 160, 257 flints, 42 flywheels, 54 Ford, 54, 92, 162 Ford, Gerald, 114 Ford, Henry, 54, 162 Ford, Martin, 125 Fortnite, 116 fossil fuels, 40, 159, 172 France, 100, 138, 139, 147, 163 free-market economics, 63–4 freelance work, 10, 71, 142–9 Frey, Carl, 129, 134, 141 Friedman, Milton, 63–4, 241 Friedman, Thomas, 167 FriendFeed, 238 Friendster, 26 Fudan University, 245 fund management, 132 Galilei, Galileo, 83 gaming, 86 Gates, Bill, 17, 25, 84 gender, 6 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, 87 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), 226 General Electric, 52 General Motors, 92, 125, 130 general purpose technologies, 10, 45–8 generative adversarial networks (GANs), 58 Geneva Conventions, 193, 199, 209 Genghis Khan, 44 GEnie, 100 genome sequencing, 40–41, 90, 229, 234, 245–7, 250, 252 Germany, 75, 134, 147 Giddens, Anthony, 82 gig economy, 10, 71, 142–9, 153, 162, 164, 239, 252, 255 Gilbreth, Lillian, 150 Ginsparg, Paul, 59 GitHub, 58, 60 GlaxoSmithKline, 229–30 global financial crisis (2007–9), 168 Global Hawk drones, 206 global positioning systems (GPS), 197 globalisation, 11, 62, 64, 156, 166, 167–71, 177, 179, 187, 193 internet and, 185 conflict and, 189, 193, 194 Glocer, Thomas, 56 Go (game), 132 GOAT, 102 Gojek, 103 Golden Triangle, 170 Goldman Sachs, 151 Goodfellow, Ian, 58 Google, 5, 35, 36, 94, 98, 104, 108, 115, 122 advertising business, 94, 112–13, 116, 117, 227 Android, 85, 94, 117, 120 chip production, 113 Covid-19 pandemic (2019–21), 222–3 data network effect, 106–7 death benefits, 151 Double Irish tax loophole, 119 Maps, 113 quantum computing, 35 R&D, 114, 118 vertical integration, 112–13, 116 X, 114 YouTube acquisition (2006), 112, 117 Gopher, 59, 100 GPT-3, 33 Graeber, David, 133–4 Grand Bazaar, Istanbul, 102 Graphcore, 34, 35 graphics chips, 34 Grateful Dead, The, 184 gravitational potential energy, 53 gravity bombs, 195 Greater Bay Area, China, 182 Greenberg, Andy, 199 Gross, Bill, 53 Grove, Andrew, 17 GRU (Glavnoje Razvedyvatel’noje Upravlenije), 199 Guangzhou, Guangdong, 182 Guardian, 8, 125, 154, 226, 227 Guiyang, Guizhou, 166 H1N1 virus, 75 Habermas, Jürgen, 218 Hard Times (Dickens), 80 Hardin, Garrett, 241 Harop drones, 207–8 Harpy drones, 207–8 Harvard University, 150, 218, 220, 221, 253 healthcare artificial intelligence and, 57–8, 88, 103 data and, 230, 239, 250–51 wearable devices and, 158, 251 Helsinki, Finland, 160 Herlev Hospital, Denmark, 58 Hinton, Geoffrey, 32, 126–7 HIPA Act (US, 1996), 230 Hitachi, 152 Hobbes, Thomas, 210 Hoffman, Josh, 174 Hoffman, Reid, 110, 111 Holmes, Edward, 245 homophily, 231–4 Hong Kong, 182 horizontal expansion, 111–12, 218 Houston Islam protests (2016), 203 Houthis, 206 Howe, Jeff, 143 Hsinchu, Taiwan, 181 Hughes, Chris, 217 Hull, Charles, 43 Human + Machine (Daugherty), 141 human brain, 77 human genome, 40–41, 90, 229, 234, 250 human resources, 150 Hussein, Saddam, 195 Hyaline, 174 hydroponics, 171 hyperinflation, 75 IBM, 17, 21, 47, 98 IDC, 219 Ideal-X, 61 Ikea, 144 Illumina, 41 Ilves, Toomas Hendrik, 190 ImageNet, 32 immigration, 139, 168, 183–4 Impossible Foods, 69 Improv, 99 income inequality, 155–8, 161, 168 India, 103, 145, 181, 186, 224, 253, 254 Indonesia, 103 Industrial Revolution (1760–1840), 79–81, 157, 235 informational networks, 59–60 ING, 178 innovation, 14, 117 Innovator’s Dilemma, The (Christensen), 24 Instagram, 84, 117, 120, 121, 237 institutions, 9, 10, 79–88, 90–91 path dependence, 86–7 punctuated equilibrium, 87–8 intangible economy, 104–7, 118, 156, 175, 180 integrated circuits, 19 Intel, 16–17, 19, 163 intellectual property law, 82 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (1987), 237 International Alliance of App-Based Transport Workers, 164 International Court of Justice, 224 International Criminal Court, 208 International Energy Agency, 77, 82 International Labour Organization, 131 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 87, 167, 187 international organisations, 82 International Organization for Standardization, 55, 61 International Rescue Committee, 184 International Telecommunication Union, 55 internet, 7, 47–8, 55, 65, 72, 75, 84–5, 88, 115, 184–6 code is law, 220–22, 235 data and, 11, 32, 71 informational networks, 59–60 localisation, 185–6 lockdowns and, 12 network effect, 100–101 online shopping, 48, 61, 62, 75, 94, 102, 135 platform model and, 102 public sphere and, 223 standardisation, 55 Wi-Fi, 151 interoperability, 55, 120–22, 237–9, 241, 243, 256–7 iPhone, 47, 62, 85, 94, 115, 175 Iran, 186, 196, 198, 203, 206 Iraq, 195–6, 201, 209 Ireland, 57–8, 119 Islamic State, 194, 233 Israel, 37, 188, 195–6, 198, 206, 207–8 Istanbul, Turkey, 102 Jacobs, Jane, 182 Japan, 37, 152, 171, 174 Jasanoff, Sheila, 253 JD.com, 137 Jena, Rajesh, 127 Jio, 103 job interviews, 153, 156 John Paul II, Pope, 83 Johnson, Boris, 79 Jumia, 103 just in time supply chains, 61–2 Kahneman, Daniel, 74 KakaoTalk, 27 Kaldor, Mary, 194 Kapor, Mitchell, 99 Karunaratne, Sid, 140–41, 151 Kenosha unrest shooting (2020), 224 Keynes, John Maynard, 126, 158 Khan, Lina, 119 Khartoum, Sudan, 183 Kim Jong-un, 198 King’s College London, 179 Kiva Systems, 136 Kobo360, 145 Kodak, 83–4, 88 Kranzberg, Melvin, 254 Krizhevsky, Alex, 32–3, 34 Kubursi, Atif, 178 Kurdistan Workers’ Party, 206 Kurzweil, Ray, 29–31, 33, 35, 77 Lagos, Nigeria, 182 Lahore, Pakistan, 102 landmines, 213 Law of Accelerating Returns, 30–31, 33, 35 Laws of Motion, 20 learning by doing, 48, 53 Leggatt, George, 148 Lemonade, 56 Lessig, Larry, 220–21 Leviathan (Hobbes), 210 Li Fei-Fei, 32 life expectancy, 25, 26 light bulbs, 44, 157 Lime, 27 Limits to Growth, The (Meadows et al.), 73 linear value chains, 101 LinkedIn, 26, 110, 121, 237, 238 Linkos Group, 197 Linux OS, 242 Lipsey, Richard, 45 lithium-ion batteries, 40, 51 lithium, 170 localism, 11, 166–90, 252, 255 log files, 227 logarithmic scales, 20 logic gates, 18 logistic curve, 25, 30, 51, 52, 69–70 London, England, 180, 181, 183 London Underground, 133–4 looms, 157 Lordstown Strike (1972), 125 Lotus Development Corporation, 99 Luddites, 125, 253 Lufa Farms, 171–2 Luminate, 240 lump of labour fallacy, 139 Lusaka, Zambia, 15 Lyft, 146, 148 machine learning, 31–4, 54, 58, 88, 127, 129, 143 MacKinnon, Rebecca, 223 Maersk, 197, 199, 211 malaria, 253 Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shootdown (2014), 199 Malta, 114 Malthus, Thomas, 72–3 malware, 197 Man with the Golden Gun, The (1974 film), 37 manufacturing, 10, 39, 42–4, 46, 166–7, 175–9 additive, 43–4, 46, 48, 88, 166, 169, 175–9 automation and, 130 re-localisation, 175–9 subtractive, 42–3 market saturation, 25–8, 51, 52 market share, 93–6, 111 Marshall, Alfred, 97 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 18, 147, 202, 238 Mastercard, 98 May, Theresa, 183 Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, 189 McCarthy, John, 31 McKinsey, 76, 94 McMaster University, 178 measles, 246 Mechanical Turk, 142–3, 144, 145 media literacy, 211–12 meningitis, 246 Mexico, 202 microorganisms, 42, 46, 69 Microsoft, 16–17, 65, 84–5, 88, 98–9, 100, 105, 108, 122, 221 Bing, 107 cloud computing, 85 data collection, 228 Excel, 99 internet and, 84–5, 100 network effect and, 99 Office software, 98–9, 110, 152 Windows, 85, 98–9 Workplace Productivity scores, 152 Mill, John Stuart, 193 miniaturisation, 34–5 minimum wage, 147, 161 misinformation, 11, 191, 192, 200–204, 209, 212, 217, 225, 247–8 mobile phones, 76, 121 see also smartphones; telecom companies Moderna, 245, 247 Moixa, 174 Mondelez, 197, 211 Mongol Empire (1206–1368), 44 monopolies, 10, 71, 94, 95, 114–24, 218, 255 Monopoly (board game), 82 Montreal, Quebec, 171 mood detection systems, 152 Moore, Gordon, 19, 48 Moore’s Law, 19–22, 26, 28–9, 31, 34, 63, 64, 74 artificial intelligence and, 32, 33–4 Kodak and, 83 price and, 41–2, 51, 68–9 as social fact, 29, 49 superstar companies and, 95 time, relationship with, 48–9 Moravec, Hans, 131 Moravec’s paradox, 131–2 Motorola, 76 Mount Mercy College, Cork, 57 Mozilla Firefox, 242 Mumbai, India, 181 mumps, 246 muskets, 54–5 MySpace, 26–7 Nadella, Satya, 85 Nagorno-Karabakh War (2020), 206–7 napalm, 216 NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), 56 Natanz nuclear site, Iran, 196 National Health Service (NHS), 87 nationalism, 168, 186 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 191, 213 Netflix, 104, 107, 109, 136, 137, 138, 139, 151, 248 Netherlands, 103 Netscape Communicator, 6 networks, 58–62 network effects, 96–101, 106, 110, 121, 223 neural networks, 32–4 neutral, technology as, 5, 220–21, 254 new wars, 194 New York City, New York, 180, 183 New York Times, 3, 125, 190, 228 New Zealand, 188, 236 Newton, Isaac, 20 Nigeria, 103, 145, 182, 254 Niinistö, Sauli, 212 Nike, 102 nitrogen fertilizers, 35 Nixon, Richard, 25, 114 Nobel Prize, 64, 74, 241 Nokia, 120 non-state actors, 194, 213 North Korea, 198 North Macedonia, 200–201 Norway, 173, 216 NotPetya malware, 197, 199–200, 211, 213 Novell, 98 Noyce, Robert, 19 NSO Group, 214 nuclear weapons, 193, 195–6, 212, 237 Nuremberg Trials (1945–6), 208 O’Reilly, Tim, 107 O’Sullivan, Laura, 57–8, 60 Obama, Barack, 205, 214, 225 Ocado, 137 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 239 Oculus, 117 oDesk, 144 Ofcom, 8 Ofoto, 84 Ogburn, William, 85 oil industry, 172, 250 Houthi drone attacks (2019), 206 OAPEC crisis (1973–4), 37, 258 Shamoon attack (2012), 198 Standard Oil breakup (1911), 93–4 Olduvai, Tanzania, 42 online shopping, 48, 61, 62, 75, 94, 102, 135 open-source software, 242 Openreach, 123 Operation Opera (1981), 195–6, 209 opium, 38 Orange, 121 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 119, 167 Osborne Computer Corporation, 16 Osborne, Michael, 129 Osirak nuclear reactor, Iraq, 195–6, 209 Ostrom, Elinor, 241 Oxford University, 129, 134, 203, 226 pace of change, 3 pagers, 87 Pakistan, 145, 205 palladium, 170 PalmPilot, 173 panopticon, 152 Paris, France, 181, 183 path dependence, 86 PayPal, 98, 110 PC clones, 17 PeerIndex, 8, 201, 237 Pegasus, 214 PeoplePerHour, 144 PepsiCo, 93 Perez, Carlota, 46–7 pernicious polarization, 232 perpetual motion, 95, 106, 107, 182 Petersen, Michael Bang, 75 Phan Thi Kim Phuc, 216–17, 224, 225 pharmaceutical industry, 6, 93, 250 phase transitions, 4 Philippines, 186, 203 Phillips Exeter Academy, 150 phishing scams, 211 Phoenix, Arizona, 134 photolithography, 19 Pigou, Arthur Cecil, 97 Piketty, Thomas, 160 Ping An Good Doctor, 103, 250 Pix Moving, 166, 169, 175 PKK (Partîya Karkerên Kurdistanê), 206 Planet Labs, 69 platforms, 101–3, 219 PlayStation, 86 plough, 157 Polanyi, Michael, 133 polarisation, 231–4 polio, 246 population, 72–3 Portify, 162 Postel, Jon, 55 Postings, Robert, 233 Predator drones, 205, 206 preprints, 59–60 price gouging, 93 price of technology, 22, 68–9 computing, 68–9, 191, 249 cyber-weapons, 191–2 drones, 192 genome sequencing, 41–2, 252 renewable energy, 39–40, 250 printing press, 45 public sphere, 218, 221, 223 Pulitzer Prize, 216 punctuated equilibrium, 87–8 al-Qaeda, 205, 210–11 Qatar, 198 quantum computing, 35 quantum physics, 29 quarantines, 12, 152, 176, 183, 246 R&D (research and development), 67–8, 113, 118 racial bias, 231 racism, 225, 231, 234 radicalisation pathways, 233 radiologists, 126 Raford, Noah, 43 Raz, Ze’ev, 195, 209 RB, 197 re-localisation, 11, 166–90, 253, 255 conflict and, 189, 193, 194, 209 Reagan, Ronald, 64, 163 religion, 6, 82, 83 resilience, 257 reskilling, 159–60 responsibility gap, 209 Restrepo, Pascual, 139 Reuters, 8, 56, 132 revolutions, 87 Ricardo, David, 169–70, 177 rights, 240–41 Rise of the Robots, The (Ford), 125 Rittenhouse, Kyle, 224 Roche, 67 Rockefeller, John, 93 Rohingyas, 224 Rome, ancient, 180 Rose, Carol, 243 Rotterdam, Netherlands, 56 Rule of Law, 82 running shoes, 102, 175–6 Russell, Stuart, 31, 118 Russian Federation, 122 disinformation campaigns, 203 Estonia cyberattacks (2007), 190–91, 200 Finland, relations with, 212 Nagorno-Karabakh War (2020), 206 nuclear weapons, 237 Ukraine cyberattacks (2017), 197, 199–200 US election interference (2016), 217 Yandex, 122 S-curve, 25, 30, 51, 52, 69–70 al-Sahhaf, Muhammad Saeed, 201 Salesforce, 108–9 Saliba, Samer, 184 salt, 114 Samsung, 93, 228 San Francisco, California, 181 Sandel, Michael, 218 Sanders, Bernard, 163 Sandworm, 197, 199–200, 211 Santander, 95 Sasson, Steve, 83 satellites, 56–7, 69 Saturday Night Fever (1977 soundtrack), 72 Saudi Arabia, 108, 178, 198, 203, 206 Schmidt, Eric, 5 Schwarz Gruppe, 67 Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson and McAfee), 129 self-driving vehicles, 78, 134–5, 141 semiconductors, 18–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52, 113, 251 September 11 attacks (2001), 205, 210–11 Shamoon virus, 198 Shanghai, China, 56 Shannon, Claude, 18 Sharp, 16 Shenzhen, Guangdong, 182 shipping containers, 61–2, 63 shopping, 48, 61, 62, 75, 94, 102, 135 Siemens, 196 silicon chips, see chips Silicon Valley, 5, 7, 15, 24, 65, 110, 129, 223 Sinai Peninsula, 195 Sinclair ZX81, 15, 17, 21, 36 Singapore, 56 Singles’ Day, 48 Singularity University, 5 SixDegrees, 26 Skydio R1 drone, 208 smartphones, 22, 26, 46, 47–8, 65, 86, 88, 105, 111, 222 Smith, Adam, 169–70 sneakers, 102, 175–6 Snow, Charles Percy, 7 social credit systems, 230 social media, 26–8 censorship on, 216–17, 224–6, 236 collective bargaining and, 164 data collection on, 228 interoperability, 121, 237–8 market saturation, 25–8 misinformation on, 192, 201–4, 217, 247–8 network effect, 98, 223 polarisation and, 231–4 software as a service, 109 solar power, 37–8, 53, 65, 77, 82, 90, 171, 172, 173, 249, 250, 251 SolarWinds, 200 Solberg, Erna, 216 South Africa, 170 South Korea, 188, 198, 202 Southey, Robert, 80 sovereignty, 185, 199, 214 Soviet Union (1922–91), 185, 190, 194, 212 Spain, 170, 188 Spanish flu pandemic (1918–20), 75 Speedfactory, Ansbach, 176 Spire, 69 Spotify, 69 Sputnik 1 orbit (1957), 64, 83 stagflation, 63 Standard and Poor, 104 Standard Oil, 93–4 standardisation, 54–7, 61, 62 Stanford University, 32, 58 Star Wars franchise, 99 state-sized companies, 11, 67 see also superstar companies states, 82 stirrups, 44 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 208 Stockton, California, 160 strategic snowflakes, 211 stress tests, 237 Stuxnet, 196, 214 Sudan, 183 superstar companies, 10, 11, 67, 94–124, 218–26, 252, 255 blitzscaling, 110 collective bargaining and, 163 horizontal expansion, 111–12, 218 increasing returns to scale, 108–10 innovation and, 117–18 intangible economy, 104–7, 118, 156 interoperability and, 120–22, 237–9 monopolies, 114–24, 218 network effect, 96–101, 121 platform model, 101–3, 219 taxation of, 118–19 vertical expansion, 112–13 workplace cultures, 151 supply chains, 61–2, 166–7, 169, 175, 187, 252 surveillance, 152–3, 158 Surviving AI (Chace), 129 Sutskever, Ilya, 32 synthetic biology, 42, 46, 69, 174, 245, 250 Syria, 186 Taiwan, 181, 212 Talkspace, 144 Tallinn, Estonia, 190 Tang, Audrey, 212 Tanzania, 42, 183 TaskRabbit, 144 Tasmania, Australia, 197 taxation, 10, 63, 96, 118–19 gig economy and, 146 superstar companies and, 118–19 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 150, 152, 153, 154 Tel Aviv, Israel, 181 telecom companies, 122–3 Tencent, 65, 104, 108, 122 territorial sovereignty, 185, 199, 214 Tesco, 67, 93 Tesla, 69, 78, 113 Thailand, 176, 203 Thatcher, Margaret, 64, 163 Thelen, Kathleen, 87 Thiel, Peter, 110–11 3D printing, see additive manufacturing TikTok, 28, 69, 159–60, 219 Tisné, Martin, 240 Tomahawk missiles, 207 Toyota, 95 trade networks, 61–2, 166–7, 169, 175 trade unions, see collective bargaining Trading Places (1983 film), 132 Tragedy of the Commons, The (Hardin), 241 transistors, 18–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52, 113, 251 transparency, 236 Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 199 TRS-80, 16 Trump, Donald, 79, 119, 166, 201, 225, 237 Tufekci, Zeynep, 233 Turing, Alan, 18, 22 Turkey, 102, 176, 186, 198, 202, 206, 231 Tversky, Amos, 74 23andMe, 229–30 Twilio, 151 Twitch, 225 Twitter, 65, 201, 202, 219, 223, 225, 237 two cultures, 7, 8 Uber, 69, 94, 102, 103, 106, 142, 144, 145 Assembly Bill 5 (California, 2019), 148 engineering jobs, 156 London ban (2019), 183, 188 London protest (2016), 153 pay at, 147, 156 satisfaction levels at, 146 Uber BV v Aslam (2021), 148 UiPath, 130 Ukraine, 197, 199 Unilever, 153 Union of Concerned Scientists, 56 unions, see collective bargaining United Arab Emirates, 43, 198, 250 United Autoworkers Union, 162 United Kingdom BBC, 87 Biobank, 242 Brexit (2016–20), 6, 168 collective bargaining in, 163 Covid-19 epidemic (2020–21), 79, 203 DDT in, 253 digital minilateralism, 188 drone technology in, 207 flashing of headlights in, 83 Golden Triangle, 170 Google and, 116 Industrial Revolution (1760–1840), 79–81 Luddite rebellion (1811–16), 125, 253 misinformation in, 203, 204 National Cyber Force, 200 NHS, 87 self-employment in, 148 telecom companies in, 123 Thatcher government (1979–90), 64, 163 United Nations, 87, 88, 188 United States antitrust law in, 114 automation in, 127 Battle of the Overpass (1937), 162 Capitol building storming (2021), 225 China, relations with, 166 Cold War (1947–91), 194, 212, 213 collective bargaining in, 163 Covid-19 epidemic (2020–21), 79, 202–4 Cyber Command, 200, 210 DDT in, 253 drone technology in, 205, 214 economists in, 63 HIPA Act (1996), 230 Kenosha unrest shooting (2020), 224 Lordstown Strike (1972), 125 manufacturing in, 130 misinformation in, 202–4 mobile phones in, 76 nuclear weapons, 237 Obama administration (2009–17), 205, 214 polarisation in, 232 presidential election (2016), 199, 201, 217 presidential election (2020), 202–3 Reagan administration (1981–9), 64, 163 self-employment in, 148 September 11 attacks (2001), 205, 210–11 shipping containers in, 61 shopping in, 48 solar energy research, 37 Standard Oil breakup (1911), 93–4 taxation in, 63, 119 Trump administration (2017–21), 79, 119, 166, 168, 201, 225, 237 Vietnam War (1955–75), 216 War on Terror (2001–), 205 universal basic income (UBI), 160, 189 universal service obligation, 122 University of Cambridge, 127, 188 University of Chicago, 63 University of Colorado, 73 University of Delaware, 55 University of Oxford, 129, 134, 203, 226 University of Southern California, 55 unwritten rules, 82 Uppsala Conflict Data Program, 194 UpWork, 145–6 USB (Universal Serial Bus), 51 Ut, Nick, 216 utility providers, 122–3 vaccines, 12, 202, 211, 245–7 Vail, Theodore, 100 value-free, technology as, 5, 220–21, 254 Veles, North Macedonia, 200–201 Véliz, Carissa, 226 Venezuela, 75 venture capitalists, 117 vertical expansion, 112–13, 116 vertical farms, 171–2, 251 video games, 86 Vietnam, 61, 175, 216 Virological, 245 Visa, 98 VisiCalc, 99 Vodafone, 121 Vogels, Werner, 68 Wag!

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pages: 524 words: 130,909

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
by Max Chafkin
Published 14 Sep 2021

This applied to payments, and really to everything else on the internet—social networks, food delivery, ride-hailing—and meant that any tech entrepreneur who wanted to succeed would have to grow as quickly and ruthlessly as possible. There would be a term of art for this, “blitzscaling,” coined, naturally, by Reid Hoffman, Thiel’s good friend and PayPal deputy. Many companies interpreted it to mean spending huge sums of money to try to take over a market, and then, once they’d achieved market dominance, trying to raise prices. But quite a few entrepreneurs—people like Zuckerberg and Uber’s former CEO Travis Kalanick—seemed to see a moral philosophy in blitzscaling as well. Whereas Jobs viewed business as a form of cultural expression, even art, for Thiel and his peers it was a mode of transgression, even activism—a version of what he’d been trying to do at the Stanford Review.

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Use it, come to love it, let it become an integral part of your life (i.e., become addicted),” an eBay seller complained, comparing PayPal’s management to drug dealers. “And then we’ll start slowly bleeding you dry with fees.” It sounded melodramatic, but it was exactly right—and became a standard part of the Silicon Valley blitzscale playbook. But this wasn’t the only way that PayPal tried to goose revenue. Porn and gambling were booming on the internet at the time, but some banks and credit card processors were refusing to approve online purchases that were identified as either category. That is, unless the porn and gambling purveyors chose to take payments with PayPal, which coded every transaction simply “eCommerce,” even if that commerce involved placing a bet on a box score or downloading a video of a sex act.

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“He got wrong-footed, and it was hard to get right.” Silicon Valley was losing some of its confidence too. In October 2008, Sequoia began distributing a PowerPoint presentation encouraging its companies to cut costs and conserve cash. The presentation, titled “R.I.P. Good Times,” signaled a rejection of the blitzscaling playbook. No longer would there be enough money for startups to ruthlessly buy market share; they’d have to generate revenue instead. Facebook had seemed destined for an IPO; now that was off the table. Instead the company raised $200 million from Yuri Milner, a Russian investor with ties to the Kremlin.

pages: 280 words: 82,355

Extreme Teams: Why Pixar, Netflix, AirBnB, and Other Cutting-Edge Companies Succeed Where Most Fail
by Robert Bruce Shaw , James Foster and Brilliance Audio
Published 14 Oct 2017

Internal presentation, available at www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664. 9Nancy Hass, “And the Award for the Next HBO Goes To . . . ,” GQ, January 29, 2013. 10Hastings also believes that putting his firm’s principles in writing promotes productive debate within the company (such as the degree to which the principles are being followed) and how to most clearly communicate them (clarifying statements that may be confusing). 11From Greylock Partners, “Blitzscaling 16: Reed Hastings on Building a Steaming Empire,” www.youtube.comwatch?v=jYhP08uuffs&sns=em. 12Netflix blog post announcing the unlimited maternity and paternity leave policy, blog.netflix.com/2015/08/starting-now-at-netflix-unlimited.html. 13La Verdad, December 27, 2010 (1:06 p.m.), posted on “Hacking Netflix,” www.hackingnetflix.com/2010/12/whats-it-really-like-to-work-at-netflix.html. 14Comment posted by former Netflix vice president on the website Glassdoor.

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Again, most of this well-articulated in culture deck, so no surprise.” www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Netflix-RVW2115622.htm. 15Patty McCord, “How Netflix Reinvented HR,” Harvard Business Review January-February (2014). 16Robert J. Grossman, “Tough Love at Netflix,” SHRM 55 (2010). 17“Netflix Culture: Freedom and Responsibility.” 18The firm’s CEO, Reed Hastings, said the company let go of approximately 1,000 people over its history without a single lawsuit. Interview with Blitzscaling 16: Reed Hastings on Building a Streaming Empire. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYhP08uuffs. Nov. 12, 2015. 19Grossman, “Tough Love at Netflix.” 20Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace,” New York Times, August 15, 2015. 21The New York Times is a competitor of the Washington Post, which was acquired by Jeff Bezos several years ago.

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The best known tool for those who go down this path is called a RACI—which is a template that allows people to specify the roles of various individuals and groups in regard to specific decisions. 26This past year, domestic DVDs accounted for just over 8 percent of the firm’s revenue. 27Greylock Partners, “Blitzscaling 18: Brian Chesky on Launching Airbnb and the Challenges of Scale,” November 30, 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=W608u6sBFpo. 28See Scott Berkun, “How Do You Build a Culture of Healthy Debate?” June 28, 2013, scottberkun.com/2013/how-to-build-a-culture-of-healthy-debate/. 29Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, asks a slightly different question but with the same intent: “How would the company be different if you were CEO?”

pages: 432 words: 106,612

Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever
by Robin Wigglesworth
Published 11 Oct 2021

Given how investors preferred the use of brand-name indices, and how investor inflows and tradability is a virtuous circle for ETFs, it essentially allowed BGI to seize and fortify important tracts of the investment landscape undisturbed. The iShares Russell ETF alone manages about $70 billion today, more than its three biggest competitors combined. It was in effect what Silicon Valley today terms a “blitzscaling”—a well-funded, rapid, and aggressive move to build an unassailable market share as quickly as possible. BGI was braced for an aggressive response from State Street and especially Vanguard. Given the latter’s commanding position as a pioneer of low-cost index funds for the masses, many executives assumed that it would seize much of the nascent ETF industry as well.

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“The ETF is a little bit like the famed Purdey shotgun that you buy over in London,” Jack Bogle once remarked.4 “It’s the greatest shotgun ever made. It’s great for killing big game in Africa, but it’s also great for suicide.” * * * ♦ BARCLAYS GLOBAL INVESTORS MIGHT HAVE been the first to realize that ETFs constituted a new financial technology with vast potential, but it was far from the last. The blitzscaling approach taken by iShares in the early 2000s has become what even some ETF fans term a “spaghetti cannon,”5 with an array of providers churning out increasingly niche products, shooting them against the wall, and seeing what sticks. In 2000, there were still just 88 ETFs with just $70 billion of assets, compared to over 500 index mutual funds that managed $426 billion, according to data from the Investment Company Institute.

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Boles), 185 Black Monday of 1987, 123, 125, 170–73, 177, 178, 189, 189n, 209 BlackRock Financial Management, 17, 209–21 BGI acquisition, 203, 204–6, 215–16, 221, 222–34 climate change and, 290–93 financial crisis and, 219–21 founding of, 209–12 “Giant Three” scenario, 297–99 gun stock boycott, 285–87 Icahn on, 271 IPO, 214–15 MLIM acquisition, 217–19 naming of, 213–14 SSR acquisition, 216 Black-Scholes-Merton model, 71, 147, 152–53 Blackstone Financial Management (BFM), 210–14 Blair Academy, 89–90 BLES Inspire Global Hope ETF, 238–39 blitzscaling, 200, 239–40 Bloom, Steven, xii, 171–72, 173–74, 177, 178 Bloomberg, Michael, 78n, 149 Bloomberg Barclays Aggregate, 17 BM Personal Computer, 145 Boening & Company, 92 Bogle, David Caldwell, 89 Bogle, Eve Sherrerd, 13, 93–94 Bogle, John “Jack,” ix, 86–105, 244, 276, 296, 302 assistants of, 108, 125, 126–30 background of, 87–88 at Berkshire meeting of 2017, 12–14, 19 billion-dollar milestones of Vanguard, 119–20, 121 corporate governance and public policy, 287 “cost matters hypothesis,” 108, 280 CRSP seminars, 53, 146 DFA and Booth, 146 dinners, 127–28 early finance career of, 86–88, 92–96 early life of, 88–90 education of, 89–92 eighty-eighth birthday of, 12–13, 14 ETFs, 166–68, 239 founding of Vanguard, 11–12, 104–10, 104n free-rider problem, 279 funeral of, 134–35 on “Giant Three” scenario, 299 growing pains at Vanguard, 124, 125, 126 gun stocks and, 286 heart attacks of, 93–94 heart transplant of, 12, 130–31 media and press, 120–21 nickname of “Saint Jack,” 120, 132, 303 personality of, 125 126–27 on Purdey shotgun, 239 schism with Brennan, 130–34 setting up first FIIT (“Bogle’s Folly”), 107–17 “strategy follows structure,” 107 at Wellington Management, 53, 88, 92–104, 130 Bogle, Josephine Lorraine, 88–89, 90–91 Bogle, William Yates, Jr., 88–89, 90–91 Bogle, William Yates, III “Bud,” 88–89, 90, 130, 133 Bogle Financial Markets Research Center, 132–33 Bogleheads, 15, 132 “Bogleisms,” 127–28 Bohr, Niels, 301 bond ETFs, 248, 271–73 bond funds, 275n bond indices, 259–62 Booth, David Gilbert, xii, 138, 139–46 at AG Becker, 141–43, 146 background of, 139–40 at Chicago, 50, 140–41 at DFA, 138, 144–51, 159–60, 162–63 Klotz’s departure, 156–59 at Wells Fargo, 70–71, 75, 138 Booth, Gilbert, 139 Booth School of Business, 157–58 Boston Celtics, 136 Boston Chicken, 137 Boston Globe, 114 Box, George, 51–52 Braham, Lewis, 89, 98n Branson, Richard, 295 Breakfast Club, The (film), 227 Breeden, Richard, 179–80 Brennan, Frank, 128–29 Brennan, Jack, xi, 120–21, 123, 125, 128–34, 240 background of, 128–29 schism with Bogle, 130–34 British East India Company, 300 Brooklyn Bridge, 150 Brown, Robert, 25 Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church, 134–35 Buffett, Warren, ix, 83, 133, 267n Bogle and, 12–14, 19 on coin flips, 6–7 ESG push and, 294 on hedge funds, 1–3 on pension fund investing, 4–5, 7, 8 on professional fund managers, 4–8, 16–17 wager with Seides, 1–2, 3–4, 6, 9–11, 15–17, 267n bull markets, 5–6, 119, 121, 144–45 Burkart, David, 194n BusinessWeek, 35, 119 Butler, Dave, 136–48 background of, 136–37 at DFA, 137–39, 144–48, 163 California Golden Bears, 136 California Gold Rush, 57, 75 California State University, 206 Campbell, Gordon, 64–65 CANSLIM, 137, 152 “Can Stock Market Forecasters Forecast?”

pages: 406 words: 105,602

The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise
by Eric Ries
Published 15 Mar 2017

And we need to provide cross-training for people whose main entrepreneurial experience is in building new products or building new kinds of companies. This cross-training, by the way, is not only needed in established enterprises. It is also a huge part of the power of Silicon Valley (see LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman’s blitzscaling thesis1) To date, cross-training has taken the form of esoteric knowledge passed down from investors and founders to the next generation. But we can all benefit from systematizing and bringing this method out into the open (as I think The Lean Startup demonstrated). THE BIGGER PICTURE In Part Two, we focused in and looked very closely at the mechanisms for creating transformation and what the results can look like.

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Byrne, Jack: Straight from the Gut (New York: Warner Business Books, 2001), p. 330. 7. forbes.com/sites/miguelhelft/2015/09/21/dropboxs-houston-were-building-the-worlds-largest-platform-for-collaboration/#58f0ccd9125e; fortune.com/2016/03/07/dropbox-half-a-billion-users. 8. techcrunch.com/2013/11/02/welcome-to-the-unicorn-club/. 9. forbes.com/sites/howardhyu/2016/11/25/this-black-friday-jeff-bezos-makes-amazon-echo-sound-better-than-google-home/#11dc97a66cc4; wired.com/2014/12/jeff-bezos-ignition-conference/; fastcompany.com/3040383/following-fire-phone-flop-big-changes-at-amazons-lab126. 10. bloomberg.com/features/2016-amazon-echo. 11. fastcompany.com/3039887/under-fire. 12. sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312505070440/dex991.htm. CHAPTER 2 1. See AnnaLee Saxenian’s Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Reid Hoffman’s blitzscaling thesis (Part Three Introduction, note 1); and the TechStars Manifesto (Chapter 7, note 5). 2. The term “ambidextrous organization” was coined by Robert Duncan in 1976, in the article “The Ambidextrous Organization: Designing Dual Structures for Innovation,” in The Management of Organization Design: Strategies and Implementation, edited by Ralph H.

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Scott Cook of Intuit created the delight standard in 2007 with his one-day Design for Delight program, which eventually grew into a company-wide innovation structure. hbr.org/2011/06/the-innovation-catalysts. 6. netpromoter.com/know/. 7. slideshare.net/hiten1/measuring-understanding-productmarket-fit-qualitatively/3-Sean_Ellis_productmarket_fit_surveysurveyio. 8. These “bingo card” charts are based on my work with GE, and are used with permission from the company. 9. Those of us who have tried to build a real startup without even a part-time CFO have learned this lesson the hard way. PART THREE 1. hbr.org/2016/04/blitzscaling. CHAPTER 10 1. I belong to the Peter Drucker school of gurus: drucker.institute/about-peter-f-drucker. 2. fakesteve.net/2010/04/an-open-letter-to-the-people-of-the-world.html. CHAPTER 11 1. Entrepreneurs within both the UK and U.S. governments have taken up this approach under the banner of “the strategy is delivery.”

pages: 237 words: 74,109

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir
by Anna Wiener
Published 14 Jan 2020

Sometimes it felt like everyone was speaking a different language—or the same language with radically different rules. There was no common lexicon. Instead, people used a sort of nonlanguage, which was neither beautiful nor especially efficient: a mash-up of business-speak with athletic and wartime metaphors, inflated with self-importance. Calls to action; front lines and trenches; blitzscaling. Companies didn’t fail, they died. We didn’t compete, we went to war. “We are making products,” the CEO said, building us up at a Tuesday team meeting, “that can push the fold of mankind.” * * * On a chilly morning in late summer, the fog still lingering, we took a field trip to see our own, newly unveiled highway billboards.

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Or, maybe I did want two, but only if the second one was completely different, an evil twin: Matriarchal Silicon Valley. Separatist-feminist Silicon Valley. Small-scale, well-researched, slow-motion, regulated Silicon Valley—men could hold leadership roles in that one, but only if they never used the word “blitzscale” or referred to business as war. I knew my ideas were contradictions in terms. “Progress is so unusual and so rare, and we’re all out hunting, trying to find El Dorado,” Patrick said. “Almost everyone’s going to return empty-handed. Sober, responsible adults aren’t going to quit their jobs and lives to build companies that, in the end, may not even be worth it.

pages: 585 words: 151,239

Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan
Published 15 Oct 2018

The men who created these corporations typically followed the same sequence of moves that we have seen with Carnegie and Rockefeller. They made bet-the-farm investments in new plants. They grew as big as possible as fast as possible, turning their lower costs into barriers to entry. (Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, calls the modern equivalent of this technique “blitzscaling.”)19 They integrated “forward” and “backward.” And they tried to drive sales as high as possible by cutting costs and mass advertising. The final area to fall to the corporation was retailing. In 1850, retailing was completely dominated by mom-and-pop stores. Within a generation, a handful of giants had joined the crowd of midgets.

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John Bates Clark, The Control of Trusts (New York: Macmillan, 1901), 17. 15. Tedlow, The Rise of the American Business Corporation, 14. 16. Ibid., 16. 17. Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 2. 18. Ibid., 209. 19. Tim Sullivan, “Blitzscaling,” Harvard Business Review, April 2016. 20. Charles Morris, The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy (New York: Times Books, 2005), 174; Srinivasan, Americana, 209. 21. Naomi Lamoreaux, “Entrepreneurship, Organization, Economic Concentration,” in The Long Nineteenth Century, vol. 2 of The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, ed.

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See also Federal Reserve capital reserves, 444–47, 446 financial cycles and, 425–26 financial deregulation, 338–43 Great Depression and, 234–36 New Deal-era reforms, 254–55, 340 new nation, 32, 42, 65, 73 panic of 1907 and Pujo Committee, 42, 131, 185 Bank of America, 3 Bak of England, 32, 63, 226–27, 374 Bank of New York, 32 Bank of North America, 32 Bank of the United States, 42, 65, 67, 73, 156, 234 barbed wire, 115–16 Barings Bank, 40, 227 Barnett Shale, 357–58 Basel Accords, 382–83, 384 Bates, Edward, 389 Battle Cry of Freedom (McPherson), 41 Battle of New Orleans, 16 Baumol, William, 403 Bayard, James, 66 Bayonne Bridge, 412 Beame, Abraham, 323 Bear Stearns, 381, 385–86 Beckert, Sven, 75 Bell, Alexander Graham, 11, 109 Bell, Daniel, 281, 360, 423 Bell Labs, 350–51, 352 Bell Telephone, 109–10 Bentsen, Lloyd, 332 Benz, Karl, 104 Berle, Adolf, 206–7, 240–41, 260 Berners-Lee, Timothy, 348 Bernhardt, Sarah, 119 Bessemer, Henry, 14–15, 99 Bessemer steel, 14–15, 99–100, 100, 128 Bevin, Ernest, 278–79 Bezos, Jeff, 355 Bhidé, Amar, 334 Bildt, Carl, 441 Bill of Rights, 157 birthrates, 11, 274, 363 Bismarck, Otto von, 247 bison, 116–17 Black, Fischer, 383 Blackstone, William, 30, 419 Blaine, James, 167 “blitzscaling,” 140 Bloch, Richard and Henry, 293 BNP Paribas, 374 Boesky, Ivan, 338 Bogardus, James, 110 bonanza farms, 114–15 boom-bust cycle, 41–42 bootlegging, 192, 197 Borden, Gail, 119–20 Boston & Maine Railroad, 156 Boston Manufacturing Company, 71 Bower, Marvin, 264, 317–18 Bragg, Arial, 70 Brandeis, Louis, 176–77, 241 Bretton Woods Agreement, 278, 279, 306–7 Brin, Sergey, 354–55, 356, 439 British Labour Party, 188, 276 Broniewska, Janina, 276 Brown, John, 77 Brown, Lewis, 209 Brown Brothers, 79 Bryan, William Jennings, 150–53, 172, 174–75, 181, 183, 195–96 Bryce, James, 158, 159 Bubble Act, 135 Buchanan, Patrick, 344, 423 budget deficit, 27, 139, 305, 331, 367, 368, 372, 409–10 Buffalo Forge Company, 213 Buffett, Warren, 392 Bull, John, 95 Burbank, Luther, 118 bureaucratization, 250–51, 333 Burj Khalifa (Dubai), 395 Burke, Edmund, 5 Burling, Walter, 74 buses, 198–99 Bush, George H.

pages: 240 words: 78,436

Open for Business Harnessing the Power of Platform Ecosystems
by Lauren Turner Claire , Laure Claire Reillier and Benoit Reillier
Published 14 Oct 2017

ct=t(How_Does_Your_Leadership_Team_Rate_12_3_2015). 2 See, for example, the scale-up report, Sherry Coutu et al., November 2014, www.scaleupreport.org/, for a well-documented articulation of the scale-up challenges. 3 Reid Hoffman is now teaching his own version of fast scaling strategies at Stanford: ‘Blitzscaling’, http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/14/reid-hoffman-to-teach-blitzscalingat-stanford-this-fall/. 4 Rocket Internet is a VC firm well known for launching and selling copycat business models in markets when the leading player is not yet established. See, for example, ‘Rocket Internet: What It’s Like to Work at a Startup Clone Factory’, http://thehustle. co/rocket-internet-oliver-samwer. 5 The K-factor simply represents the number of new customers an existing customer brings to the platform on average.

pages: 372 words: 94,153

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next
by Andrew McAfee
Published 30 Sep 2019

More Praise for MORE FROM LESS “I’ve always believed that technological progress and entrepreneurship make our lives better. Here, Andrew McAfee shows how these powerful forces are helping us make our planet better, too, instead of degrading it. For anyone who wants to help create a future that is both sustainable and abundant, this book is essential reading.” —Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn and coauthor of Blitzscaling “Andrew McAfee’s optimistic and humane book documents a profoundly important and under-appreciated megatrend—the dematerialization of our economy. In a world where there is much to worry about, his analytical optimism is very welcome. Anyone who worries about the future will have their fears allayed and hopes raised by reading this important book.”

pages: 362 words: 97,288

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car
by Anthony M. Townsend
Published 15 Jun 2020

Cheape, Moving the Masses: Urban Public Transit in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia 1880–1912 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 1. 175companies merely joined forces: Cheape, Moving the Masses, 172. 175the most powerful, reviled traction monopoly: Walt Crowley, “City Light’s Birth and Seattle’s Early Power Struggles, 1886–1950,” History Link, April 26, 2000, https://www.historylink.org/File/2318. 175enjoyed decades of unrivaled power: Owain James, “We Miss Streetcars’ Frequent and Reliable Service, Not Streetcars Themselves,” Mobility Lab, April 17, 2019, https://mobilitylab.org/2019/04/17/we-miss-streetcars-frequent-and-reliable-service-not-streetcars-themselves/; combination of technological change and federal intervention: “Jersey Trolley Merger,” Wall Street Journal, May 13, 1905, 2. 176$100 billion Vision Fund: Katrina Brooker, “The Most Powerful Person in Silicon Valley,” Fast Company, January 14, 2019, https://www.fastcompany.com/90285552/the-most-powerful-person-in-silicon-valley. 176its total commitment to some $9 billion: Pavel Alpeyev, Jie Ma, and Won Jae Ko, “Taxi-Hailing Apps Take Root in Japan as SoftBank, Didi Join Fray,” Bloomberg, July 19, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-19/softbank-didi-to-roll-out-taxi-hailing-business-in-japan. 177$2 billion into Singapore-based Grab: Yoolim Lee, “Grab Vanquishes Uber with Local Strategy, Billions from SoftBank,” Bloomberg, March 26, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/grab-vanquishes-uber-with-local-strategy-billions-from-softbank. 177Ola downloaded $2 billion: Saritha Rai, “India’s Ola Raises $2 Billion from SoftBank, Tencent,” Bloomberg, October 2, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-02/india-s-ola-is-said-to-raise-2-billion-from-softbank-tencent. 17715 percent stake in Uber: Alison Griswold, “SoftBank—not Uber—Is the Real King of Ride-Hailing,” Quartz, January 23, 2018, https://qz.com/1187144/softbank-not-uber-is-the-real-king-of-ride-hailing/. 177Uber picked off Dubai-based Careem: Adam Satariano, “This Estonian Start-Up Has Become a Thorn in Uber’s Side,” New York Times, April 23, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/technology/bolt-taxify-uber-lyft.html. 177The damage to consumers: Justina Lee, “Singapore Fine Is ‘Minor Bump’ in Grab’s Ride-Hailing Dominance,” Nikkei Asian Review, September 25, 2018, https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Sharing-Economy/Singapore-fine-is-minor-bump-in-Grab-s-ride-hailing-dominance. 177Grab cornered more than 80 percent: Ardhana Aravindan, “Singapore Fines Grab and Uber, Imposes Measures to Open Up Market,” Reuters, September 23, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-grab-singapore/singapore-fines-grab-and-uber-imposes-measures-to-open-up-market-idUSKCN1M406J. 177all launched antitrust investigations: Mai Nguyen, “Vietnam Says Eyeing Formal Antitrust Probe into Uber-Grab Deal,” Reuters, May 16, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-grab-vietnam-idUSKCN1IH0XNiAikaRey, “Antitrust Watchdog Fines Grab P16 Million over Uber Deal,” Rappler, October 17, 2018, https://www.rappler.com/business/214502-philippine-competition-commission-fines-grab-philippines-over-uber-deal; Yoolim Lee, “Singapore Watchdog Fines Uber, Grab $9.5 Million over Merger,” Bloomberg, September 24, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-24/singapore-fines-uber-grab-s-13-million-for-merger-infringement. 177another fare-slashing battle with Ola: “Steering Group: A Bold Scheme to Dominate Ride-Hailing,” The Economist, May 10, 2018, https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/05/10/a-bold-scheme-to-dominate-ride-hailing. 177“SoftBank is playing the ride-hailing”: Alison Griswold, “Softbank Has Spread Its Ride-Hailing Bets and Didi Looks Like an Early Win,” Quartz, April 24, 2018, https://qz.com/1261177/softbanks-winner-in-ride-hailing-is-chinas-didi-chuxing-not-uber/. 177“driver incentives, passenger discounts”: Tim O’Reilly, “The Fundamental Problem with Silicon Valley’s Favorite Growth Strategy,” Quartz, February 5, 2019, https://qz.com/1540608/the-problem-with-silicon-valleys-obsession-with-blitzscaling-growth/. 178“locked in a capital-fueled deathmatch”: O’Reilly, “The Fundamental Problem.” 178The Vision Fund’s biggest investor: Brooker, “The Most Powerful Person.” 178the proceeds of an earlier liquidation: Catherine Shu, “Saudi Arabia’s Sovereign Fund Will Also Invest $45B in SoftBank’s Second Vision Fund,” Tech-Crunch, October 2018, https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/07/saudi-arabias-sovereign-fund-will-also-invest-45b-in-softbanks-second-vision-fund/. 178Uber’s multi-billion-dollar quarterly losses: “Aramco Value to Top $2 Trillion, Less Than 5 Percent to Be Sold, Says Prince,” Reuters, April 25, 2016, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-plan-aramco-idUSKCN0XM16M. 178the House of Saud: Brooker, “The Most Powerful Person.” 178thwart municipal officials’ attempts at enforcement: Mike Isaac, “How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide,” New York Times, March 3, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-program-evade-authorities.html. 179“Even if that means paying money”: Dara Khosrowshahi, “The Campaign for Sustainable Mobility,” Uber, September 26, 2018, https://www.uber.com/newsroom/campaign-sustainable-mobility/. 180Five-cent nickel fares: Cheape, Moving the Masses, 174–75. 180cities . . . grant a ride-hail monopoly: “Free Exchange: The Market for Driverless Cars Will Head towards Monopoly,” The Economist, June 7, 2018, https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2018/06/07/the-market-for-driverless-cars-will-head-towards-monopoly. 180“corrupt and contented”: Cheape, Moving the Masses, 177. 180Jay Gould’s Manhattan Railway Company: Terry Golway, Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (New York: Live-right, 2014), 135. 180took over Puget Sound’s streetcar: Crowley, “City Light’s Birth.” 181Public transit was the competition: United States Securities and Exchange Commission, Registration Statement under the Securities Act of 1933: Uber Technologies, April 11, 2019, 25, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1543151/000119312519103850/d647752ds1.htm#toc. 181deploy predatory pricing: United States Securities and Exchange Commission, Registration Statement. 182“have been created based on cash flows”: “Asset-Backed Security,” Investo-pedia, accessed December 7, 2018, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/asset-backedsecurity.asp. 183Amazon’s body-tracking technology: “The Learning Machine: Amazon’s Empire Rests on its Low-Key Approach to AI,” The Economist, April 11, 2019, https://www.economist.com/business/2019/04/13/amazons-empire-rests-on-its-low-key-approach-to-ai. 8.

pages: 361 words: 107,461

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs
by Guy Raz
Published 14 Sep 2020

This was certainly Paul Graham’s position during their interview with the Y Combinator board for a slot in the 2009 winter class. “The very first thing out of Paul Graham’s mouth was, ‘You mean people actually use this? Well, that’s weird,’” Joe recalled during our conversation. Brian, recounting that same moment during a 2015 interview with Reid Hoffman in his Blitzscaling class at Stanford, remembered Graham then asking them a rhetorical question that only a really good story could sufficiently answer: “What’s wrong with them?” “That’s not a great way to start an interview of any kind,” Joe said. “It kind of went downhill from there.” It went downhill until Joe ran back into the room after their interview and handed Paul a box of their Obama O’s, which worked (they got their slot) because Obama O’s had a great story behind it, one that explained why Obama O’s existed and why Paul and the Y Combinator team should give Joe, Brian, and Nate a shot.

pages: 444 words: 117,770

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman
Published 4 Sep 2023

An AI might, for example, operate as one massive, state-spanning system, a single general-purpose utility governing hundreds of millions. Equally we will also have vastly capable systems, available at low cost, open-source, highly adapted, catering to a village. Multiple ownership structures will exist in tandem: technology democratized in open-source collectives, the products of today’s corporate leaders or insurgent blitz-scaling start-ups, and government held, whether through nationalization or in-house nurturing. All will coexist and coevolve, and everywhere they will alter, magnify, produce, and disrupt flows and networks of power. Where and how the forces play out will vary dramatically according to existing social and political factors.

pages: 381 words: 113,173

The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset That Drives Extraordinary Results
by Andrew McAfee
Published 14 Nov 2023

They apply their insatiable curiosity and love of experimentation to the challenge of building better products and companies. But while most people recognize that we now live in a veritable Age of Geekdom, no one seems to have analyzed and explained the core principles and mechanisms of business geekery. Even my own books, such as The Alliance and Blitzscaling, which definitely geek out on people management and building multibillion-dollar businesses respectively, don’t examine the meta question of why the geeks have inherited the Earth. With his new book, The Geek Way, Andrew McAfee (who is himself an alpha geek of the business variety) tackles the central questions of what geeks are, what they believe, and why they have been so successful in the past few decades.

pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
by Tim O'Reilly
Published 9 Oct 2017

Not just SAS and ESRI but Craigslist, Basecamp, SmugMug, MailChimp, SurveyMonkey—and for that matter, O’Reilly Media—were all quietly making money. More recently, Bryce noted that “ambitious founders have been trained that billion dollar exits are reserved only for those who follow a very defined playbook for ‘blitzscaling’ a business.” Yet in the last six months of 2016 there were seven tech M&A transactions with a value of more than $1 billion. Of those, only four were venture backed. Three had no investment at all from VCs. This is not new. Other companies that were eventually acquired or went public, like Atlassian, Braintree, Shutterstock, and Lynda.com, had started out the same way, first reaching profitability and scale, and only adding investors late in life as part of a path toward going public or being sold.

pages: 505 words: 161,581

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley
by Jimmy Soni
Published 22 Feb 2022

“We crafted the product management group to not just have empathy for customers and build great products,” she observed, “but also to hold the company together.” Once that product problem was solved, PayPal’s rapid growth led to another set of learnings that influenced the future work of its founders. Reid Hoffman’s neologism “blitzscaling,” for example, and Silicon Valley’s obsession with fast growth can trace at least partial roots to the pair of start-ups on University Avenue. Russ Simmons remarked that one unintended side effect of that scale of growth was that it colored his view of future start-up experiences. “It definitely spoiled me for later, because it’s like, ‘Oh, you just launch a thing and then it takes off, right?’

pages: 706 words: 202,591

Facebook: The Inside Story
by Steven Levy
Published 25 Feb 2020

PYMK proved to be one of Growth Circle’s most effective tools, and also one of its most controversial ones, a symbol of how the dark art of growth hacking can lead to unexpected consequences. It wasn’t a Facebook invention—LinkedIn, a growth-crazy company in its own right, did it first. (Reid Hoffman would later put a ribbon on the growth-at-all-costs phenomenon and dub it “blitz-scaling.”) But Facebook took the idea of presenting current members to new and current users to dizzying heights. On its face PYMK seems innocuous enough: a carousel of profile pictures on Facebook presumably connected to you, but somehow not your Facebook friends. Its impetus was to address an imperative that the Growth team’s researchers had unearthed: a new Facebook user is likely to abandon the service if he or she doesn’t connect with seven new friends—fast.