While Hoffman and Yeh’s book claims that companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon are icons of the blitzscaling approach, this idea is plausible only with quite a bit of revisionist history. Each of these companies achieved profitability (or in Amazon’s case, positive cash flow) long before its IPO, and growth wasn’t driven by a blitzkrieg of spending to acquire customers below cost, but by breakthrough products and services, and by strategic business model innovations that were rooted in a future that the competition didn’t yet understand. These companies didn’t blitzscale; they scaled sustainably.
Google raised only $36 million before its IPO—an amount that earned Sidecar’s Sunil Paul the dismal third prize of going out of business. For that same level of investment, Google was already hugely profitable.Tim O’Reilly, The fundamental problem with blitzscaling
Facebook’s rise to dominance was far more capital-intensive than Google’s. The company raised $2.3 billion before its IPO, but it too was already profitable long before it went public; according to insiders, it ran close to breakeven from fairly early in its life.
To my own mind the fundamental problem with blitzscaling is that it salts the fields. When an investor-funded company like Uber enters a market with a nonsensical business, it undermines the economics for companies in that same space. Cab drivers, for example, were able to make a real living before Uber.