She views Hoffman’s “blitzscaling” concept - prioritizing speed over efficiency in the face of uncertainty - as reckless.

“Our extraordinary challenge as citizens is to tackle the menace of growth at all costs - when that menace lives in devices we adore,” Julia Powles of New York University’s Information Law Institute told CNN Business. Some critics warn that Hoffman’s playbook for hastily supersizing startups into Fortune 500 juggernauts imperils society.

To some, Hoffman’s book comes at a surprising time: Tech companies such as Facebook are facing negative impacts of their creations. “You don’t have time to be patient and wait for things to work out you have to act quickly and decisively,” he wrote. He said this means companies may have to promote people who aren’t ready, and swap them out if they sink rather than swim. Reid Hoffman's new book explains how companies can move fast to get ahead. But when you’re scaling up at lightning speed, you may need to reorganize the company three times in a single year or repeatedly churn through members of your management team.” “Chaotic, unstable organizations make employees nervous and hurt morale. “Under normal circumstances, you should strive for organizational coherence and stability,” Hoffman wrote in a recent blog post promoting the book. Later, Hoffman launched career-networking site LinkedIn without a key feature. He argues this made PayPal nimble and adaptable to change. He believes in embracing chaos, tolerating “bad” management and even launching embarrassing products in need of improvements.Īt PayPal – where Hoffman served as an executive – he says managers neglected to have career-development conversations with employees nor did they have a belief of what the company should look like in three years. “You accept the risk of making the wrong decision and willingly pay the cost of significant operating inefficiencies in exchange for the ability to move faster.” “Blitzscaling is a race to build things that make the world a better place,” Hoffman writes with this co-author Chris Yeh. Hoffman, who co-founded LinkedIn and was one of Facebook’s first investors, details in his new book “ Blitzscaling” how companies must continue to grow at chaotic speeds and take on risks to not only survive but evolve into modern, massive companies like Airbnb, Facebook and Uber. Silicon Valley has been under scrutiny recently for everything from undermining American elections to grinding traffic to a halt in cities.īut prominent tech investor Reid Hoffman says that’s the price of building a better world.

Blitzscaling by reid hoffman