創業公司：如何閃電擴張

編者按：本文來自微信公眾號「ThinkingSlow緩慢思考」（ID：ThinkingSlow），編譯愉悅資本戴汨；36氪經授權發布。

原文來自HBR。我一度猶豫要不要翻譯，因為文章很長。我還是花了兩個晚上翻譯整理出來了，原因很簡單：霍夫曼是矽谷的人脈王，參與了Paypal、Facebook和Linkedin的創建和投資，他對早期公司擴張的見解值得研究。此外，Wish的創始人Danny大力給我推薦了這篇文章，我想他也是深有體會。閃電擴張的邏輯是：對於很多平台業務，只有具有規模才有價值，只有接觸客戶才能擁有客戶，因此一旦確定了市場機會和產品的契合，就應該不顧一切的擴張，在擴張中解決問題。

Reid Hoffman is one of Silicon Valley』s grown-ups. After helping to found PayPal, he moved on to found LinkedIn, in 2002, which has turned him into a billionaire. He was an early investor in Facebook and now serves as a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock. He』s written two books, The Start-Up of You (with Ben Casnocha) and The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age (with Casnocha and Chris Yeh).

里德.霍夫曼是在矽谷長大的。在幫助創立PayPal之後，2002年他創立了LinkedIn，這個公司使他成為一名億萬富翁。他還是Facebook的早期投資者，現在是風險投資公司Greylock的合伙人。他寫了兩本書：「你的創業「 和 「聯盟：網路時代的人才管理」。

In the fall of 2015, Hoffman began teaching a computer science class called Technology-Enabled Blitzscaling at Stanford University, his alma mater, with John Lilly (a partner at Greylock and formerly the CEO of Mozilla), Allen Blue (cofounder of LinkedIn), and Chris Yeh (cofounder of Allied Talent). In this edited interview with Tim Sullivan, the editorial director of HBR Press, Hoffman talks about the challenges, risks, and payoffs of blitzscaling.

2015年秋天，霍夫曼聯合約翰（Greylock的合伙人，以前是Mozilla的首席執行官）、艾倫（LinkedIn的聯合創始人）和克里斯（Allied Talent聯合創始人）開始在他的母校斯坦福大學教授一門計算機課程：技術驅動的閃電擴張。在接受哈佛商業評論編輯Tim Sullivan的這篇採訪中，霍夫曼討論了閃電擴張的挑戰、風險和回報。

HBR: Let』s start with the basics. What is blitzscaling?

哈佛商業評論： 我們從基礎開始吧。什麼是閃電擴張（blitzscaling）？

Hoffman: Blitzscaling is what you do when you need to grow really, really quickly. It』s the science and art of rapidly building out a company to serve a large and usually global market, with the goal of becoming the first mover at scale.

霍夫曼：閃電擴張就是當你需要真正的快速增長時你做的事情。快速建立一家公司，服務於巨大的市場，通常是全球市場，成為規模上的領跑者，這是門科學也是門藝術。

This is high-impact entrepreneurship. These kinds of companies always create a lot of the jobs and industries of the future. For example, Amazon essentially invented e-commerce. Today, it has over 150,000 employees and has created countless jobs at Amazon sellers and partners. Google revolutionized how we find information—it has over 60,000 employees and has created many more jobs at its AdWords and AdSense partners.

這種創業具有極大的影響力。這些公司創造了許多未來的工作和行業。例如，亞馬遜本質上是發明了電子商務。今天，它有超過15萬名員工，並為賣家和合作夥伴創造了無數工作。 Google徹底改變了我們如何找到信息 — 它有超過6萬名員工，並為其AdWords和AdSense合作夥伴創造了更多的工作。

HBR：Why this focus on fast growth?

為什麼重點放在快速增長？

We』re in a networked age. And I don』t mean only the internet. Globalization is a form of network. It adds networks of transport, commerce, payment, and information flows around the world. In such an environment, you have to move faster, because competition from anywhere on the globe may beat you to scale.

我們處於網路時代。我說的並不只是互聯網。全球化是網路的一種形式。它構建了全球的運輸、商業、支付和信息流的網路。在這樣的環境中，你必須更快地移動，因為全球任何地方的競爭都可能會擊敗你。

Software has a natural affinity with blitzscaling, because the marginal costs of serving any size market are virtually zero. The more that software becomes integral to all industries, the faster things will move. Throw in AI machine learning, and the loops get even faster. So we』re going to see more blitzscaling. Not just a little more, but a lot more.

軟體天然和閃電擴張相關聯，由於軟體服務於任何大小的市場的邊際成本幾乎為零。軟體越對任何行業適用，擴張速度就越快。加入AI機器學習，循環很更快。所以我們會看到更多的閃電擴張。不只是多一點點，而是多非常多。

HBR：How did you settle on the term 「blitzscaling」?

你如何找到「blitzscaling」這個術語的？

It has some interesting associations. I have obvious hesitations about the World War II association with the term 「blitzkrieg.」 However, the intellectual parallels are so close that it is very informative. Before blitzkrieg emerged as a military tactic, armies didn』t advance beyond their supply lines, which limited their speed. The theory of the blitzkrieg was that if you carried only what you absolutely needed, you could move very, very fast, surprise your enemies, and win. Once you got halfway to your destination, you had to decide whether to turn back or to abandon the lines and go on. Once you made the decision to move forward, you were all in. You won big or lost big. Blitzscaling adopts a similar perspective. If a start-up determines that it needs to move very fast, it will take on far more risk than a company going through the normal, rational process of scaling up. This kind of speed is necessary for offensive and defensive reasons. Offensively, your business may require a certain scale to be valuable. LinkedIn wasn』t valuable until millions of people joined our network. Marketplaces like eBay must have both buyers and sellers at scale. Payment businesses like PayPal and e-commerce businesses like Amazon have low margins, so they require very high volumes. Defensively, you want to scale faster than your competitors because the first to reach customers may own them, and the advantages of scale may lead you to a winner-takes-most position. And in a global environment, you may not necessarily be aware of who your competition really is.

它有一些有趣的關聯。我有些猶豫，因為很明顯「閃電戰」和「第二次世界大戰」相關。但是，閃電戰這個詞非常形象，意思很接近。在閃電戰作為一種軍事手段出現之前，軍隊不會推進超出他們的供應線，這限制了他們的速度。閃電戰的理論是，如果你只攜帶你的必需品，你可以非常快速地移動並且贏得勝利，讓敵人為之驚訝。一旦你到達距離目的地一半的時候，你必須決定是否回頭或繼續前行。一旦你決定向前走，你就置身全部了。你要麼大贏要麼大輸。 閃電擴張採用類似的觀點。如果一家初創公司確定需要移動的速度非常快，那麼它的風險要高於進行正常擴張的公司大得多。這種速度對於進攻和防守都是必要的。進攻上講，你的業務可能需要一定的規模才有價值。只有數百萬人加入我們的網路，LinkedIn才有價值。像eBay這樣的交易市場一定要有買賣雙方的規模。像PayPal這樣的支付業務和像亞馬遜這樣的電子商務利潤率很低，所以他們需要很大的交易量。防守上講，你希望比競爭對手更快地擴張，因為首先接觸客戶才有可能擁有他們，而規模的優勢可能會導致你贏者通吃。在全球化的環境中，你可能並不一定了解競爭對手到底是誰。

HBR：Are there several dimensions to the idea of scale?

規模這個概念而言，它有幾個不同的維度嗎？

There are three kinds of scale. People naturally focus on two of them: growing your revenues and growing your customer base. And of course, if you don』t get those right, then nothing else matters. But very few businesses can succeed on those fronts without also scaling the organization. An organization』s size and its ability to execute determine whether it can capture customers and revenue.

有三種不同的規模。人們一般關注其中兩個：增加你的收入和增加客戶群。當然，如果你這兩個沒有搞對，那麼其他的都不重要。但很少有企業可以在不擴張組織規模的情況下實現這兩個方面。組織的規模和執行力決定公司是否能夠獲取客戶和收入。

We see scale as a series of stages, based on orders of magnitude: A family-scale business can measure its employees in single digits; a tribe in tens; a village in hundreds; a city in thousands. A nation has more than 10,000 employees. These are estimates, not precise guides; a company often remains a family until around 15 employees, a tribe until around 150, and so on. At each level, the way you run various functions—financing the company, hiring and onboarding employees, marketing the product, and so on—changes significantly. There aren』t rules governing this when you』re blitzscaling; you use heuristics instead—and by that I mean guidelines that help you make decisions and learn on the fly. Organizational scale is more about the character of the company than it is an exact employee head count—things don』t change drastically at exactly 150 employees. And you』re not necessarily scaling each element of the firm at the same time or rate. You』re more likely to focus first on customer service and sales than other functions. But even then, you』ll have to blitzscale the other parts of the organization. So all along you really do need to be thinking about the company as a whole: How will you allocate your talent, and then how will you grow it? How will you hold on to your culture? How will you communicate? How will your competitive landscape shift?

我們可以根據數量級將規模分為一系列階段：家庭規模的業務可以用個位數來度量員工; 一個部落規模數十計； 一個村莊數以百計；一個城市數以千計；一個國家數以萬計。這些是估計，不是精確的指導；一家公司在15人以下就像一個家庭， 150人以下就像一個部落，以此類推。在每個層次上，你運營公司各個職能的方式都大相徑庭：公司融資，招聘和選擇員工，營銷產品等等 。當你進行閃電擴張的時候，你沒有規則可以依賴。你依靠的是直覺— 我指的是一些幫助你做決策的框架，你一邊飛行一邊學習。組織規模更多的是關於公司的特點，而不是確切的員工總數 — 到達整150名員工的時候並不會發生什麼突變。你不必要同時或者等比的擴張公司的每一個元素。你首先還是更應該關注客戶服務和銷售，而不是其他功能。但即使如此，組織的其他部分還是需要閃電擴張。所以， 自始至終，你需要把公司當一個整體思考：如何分配你的人才以及如何擴充？如何堅持你的文化？你如何溝通？你的競爭格局將如何變化？

HBR：When does a start-up begin to blitzscale?

初創公司什麼時候開始閃電擴張？

At the family scale, you』re usually raising money and figuring out exactly what your product or service is. You most likely have not launched a product yet.At the tribe scale, you』re just starting to have a real company. It』s fairly rare—not unheard of, but rare—for blitzscaling to start at this phase unless you have a runaway hit of a product: PayPal or Instagram, for example. More typically, you』ve launched some version of the product or service, and you』ve homed in on your target market. But you』re still not certain that the start-up can really scale massively. There』s always some level of risk. You may decide not to scale at this stage, because you』re not sure you have a product-market fit yet. Or you may decide to move ahead anyway, because you know you absolutely need to, for the offensive and defensive reasons we just talked about. So the blitzscale process usually starts between the tribe and village scale. By then you』ve ironed out the product-market fit, you have some data, and you know what the competitive landscape looks like. This is when the logic of blitzscaling becomes very clear. Once you begin to prove—to yourself and others—that there』s an interesting category and a big market opportunity, you attract all kinds of competition. At the low end, other start-ups may be launching their own version of your product or service and trying to achieve scale in the market before you. At the high end, established brands are figuring out how to leverage their own assets to own part or all of your space. A start-up has two advantages as a first mover going through blitzscale: focus and speed. Established brands tend not to be as fast or as focused. And competing start-ups probably don』t have momentum yet (although they may be just as fast and focused). The canonical example is Groupon, which made it to this middle stage and got hit by massive competition on both the high and the low ends. It wasn』t able to both scale fast and build a durable product and thus failed to fully realize a potentially industry-transforming opportunity.

在家庭規模上，你通常會籌集資金，並確定你的產品或服務到底是什麼。你有可能尚未推出產品。在部落規模上，你剛開始有一家真正的公司。在這個階段就開始閃電擴張是相當罕見的，除非你有一個火爆的產品，當然也不是沒有過這樣的例子，例如PayPal或Instagram。更典型地，你已經推出了一些版本的產品或服務，並且你已經在目標市場上站住了。但是，你仍然不確定公司是否應該開始啟動大規模擴張。一定程度的風險總是有的。你可能覺得此階段不進行擴張，因為你不確定產品是否已經契合了市場。或者你可能會決定無論如何要往前跑，因為你知道你必須這麼做，由於我們剛才談到的進攻和防守原因。所以這個閃電擴張的過程通常是在介於部落和村莊這兩個階段之間開始的。那時，你已經解決了產品市場適應性問題，你有了一些數據，你知道競爭格局是什麼樣的。這時候閃電擴張的邏輯變得非常清楚。一旦你開始向自己和他人證明 — 有一個門類很有趣並且有很大的市場機會，你會吸引各種各樣的競爭。在低端，其他初創企業可能會推出自己的產品或服務版本，並試圖在市場上實現規模化。在高端，成熟公司試圖利用自己的資產來獲得部分或全部市場。第一個發動閃電擴張的初創公司有兩大優勢：專註和速度。成熟公司往往不是那麼快或者集中精力。而其他競爭的初創企業可能還沒有形成勢能（儘管他們也可能同樣的快速和專註）。典型的例子是Groupon，它跑到了這個中間階段，然後遭到了來自高端和低端的巨大的競爭。它無法快速擴張同時建立持久的產品，因此錯失了一個潛在的重塑產業的機會。

當進行閃電擴張的時候，你會遇到什麼組織問題？

Blitzscaling is always managerially inefficient—and it burns through a lot of capital quickly. But you have to be willing to take on these inefficiencies in order to scale up. That』s the opposite of what large organizations optimize for.

In hiring, for instance, you may need to get as many warm bodies through the door as possible, as quickly as you can—while hiring quality employees and maintaining the company culture. How do you do that? Different companies use different hacks. As part of blitzscaling at Uber, managers would ask a newly hired engineer, 「Who are the three best engineers you』ve worked with in your previous job?」 And then they』d send those engineers offer letters. No interview. No reference checking. Just an offer letter. They』ve had to scale their engineering fast, and that』s a key technique that they』ve deployed. We faced this issue at PayPal. In early 2000, payment transaction volume was growing at a compounding rate of 2% to 5% per day. That kind of growth put PayPal in a deep hole as far as customer service was concerned. Even though the only place we listed our contact information was in the Palo Alto phone directory, angry customers were tracking down our main number and dialing extensions at random. Twenty-four hours a day, you could pick up literally any phone and talk to an angry customer. So we turned off all our ringers and used our cell phones. But that wasn』t a solution. We knew we needed to build a customer service capacity—fast. But that』s very difficult to do in Silicon Valley. So we decided to scale up in Omaha. This was during the first dot-com boom, so we convinced the governor of Nebraska that he wanted a piece of the internet revolution. He and the mayor held press conferences about how PayPal was going to open a customer service office, prompting a flood of job applicants. For four weekends straight, we flew out about 20% of the company to interview them. People showed up with their résumés, and we』d put them in a room and do group interviews. Within six weeks, we had 100 active customer-service people fielding e-mails. It』s now a classic technique for internet companies to offer e-mail and web-based customer service only. But we had to figure out how to hack our customer service challenge at a very fast pace. There was no playbook to tell us what to do. There still isn』t.

閃電擴張在管理上總是效率低下的，而且會很快燒掉很多資金。但是，為了擴大規模，您必須願意承擔這些低效率。這與大型組織的優化截然相反。

例如，在招聘方面，你可能需要儘可能快地找到儘可能多的人，同時保證質量和維護公司文化。你如何做到這一點？不同的公司使用不同的黑客手段。作為Uber閃電擴張的縮影，經理們會問每一位新聘請的工程師，「你以前在工作中工作過的最好的三位工程師是誰？」然後他們給那些工程師發錄取信。沒有面試。沒有背景調查。只是一個錄取信。他們不得不快速擴展工程團隊，這是他們採用的手段。我們在PayPal也面臨過這個問題。 2000年初，支付交易量以每天2％至5％的複利率增長。就客戶服務而言，這種增長使paypal處於深洞中。儘管我們只在Palo Alto的電話簿中列出了我們的聯繫信息，但憤怒的客戶隨機追蹤了我們的主號碼和撥號分機。每天24小時，你可以隨時拿起一個電話，都可以和一個憤怒的客戶交談。所以我們拔掉了所有的座機，轉而使用我們的手機。但這不是一個解決方案。我們知道我們需要快速建立客戶服務能力。但這在矽谷很難做到。所以我們決定在奧馬哈擴大規模。當時這是第一次互聯網泡沫期間。我們說服了內布拉斯加州州長擁抱互聯網革命。他和市長舉行了一個新聞發布會，宣布PayPal將設立客戶服務辦公室，這引發了大量的求職者。連續四個周末，公司20％的人都飛出去面試他們。人們帶著簡歷過來，我們把他們安排在一個房間里進行集體面試。在六個星期內，我們招募到了100名活躍的客服人員處理電子郵件。現在，對互聯網公司而言，利用電子郵件和網路服務處理客戶服務已經是一種經典技術。當時那個時候，我們必須弄清楚如何以非常快的速度處理客戶服務挑戰。沒有任何手冊來告訴我們該做什麼。那時還沒有。

如果沒有規則，你們怎麼想出方法來？

Sometimes freedom from normal rules is what gives you competitive advantage. For example, if we had understood how pernicious credit card fraud and chargebacks were in the early days at PayPal, I』m not sure we would have believed that such a service could be successful. We didn』t realize how staggering the losses could be. All the banking people knew the rules—you had to protect against fraud first. That prevented them from trying anything that looked remotely like PayPal. Our ignorance allowed us to build something fast, but then of course we had to fix it on the run, because we were already in the minefield. Most critics thought we were losing so much money in 2000 because of our customer acquisition bonuses. But that wasn』t the case. The industry』s average customer-acquisition cost through advertising was around $40. So when we gave customers who recommended a friend 10 bucks and gave the new customer 10 bucks, we were cutting costs in half. Why depend on heuristics rather than rules? Because you』re looking for an edge that distinguishes you from other competitors, who are following conventional wisdom. That』s not to say that there aren』t rules. Don』t allow anyone to embezzle your money. That』s a rule. But it doesn』t give anyone a competitive edge.

有時，對正常規則的不了解反而讓你具備競爭優勢。例如，如果我們了解了PayPal早期的惡意信用卡欺詐和退款，我不知道我們會相信這樣的服務可能會成功。我們沒有意識到損失可能是多麼驚人。所有的銀行人員都知道這些規則 — 你必須首先防止欺詐。這阻止他們嘗試像PayPal這樣遠程的東西。我們的無知使我們能夠快速建立一些東西，但是當然，我們必須在運行中解決問題，因為我們已經在雷區了。大多數批評者認為，我們在2000年虧損了很多錢，由於客戶獲取的激勵政策。但事實並非如此。這個行業通過廣告獲取客戶的平均購買成本約為40美元。所以當我們給客戶和客戶推薦的朋友各10美金的時候，我們把成本削減了一半。為什麼依賴直覺而不是規則？因為你正在尋找一個將你與其他競爭對手區分開的優勢，而你的競爭對手遵循傳統的智慧。這不是說沒有規則。不要讓任何人盜用你的錢。這是一個規則。但它並沒有給任何人帶來競爭優勢。

It sounds as if your choice of heuristics can lead to radically different organizational outcomes.

聽起來你依賴直覺的方式可以導致完全不同的組織結果。

Yes. One of the differentiators between Google and Microsoft, two blitzscaling companies, was that Google wanted to stay very flat, whereas Microsoft built up a lot of hierarchy.

是的。谷歌和微軟都是閃電擴張的公司，但是兩者之間的差異之一是，谷歌希望保持非常的偏平，而微軟則建立了很多等級結構。

You had to have eight direct reports at Google to be a manager, but there was no upper limit. People had 10, 15, 20, even 100 direct reports to minimize middle management. It would likely have been more managerially efficient to give someone no more than eight people. However, Google chose a flat organization that sacrificed that kind of efficiency to achieve an extreme focus on technology development. Microsoft, on the other hand, followed a more classical and hierarchical approach.

在Google，你做為一個經理，必須有8個直接的彙報，沒有上限。為了減少中間管理層級，有人可能有10個，15個，20個，甚至100個直接的彙報關係。從管理效率上講，一個人的彙報不要超過8個。 但是Google選擇了一個扁平的組織，犧牲了管理效率，以極大地關注技術開發。另一方面，微軟採用了更為經典的分級的方法。

HBR：That reminds me of Google』s decision to hire only people with very high GPAs from elite universities. As a heuristic, there』s obviously collateral damage—there are many smart people you』re not allowed to hire—but it makes sense if your goal is to hire a large number of smart generalists quickly.

這讓我想起Google決定只僱用精英大學GPA非常高的人。作為直覺，這有明顯的副作用 — 有許多聰明的人不能被僱用 — 但如果你的目標是快速招聘大量的聰明通才，這是有道理的。

That created a lot of frustration. 「I can』t hire my friend who doesn』t have that qualification, but I know that he』s really good.」 And the company says, 「Yeah, sorry. That』s the way we execute as we blitzscale. We need a simple heuristic so that we can focus on what really matters.」 Another benefit of Google』s decision to hire only from elite universities is that it helped create and maintain a coherent culture as the company scaled.

這造成了很多挫折。 「我不能僱用我的朋友，他資格不符。但我知道他真的很好。」 公司說：「是的，對不起。這是我們閃電擴張採取的方式。我們需要一個簡單的直覺方法，以便我們可以專註於真正重要的事情。「 Google決定僅從精英大學僱用的另一個好處是，當公司擴張的時候，有助於創建和維護一個連續的文化。

HBR：Why is culture so important to blitzscaling?

為什麼文化對閃電擴張如此重要 ？

Because you』re growing an organization very fast, you have to make people accountable to each other on a horizontal or peer-to-peer basis, and not just vertically and top-down through the hierarchy.

因為你當你快速擴張一個組織的時候，你必須使人們在一個水平上或點對點的基礎上彼此負責，而不僅僅是通過等級結構在垂直和自上而下的維度上。

HBR：What other heuristics are important as you go from, say, village to city?

從村莊規模到城市規模，有什麼其他直覺是非常重要的呢？

Specialization at all levels becomes more important. You need to understand how to run a large-scale engineering department, for example, and how to deploy a significant amount of capital in marketing. You need dashboards and analytics and metrics for those functions as much as you need them to help you understand customers and the marketplace.

各個層級的專業化變得越發重要。例如，你需要了解如何運行一個大型工程部門，以及如何在營銷中花費大量資金。你需要使用儀錶板、分析參數和指標幫助你了解客戶和市場。

You also need to have much higher reliability; sometimes the inefficiency that you accepted as you blitzscaled through the village stage is no longer tenable at a larger scale. You have to hire people who know how to make sure that your site is never down. And you have to be more careful in your release of engineering product. As a result, you have less adaptability. For example, Facebook famously shifted from a mantra of 「Move fast and break things」 to 「Move fast with stable infrastructure.」 You also move from a single-threaded organization to a multi-threaded one, allowing the company to focus on more than one thing at a time. When you』re in a tribe, everybody is attuned to one priority. In a village, you』re likely to start focusing on the thing that you』re going to scale. You』re also beginning to think about side experiments—for example, building developer tools, or experimenting with marketing or other paid acquisition. And you』re likely adding new functions, like corporate development to consider acquisitions. All of this rolls up to your macro goal of succeeding as a company, but as you move from village to city, functions are beginning to be differentiated; you』re really multi-threading. Companies at the city scale usually have more than one main product. They may have one central revenue stream, such as Google』s AdWords or Microsoft Office, but several different products. They』ve built an architecture that determines how the products relate to each other. And each product can be multi-threaded as well. Most Silicon Valley firms go global as they move from village to city, but some are global from Day One. At LinkedIn, we launched with 15 countries on our drop-down list. By the second day, we were getting e-mails from people whose countries were not on the list. It was an interesting geographic lesson for me, because I wasn』t aware that the Faroe Islands was a country until we got a complaint. So I went and read a little history and said, OK, add it to the list. It』s real.

你還需要具有更高的可靠性；有時候，你閃電擴張通過村莊階段時接受的低效率到了更大規模時候就不再有效了。你必須聘請知道如何確保網站永不宕機的人。您在發布工程產品時必須更加小心。因此，你的可適應空間會變小。例如，眾所周知Facebook從「快速移動，實現突破」的口號轉變為「快速移動，架構穩定」。此外，你也從單線程組織轉向多線程組織，允許公司同事不只專註於一件事情。 當你在一個部落的時候，每個人都集中到一個優先順序的事情上。在一個村子里，你可能會開始關注你要擴張的事情。你也開始考慮其他的實驗，例如構建開發人員工具，或嘗試營銷或其他付費獲客。你可能會添加新的業務功能，例如增加企業發展部來考慮收購。所有這一切，都是為了實現公司成功的宏偉目標，但隨著你從村莊轉移到城市，職能開始有所區別；你真的是多線程了。 城市規模的公司通常有不止一個主要產品。他們可能有一個中央收入來源，例如Google的AdWords或Microsoft Office，但有幾種不同的產品。他們建立了一種可以確定產品之間如何相互關聯的架構。並且每個產品也可以是多線程的。大多數矽谷公司在從村莊遷移到城市規模的時候走向全球市場，但有些則是第一天開始就是全球化的公司。在LinkedIn，發布的時候，我們的下拉列表上就有15個國家。到了第二天，我們就收到來自國家不在名單上的人的電子郵件。對我來說這是一個有趣的地理課，因為我不知道法羅群島是一個國家，直到我們收到投訴。所以我去讀了一點歷史，然後把它添加到了列表裡面。它是真實的。

不同實力的公司是不是使用不同的劇本？

Yes. For example, Google developed two device operating systems simultaneously: Android and Chrome. When Google acquired Andy Rubin and his start-up, Android Inc., Andy was set up as an entrepreneur within Google, focused on this experiment, and accountable to Larry Page. From Google』s corporate resources perspective, it was a matter of asking Andy what he needed to make the project work.

是的。例如，Google同時開發了兩個設備操作系統：Android和Chrome。當Google收購了Andy Rubin和他的創業公司Android Inc.時，Andy被當做是Google內部的創業家專註於這次實驗，並對Larry Page負責。從Google的企業資源的角度來看，只要項目能成，Andy需要什麼都會得到保證。

Andy wanted Android to stay cohesive and focused. So for example, only Android employees』 badges would grant access to the Android office; general Google employees couldn』t get in. The Android team didn』t run its software through Google』s standard code review process. Andy also wanted to be able to cut different deals with mobile operators—whatever it took to get his project off the ground—without a cross-check. In a completely different initiative, Chrome was developed in C++ (Android was developed in Java) and focused on laptops and browsers, rather than phones. Google could have handled that differently, by bundling Android and Chrome into one project, coherently attacking the device OS opportunity. But it chose instead to multi-thread, hiring the best person for the project, giving him the tools to get the job done, and letting him run a completely separate project and develop his own playbook.

Andy希望Android保持連貫和專註。例如，只有Android員工的徽章才能授予對Android辦公室的訪問許可權; 一般的Google員工無法進入。Android團隊開發的軟體不通過Google的標準代碼審查流程。 Andy還希望能夠與不同的移動運營商達成不同的交易，無論什麼代價只要能讓他的項目起飛 — 無需公司再確認。在一個完全不同的計劃中，Chrome是以C ++開發的（Android是由Java開發的），專註於筆記本電腦和瀏覽器，而不是手機。 其實Google也可採取不同的方式處理這種情況，將Android和Chrome捆綁到一個項目中，更協同一致地進攻設備操作系統的機會。但是，它選擇了多線程，僱用了這個項目的最佳人選，給他工具完成工作，讓他運行一個完全獨立的項目，並開發自己的劇本。

HBR：One of the questions I』ve heard you ask is, What can you ignore? And maybe the flip side of that is, At each stage, what first-order problems are you solving?

我聽到你問的有一個問題是，你能忽略什麼？或許，這個問題的另一面是：在每一個階段，什麼是最重要的問題？

One of the metaphors that I use for start-ups is, you throw yourself off a cliff and assemble your airplane on the way down. If you don』t solve the right problem at the right time, that』s the end. Mortality puts priorities into sharp focus.

對於初創公司，我經常使用的比喻之一是，你把自己從懸崖上扔下來，在下降的過程組裝你的飛機。如果您在正確的時間沒有解決正確的問題，遊戲就結束了。死亡率取決於你的專註程度。

When you』re blitzscaling, a whole bunch of things are inevitably broken, and you can』t work on them all at once. You have to triage. You fix the things that will get investors to give you more cash. The lift that capital provides means you have a longer time in the air to get things right. You』re unlikely to get your plane to fly on your first capital lift or even your second. A general principle of management is that if you have team dynamics problems, you fix them right away. But in blitzscaling, you』re adding those challenges all the time. And you』re moving so fast that today』s problems aren』t going to be the same as tomorrow』s. The operation is always patched together and kind of ugly and held together with duct tape. So maybe you ignore the team』s dysfunction for a while.

當你進行閃電擴張時，一大堆東西不可避免地出問題，你不可能一下子解決所有問題。你必須分類。你要修復投資者關心的問題，這樣可以拿到更多的錢。資本提供的支持意味著你在空中有更長的時間把事情做對。你不可能讓你的飛機在你獲得第一次資本甚至第二次資本支持后就可以飛行。管理的一般原則是，如果你有團隊問題，你應該馬上修復他們。但是，在閃電擴張中，你一直在增加這些挑戰。你的移動如此之快，今天的問題不會和明天一樣。各種操作總是貼在一起，用牛皮膠帶纏纏補補。所以，即使團隊一段時間不能正常運轉，你也要忽略。

For example, your engineers might be unhappy. You think, Should we build development tools to help them be more productive? Should we allocate a bunch of our engineers to make that happen? But you know that the size of the team will continue to change radically; any tools you create today are going to be obsolete. So you don』t try to solve that problem yet, even though you know that ignoring it will breed organizational unhappiness and that people will be frustrated. In nonblitzscaling circumstances those kinds of issues might be a top priority, but when you』re blitzscaling, sometimes you have to just let them burn. Remember, even if you do solve the problem, it will most likely stay solved only for a short time.

例如，你的工程師可能不滿意。你會想，我們應該建立開發工具來幫助他們更有成效嗎？我們應該分配一堆我們的工程師來實現這一點嗎？但是你知道團隊的規模會繼續發生根本變化，你今天創建的任何工具都將被淘汰。所以你不要試圖解決這個問題，即使你知道忽略它會使組織不快樂，讓人們會感到沮喪。在非閃電擴張情況下，這些問題可能是首要任務，但是當你進行閃電擴張時，有時你必須讓它們燃燒。記住，即使你解決了這個問題，它很有可能只是在很短的時間內貌似被解決了。

HBR：Can you alleviate unhappiness by telling people why you』re making certain decisions?

你能告訴人們你為什麼做出某些決定的原因從而緩解他們的痛苦嗎？

Yes, but only to a limited extent. What really keeps it all together is the perception that you』re moving at high speed because you』re growing something big, and that you』re going to be part of something successful. Almost every blitzscaling org that I have seen up close has a lot of internal unhappiness. Fuzziness about roles and responsibilities, unhappiness about the lack of a clearly defined sandbox to operate in. 「Oh my God, it』s chaos, this place is a mess.」 The thing that keeps these companies together—whether it』s PayPal, Google, eBay, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter—is the sense of excitement about what』s happening and the vision of a great future. Because I』m part of a team that』s doing something big, I』ll work through my local unhappiness. Sure, I』d like a tidier sandbox, I』d like to be more efficient, I』d like the organization to be run more smoothly. But I』m willing to let it go because the pain will be worth it.

是的，但是只能有限的程度上。真正保持大家在一起的是信念，即你們正在高速運轉，因為你們正在創造一些偉大的東西，而且你將成為成功的一部分。我近距離看到的幾乎每個閃電擴張的公司內部都有很多不快樂。對於角色和責任的模糊，對於缺乏在明確定義的邊界里操作。 「哦，我的上帝，真是混亂，這個地方是一團糟」。讓這些公司在一起的東西 — 無論是PayPal，Google，eBay， Facebook，LinkedIn或Twitter — 是對於正在發生的事情的興奮，對於偉大的未來願景的興奮。因為我是一個做偉大事情的團隊的一部分，我會努力解決我的不快樂。當然，我想要一個更邊界分明的沙箱，我想要更有效率，我希望組織運行更順利。但是，我願意犧牲這些，因為痛苦是值得的。