We see scale as a series of stages, based on orders of magnitude: A family-scale business can measure its employees in single digits; a tribe in tens; a village in hundreds; a city in thousands. A nation has more than 10,000 employees. These are estimates, not precise guides; a company often remains a family until around 15 employees, a tribe until around 150, and so on. At each level, the way you run various functions—financing the company, hiring and onboarding employees, marketing the product, and so on—changes significantly. There aren’t rules governing this when you’re blitzscaling; you use heuristics instead—and by that I mean guidelines that help you make decisions and learn on the fly. Organizational scale is more about the character of the company than it is an exact employee head count—things don’t change drastically at exactly 150 employees. And you’re not necessarily scaling each element of the firm at the same time or rate. You’re more likely to focus first on customer service and sales than other functions. But even then, you’ll have to blitzscale the other parts of the organization. So all along you really do need to be thinking about the company as a whole: How will you allocate your talent, and then how will you grow it? How will you hold on to your culture? How will you communicate? How will your competitive landscape shift?

　　我们可以根据数量级将规模分为一系列阶段：家庭规模的业务可以用个位数来度量员工; 一个部落规模数十计；一个村庄数以百计；一个城市数以千计；一个国家数以万计。这些是估计，不是精确的指导；一家公司在15人以下就像一个家庭，150人以下就像一个部落，以此类推。在每个层次上，你运营公司各个职能的方式都大相径庭：公司融资，招聘和选择员工，营销产品等等。当你进行闪电扩张的时候，你没有规则可以依赖。你依靠的是直觉— 我指的是一些帮助你做决策的框架，你一边飞行一边学习。组织规模更多的是关于公司的特点，而不是确切的员工总数— 到达整150名员工的时候并不会发生什么突变。你不必要同时或者等比的扩张公司的每一个元素。你首先还是更应该关注客户服务和销售，而不是其他功能。但即使如此，组织的其他部分还是需要闪电扩张。所以，自始至终，你需要把公司当一个整体思考：如何分配你的人才以及如何扩充？如何坚持你的文化？你如何沟通？你的竞争格局将如何变化？

　　HBR：When does a start-up begin to blitzscale?

　　初创公司什么时候开始闪电扩张？

　　At the family scale, you’re usually raising money and figuring out exactly what your product or service is. You most likely have not launched a product yet.At the tribe scale, you’re just starting to have a real company. It’s fairly rare—not unheard of, but rare—for blitzscaling to start at this phase unless you have a runaway hit of a product: PayPal or Instagram, for example. More typically, you’ve launched some version of the product or service, and you’ve homed in on your target market. But you’re still not certain that the start-up can really scale massively. There’s always some level of risk. You may decide not to scale at this stage, because you’re not sure you have a product-market fit yet. Or you may decide to move ahead anyway, because you know you absolutely need to, for the offensive and defensive reasons we just talked about. So the blitzscale process usually starts between the tribe and village scale. By then you’ve ironed out the product-market fit, you have some data, and you know what the competitive landscape looks like. This is when the logic of blitzscaling becomes very clear. Once you begin to prove—to yourself and others—that there’s an interesting category and a big market opportunity, you attract all kinds of competition. At the low end, other start-ups may be launching their own version of your product or service and trying to achieve scale in the market before you. At the high end, established brands are figuring out how to leverage their own assets to own part or all of your space. A start-up has two advantages as a first mover going through blitzscale: focus and speed. Established brands tend not to be as fast or as focused. And competing start-ups probably don’t have momentum yet (although they may be just as fast and focused). The canonical example is Groupon, which made it to this middle stage and got hit by massive competition on both the high and the low ends. It wasn’t able to both scale fast and build a durable product and thus failed to fully realize a potentially industry-transforming opportunity.