It goes something like this: A brilliant entrepreneur discovers an incredible opportunity. The success narrative of these hallowed names has become so universally familiar that people from countries around the world can tell it just as well as Sand Hill Road venture capitalists. When people think of Silicon Valley, the first things that spring to mind-after the HBO television show, of course-are the names of famous start-ups and their equally glamorized founders: Apple, Google, Facebook Jobs/ Wozniak, Page/ Brin, Zuckerberg. To discover the secret to Silicon Valley’s success, you need to look beyond the standard origin story. “In fact, the same basic ingredients can easily be found in numerous start-up clusters in the United States and around the world: Austin, Boston, New York, Seattle, Shanghai, Bangalore, Istanbul, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, and Dubai. It is sorely needed.”īlitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies We want to share the secret weapon that has allowed Silicon Valley to punch so much (more than a hundred times) above its population index so that those lessons can be applied far beyond the sixty-mile stretch between the Golden Gate Bridge and San Jose. In the process you’ll see how the lessons of blitzscaling can be adapted to help build great companies in nearly any ecosystem, albeit with differing degrees of difficulty. We’re going to show you examples from overlooked parts of the United States, such as Detroit (Rocket Mortgage) and Connecticut (Priceline), as well as from international companies, such as WeChat and Spotify. While Silicon Valley certainly has many key networks and resources that make it easier to apply the techniques we’re going to lay out for you, blitzscaling is made up of basic principles that do not depend on geography.

The real story is that the world keeps getting faster-Silicon Valley is just the first place to figure out how to keep pace. “There’s a common misconception that Silicon Valley is the accelerator of the world.

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