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Ultimately, Brian decided not to buy Wimdu, swayed in part by the arguments of his key advisers. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg counseled him to fight. “Don’t buy them,” he said. “The best product will win.” YC’s Paul Graham gave similar feedback. “They’re mercenaries. You’re missionaries,” he told Brian. “They’re like people raising a baby they don’t actually want.” When Brian reached out to me for my advice on the situation, I too advised him not to buy Wimdu. The key issue wasn’t the price and dilution, but the way a merger could pose impediments to speed and success. “Buying [Wimdu] adds a substantial amount of integration risk, which tripped up Groupon after buying CityDeal,” I told him. “Merging company cultures and company management could create potentially fatal risks, especially if it slows us down. With Airbnb, we have a business that is already benefiting from network effects. We can win.” I stand by that advice today. In the end, Airbnb’s founders realized that they wanted to take on the Samwers—and they wanted to win. But how? The key was an aggressive, all-out program of growth that we call blitzscaling. Blitzscaling drives “lightning” growth by prioritizing speed over efficiency, even in an environment of uncertainty. It’s a set of specific strategies and tactics that allowed Airbnb to beat the Samwer brothers at their own game.
Blitzscaling
Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh
Paul: So the whole reason we got into doing startups synchronously, meaning a whole bunch at once, was to teach ourselves how to be investors. The first summer, the first time we did Y Combinator, it was a summer program for undergrads. In computer science, or probably in engineering generally, summer jobs are throwaway jobs. Google will hire college students during the summer in the hopes of recruiting them when they graduate. Google does not expect them to actually get shit done during the summer. So it’s kind of a throwaway for everyone involved. So we figured, since everyone in college treats summer jobs as throwaways, we’ll say, start a throwaway startup. And these guys could come and learn how to start a startup while we learn how to be investors on them. And so they would probably be shitty founders, and we would be shitty investors, but no one would blame either, because we each got what we deserved. [laughs] What ended up happening was that we were better investors than we thought, and the founders were better founders than we thought.
Interviews With the Masters
Robert Greene
And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to others!
Self Reliance
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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