Blitzscaling: The good, the bad, and the ugly

Donald F. Kuratko, Harrison L. Holt and Emily Neubert

Business Horizons, 2020, vol. 63, issue 1, 109-119

Abstract: Today’s disruptive innovations are driving the creation of numerous billion-dollar startups. Venture capitalists focus on these potentially disruptive technology startups and fund them furiously, advancing their speed of growth. The idea is to scale fast and seek huge returns for investors. Terms that define this type of aggressive scaling have recently developed in Silicon Valley. Unicorn is defined as a venture with a value of $1 billion, while a decacorn describes startups with a value of $10 billion. Another recent term is blitzscaling: funding a venture for extremely fast growth and prioritizing speed over efficiency in an environment of uncertainty. While blitzscaling is being used heavily by investors in Silicon Valley, we look at exactly what comprises this new phenomenon and how it is used in practice. We examine the concept, its stages, and its prevalence before reviewing the different examples of how the strategy has been implemented for success (the good), cases of its failure in practice (the bad), and the extreme cases of ethical compromise by ventures (the ugly). From these cases, we draw specific lessons that, if understood and appropriately addressed, would help new ventures effectively implement the strategy.

Keywords: Blitzscaling; Disruptive innovation; Scaling; Startup funding; Venture capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0007681319301478
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:bushor:v:63:y:2020:i:1:p:109-119

DOI: 10.1016/j.bushor.2019.10.002

Access Statistics for this article

Business Horizons is currently edited by C. M. Dalton

More articles in Business Horizons from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().