Silicon Alley Venture Partners' Steve Brotman has summarized seven steps he gleamed from a recent book called Blueprint to a Billion by David Thomson that explains how entrepreneurs can grow their businesses into billion dollar business. These themes are:

1) Find or create a great value proposition.
2) Find a quickly growing market.
3) Get some marquee customers.
4) Leverage a "Big Brother" Partner.
5) Be capital efficient.
6) Paired management teams.
7) Have at least one board member on your board, outside of your investor or management team that has grown a company to a billion.

I recently wrote a story in The Deal called Billion Dollar Basics that tackled the same topic.

Looking at exit data from the last few years (see below), the number of true startups that have built billion dollar businesses can be counted on two hands. Vonage's IPO brings the total since 2001 to six. But, even if a business doesn't cross the nine-figure threshold, only by aiming big will a company ever find out how much of an impact it can have and how big a valuation it can achieve.

Tags: startups, vc, venture capital.