Blitzscaling 09: Reid Hoffman and Allen Blue on Why and How They Scaled LinkedIn

This is session 9 of Technology-enabled Blitzscaling, a Stanford University class taught by Reid Hoffman, John Lilly, Allen Blue, and Chris Yeh. This lecture recaps the previous three sessions and explains how the Village stage is the inflection point for blitzscaling. Reid Hoffman and Allen Blue then move into the when, why, and how of scaling LinkedIn.

[@ArminNehzat]

Thank you Reid & Greylock! As a person who has failed numerous times at various stages of a project these lectures extremely accurate and detailed. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights, I'm sure many are going to benefit from these. It would be great if we could get access to the slides.

[@jahmorlymogullab3186]

TOTALLY agree... Probably saved me years of dismay and failure...

[@jameshendrickson4845]

Blitzkreig is a terrible analogy.

[@Hawking1969]

why?

[@vincentlextrait3092]

This is nice but extremely misleading. How to milk the cow has been known for ages now since the beginnings of the Silicon Valley. The real question, when you have a very good idea (like LinkedIn) is to find and keep the engineering mavericks to kick it off when talent is very scarce. LinkedIn without Yan Pujante would be nothing. Reducing LinkedIn to ordinary MBA stuff is not helping entrepreneurs. Talent is 10 times scarcer than courage, which is 10 times scarcer than money, which is 10 times scarcer than ideas, which are 10 times scarcer than MBA stuff.

[@weeksy_j]

When you're doing the family side - "everyone's a generalist". Key to your early hires for sure.

[@MillenniumCampaignIn]

Slides here: www.slideshare.net/greylockpartners/blitzscaling-session-9-village-stage

[@Villaintrader12]

Great video and thanks for sharing

[@rotimibest8530]

can we get access to the slides?

[@theoneed2051]

Feels like we're getting something for free that r should have paid for! Great presentation. It would be interesting to knows if any of the students in this class went on to build successful business after this talk, wouldn't be surprised.

[@xdite]

this episode didn't have chinese subtitle

[@CreatorRevolution]

Eric also developed mythologies for B culture so they could be integrated. They had to prove themselves so to speak.

[@28121sdfsfsf]

This is great but why there is someone breathing like Shrek in the background 😡

[@1983sushi]

are the slides available?

[@domore1287]

Just WOW

[@thetomschaeffer]

Blitzscaling - what a ridiculous concept. Come up with an idea and drive forward with passion and grit. Incorporate best practices for scale, but this will change from org to org. BS'ing is not what makes companies great... sounds like an easy way for a company to crash and burn just to use some ridiculous buzz word to attract investors. give me a break.

[@pricejoss]

Totally agree. I find a lot of the valley back-slapping and self-congratulation really revolting. They’re not changing the world - they’re just harnessing a relatively nascent industry and technology to make vast sums of money in the same way industrialists did in previous centuries. The credit they get is grossly overweighted and when they talk about culture it’s really code for work addiction and projecting meaning on to the meaningless. In other words, much of what drives these start ups is ego followed by rampant effort to achieve traction in the marketplace to validate that ego.