There’s a definite shift from informal culture to formal culture followed by the implementation of procedures and processes. Your company has over 100 employees and it becomes almost impossible to know everyone on a first-name basis. Now things are starting to get more serious. Hierarchy is introduced as managers come in to organize different departments. Things are also starting to become a little more formal. People are still familiar with one another, you’re likely bumping into colleagues at the office (or on Zoom calls), just perhaps not on a daily basis. It’s also where you’ve been learning about the market, coming up with a set of hypotheses, and testing them with an MVP (minimum viable product) using lean startup methodology.Ī tribe is still very much like a family, right? It’s the typical “ romance phase” of a start-up. Everyone knows each other, everyone’s intimately involved within the project and talking, just as you might expect at a family dinner table. This is when there are just a handful of employees at the company ( between 1-9). The game changes as you progress to each new stage – how management works, how recruiting works, what kind of structure the organization needs, etc.Īnd what may have worked for you before to progress from stage #1 – #2 isn’t going to be the best practice for jumping from stage #2 to stage #3, for example. “The chessboard keeps adding new pieces and new dimensions over time.” – Drew Houston, Dropbox

Now, transitioning between stages is much like a game of strategy… Seeing as the most obvious change a business undertakes when scaling up is the number of employees, this is the determining factor of a company’s growth “stage”. Typically, startups go through a five-stage process of growth as they blitzscale their way to the top of the market: It provides a solid framework for companies wanting to scale harder and faster than the competition, backed by examples from tech incumbents such as Amazon, LinkedIn, Airbnb, and Google. He coined the term from the German blitzkrieg (lightning war), a reference to the Wehrmacht’s prioritization of speed over all else as they rampaged across Europe in World War Two.īlitzscaling gained increased popularity after the publication of the book Blitzscaling – The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies in 2018, written by Hoffman and co-author Chris Yeh. The concept of Blitzscaling was first introduced to us in September 2015 by Reid Hoffman – the co-founder of LinkedIn – at a Stanford University course.

Blitzscaling by reid hoffman