How We Wrote Blitzscaling

Many people often ask, “How did you write this book?” When a simple answer makes the most sense, we usually say, “With a lot of hard work.” But for those who are curious about how Blitzscaling came to be, I thought I'd ask my co-author Chris Yeh to tell the story.

The following is a guest post from Chris Yeh, the co-author of Blitzscaling (available everywhere next week on October 9) and The Alliance.

After we finished writing The Alliance, we took a few months off before thinking about the next book. By the spring of 2015, we were playing around with a couple different book concepts, when Reid came to me with the idea of writing about “scaleups” instead of startups. “People always talk about how Silicon Valley is a great place to start a company,” Reid pointed out, “But I seldom hear them talk about why Silicon Valley is a great place to scale a company.” The instant he told me, I was drawn to that core idea, which resonated with my own experience.

A quick survey of the existing literature found a few books on scaling, but most of those appeared to focus on traditional small businesses, rather than the kind of extreme growth that drives Silicon Valley. We also began thinking about how the ideas were applicable outside Silicon Valley; Reid had visited China many times, and had observed how successful the ecosystem there had become at scaling up businesses. We decided to pursue the concept.

The first part of our writing process, paradoxically enough, doesn't feature a lot of writing. During this phase, we spend most of our time simply talking about the ideas, trying to fit them into a framework, and thinking about potential stories and examples. We spent many weekend hours exploring these ideas, which is just one of many reasons why our wives are thanked in the acknowledgments! It was during this phase that some of the core ideas of Blitzscaling, like our definition of the five stages, or the key concept of prioritizing speed over efficiency, began to emerge.

These ideas don't spring forth fully-fledged, a la Athena from Zeus' skull. For example, we played around with a number of different ways to describe the stages, including using the metaphor of military units (Squad, Platoon, Company, Brigade, Army) or boats (Canoe, Longboat, Yacht, Schooner, Clipper). But because blitzscaling has a such profound impact on society, we were drawn to a metaphor that reflected the broadest possible experience, hence our adoption of the canonical stages of Family, Tribe, Village, City, and Nation. Each of these stages describes how we live, and captures the radical change that occurs from stage to stage.

Over the summer of 2015, we wrote a book's worth of content on how to blitzscale each aspect of your company (from the role of the founder to the company's culture) through each of the stages of blitzscaling. The basic cadence was fairly standard—Reid and I would get together, talk about a specific set of ideas (one of Reid's superpowers is the ability to create mental frameworks for understanding complex issues, seemingly at will!), and based on our conversation, I would go off and draft another section or chapter of the book. By the end of the summer, we were feeling pretty good.

That fall, we stress-tested the ideas of the book by teaching the class CS183C: Technology-enabled Blitzscaling at our alma mater, Stanford University with the help of our friends (and fellow Stanford alumni) Allen Blue and John Lilly. Our thesis going into the class was that we'd share the ideas of the book, learn what was missing, make a few minor tweaks, and publish the book in 2016.

What we discovered was that blitzscaling was so counter-intuitive, that we had put the cart before the horse by writing a “playbook” on how to blitzscale before we had adequately made the case for the who, what, where, when, and why of blitzscaling.

It was gut-check time. We had a tough decision to make. Should we simply follow our original plan, and release a blitzscaling playbook in 2016? That would be the least work, but our experience with the class made that option feel inadequate. Or should we set aside an entire book's worth of material, and start over, nearly from scratch, to write a very different, more philosophical book? We hadn't planned our lives around starting over, and the prospect was pretty daunting.

In the end, we decided that the ideas of blitzscaling were important enough that writing a new book would be worth the effort (we hoped). So we began again, starting with articulating the compelling reasons why blitzscaling mattered. At times, it seemed like fate was conspiring against us. The Microsoft / LinkedIn merger kept Reid so busy that we took a multi-month hiatus (though I was able to use some of this time to conduct interviews that produced some of the material in the book), and the 2016 presidential election cycle also diverted crucial time and attention.

Through it all, we kept working. And as we kept grinding away, it became apparent that the subject was even richer than we thought. We added content on blitzscaling outside of high tech, blitzscaling in other ecosystems, and perhaps most importantly, on how to blitzscale responsibility. By the time we turned in the book, it had grown to be 50% longer than The Start-up of You and 200% longer than The Alliance.

Throughout the writing process, one of the other key techniques we used was sharing drafts with fellow authors, thinkers, and practitioners—eating our own dog food, so to speak, on network intelligence. While it can be difficult to incorporate criticism and feedback, we strongly believe that getting feedback is the best way to boost final quality—the literary equivalent of Reid's famous dictum, “If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.” We tried to thank many of these folks in the acknowledgements. Without them, the book wouldn't be nearly as strong.

Even today, it doesn't really feel like we've truly “finished.” While the final text for Blitzscaling is, literally, set on paper, we're still engaging with and refining the nuances of blitzscaling in response to how the world continues to change. The blitzscaling playbook needs to change on a weekly basis just to keep up! We plan to be living with these ideas for years to come, and hope that others will join us in evolving and improving the techniques and principles of blitzscaling.

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To learn more about why, when, and how to blitzscale your organization, visit Blitzscaling.com to order your copy of our upcoming book Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies.

For a quick introduction to the book's ideas, enjoy the trailer below.