LinkedIn Cofounder Wants To Teach You How To “Blitzscale” Your Company

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Stanford is continuing its ultra-popular course series on creating tech startups. Starting this month, LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman will be teaching a specialized version of the course on scaling businesses from small product ideas to large companies (or what he calls “blitzscaling”). 

“When you examine the history of iconic Silicon Valley companies, they quickly grew their customers, revenue, and organizational scale to fit a global market,” he explained in a company blog post. “Most of the impact and value creation that Silicon Valley companies produce actually occurs during this scaleup phase.” 

See also: Why Silicon Valley’s Tech Talent Worked For Free Over The Holiday

Interestingly, Hoffman is permitting select non-Stanford students to apply for the class. Interested parties can fill out the application form here. (Warning: It’s lengthy.) For those who don’t get in, or can’t fly to the Bay Area, lectures will be placed online for Course CS183C.

A Novel Approach (At Least For Stanford)

It’s not very often that world-class schools allow non-matriculating students to walk into their halls and intermingle with students. They usually keep outsiders at arm’s length with online lectures. But much of the value of a university comes with the networks between students and professors—such as former Stanford grad students Larry Page and Sergey Brin (who, I’m told, went into the search business).

Unfortunately, this gated philosophy can also perpetuate insular networks that exclude the most needy students. Opening up the course to public application is one way (albeit small) to break down these barriers.

The lectures themselves will cover everything from hiring an executive team to managing through an analytics dashboard. You can learn more about the course here.

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Lead photo by Sheila Scarborough