在家庭规模上，你通常会筹集资金，并确定你的产品或服务到底是什么。你有可能尚未推出产品。在部落规模上，你刚开始有一家真正的公司。在这个阶段就开始闪电扩张是相当罕见的，除非你有一个火爆的产品，当然也不是没有过这样的例子，例如PayPal或Instagram。更典型地，你已经推出了一些版本的产品或服务，并且你已经在目标市场上站住了。但是，你仍然不确定公司是否应该开始启动大规模扩张。一定程度的风险总是有的。你可能觉得此阶段不进行扩张，因为你不确定产品是否已经契合了市场。或者你可能会决定无论如何要往前跑，因为你知道你必须这么做，由于我们刚才谈到的进攻和防守原因。所以这个闪电扩张的过程通常是在介于部落和村庄这两个阶段之间开始的。那时，你已经解决了产品市场适应性问题，你有了一些数据，你知道竞争格局是什么样的。这时候闪电扩张的逻辑变得非常清楚。一旦你开始向自己和他人证明— 有一个门类很有趣并且有很大的市场机会，你会吸引各种各样的竞争。在低端，其他初创企业可能会推出自己的产品或服务版本，并试图在市场上实现规模化。在高端，成熟公司试图利用自己的资产来获得部分或全部市场。第一个发动闪电扩张的初创公司有两大优势：专注和速度。成熟公司往往不是那么快或者集中精力。而其他竞争的初创企业可能还没有形成势能（尽管他们也可能同样的快速和专注）。典型的例子是Groupon，它跑到了这个中间阶段，然后遭到了来自高端和低端的巨大的竞争。它无法快速扩张同时建立持久的产品，因此错失了一个潜在的重塑产业的机会。

　　HBR：What organizational issues do you run into when blitzscaling?

　　当进行闪电扩张的时候，你会遇到什么组织问题？

　　Blitzscaling is always managerially inefficient—and it burns through a lot of capital quickly. But you have to be willing to take on these inefficiencies in order to scale up. That’s the opposite of what large organizations optimize for.

　　In hiring, for instance, you may need to get as many warm bodies through the door as possible, as quickly as you can—while hiring quality employees and maintaining the company culture. How do you do that? Different companies use different hacks. As part of blitzscaling at Uber, managers would ask a newly hired engineer, “Who are the three best engineers you’ve worked with in your previous job?” And then they’d send those engineers offer letters. No interview. No reference checking. Just an offer letter. They’ve had to scale their engineering fast, and that’s a key technique that they’ve deployed. We faced this issue at PayPal. In early 2000, payment transaction volume was growing at a compounding rate of 2% to 5% per day. That kind of growth put PayPal in a deep hole as far as customer service was concerned. Even though the only place we listed our contact information was in the Palo Alto phone directory, angry customers were tracking down our main number and dialing extensions at random. Twenty-four hours a day, you could pick up literally any phone and talk to an angry customer. So we turned off all our ringers and used our cell phones. But that wasn’t a solution. We knew we needed to build a customer service capacity—fast. But that’s very difficult to do in Silicon Valley. So we decided to scale up in Omaha. This was during the first dot-com boom, so we convinced the governor of Nebraska that he wanted a piece of the internet revolution. He and the mayor held press conferences about how PayPal was going to open a customer service office, prompting a flood of job applicants. For four weekends straight, we flew out about 20% of the company to interview them. People showed up with their résumés, and we’d put them in a room and do group interviews. Within six weeks, we had 100 active customer-service people fielding e-mails. It’s now a classic technique for internet companies to offer e-mail and web-based customer service only. But we had to figure out how to hack our customer service challenge at a very fast pace. There was no playbook to tell us what to do. There still isn’t.