There’s another point that Hoffman and Yeh fail to address. It matters what stories we tell ourselves about what success looks like. Blitzscaling can be used by any company, but it can encourage a particular kind of entrepreneur: hard-charging, willing to crash through barriers, and often ruthless.
We see the consequences of this selection bias in the history of the on-demand ride-hailing market. Why did Uber emerge the winner in the ride-hailing wars? Sunil Paul, the founder of Sidecar, was the visionary who came up with the idea of peer-to-peer taxi service provided by people using their own cars. Logan Green, the co-founder of Lyft, was the visionary who had set out to reinvent urban transportation by filling all the empty cars on the road. But Travis Kalanick, the co-founder and CEO of Uber, was the hyper-aggressive entrepreneur who raised money faster, broke the rules more aggressively, and cut the most corners in the race to the top.