Whenever I hear about the wild antics of a Silicon Valley startup, I think of Reid Hoffman’s 2018 book Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies. Hoffman is no armchair general. A billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, he is an elder statesman of the tech industry. Which is why I’ve always found it troubling that Hoffman’s favoured analogy for how to run a startup is the Nazi Wehrmacht.
The armies of the Third Reich, he explains, “abandoned the traditional approach of moving at the slow pace at which they could establish secure lines of supply and retreat”. Instead, they adopted an offensive strategy that “accepted the possibility of running out of fuel, provisions and ammunition”. They did this to “maximise speed and surprise”, knowing that the price might be “potentially disastrous defeat”.
