Customer Reviews

Blueprint to a Billion: 7 Essentials to Achieve Exponential Growth

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I read some stellar reviews on this book and expected it to be a milestone business guide. I was even enthusiastic through the first couple of chapters. However, if you have any business training and have been within 10 miles of a start-up or growth-stage company in your life, this book is pretty elementary. A value proposition, decent leadership, a Board that can open any door in the universe, a couple of mammoth customers - how can a company fail? Those accomplishments alone will get almost any company to a decent liquidity event unless it was all dumb luck. The most frustrating thing about the book is that it's all about "what." This is what makes it seem, as one reviewer put it, as if it were a PowerPoint presentation. It lists out the "whats" that, in retrospect, some very successful companies did. But it leaves out the "hows." Any company would give a lot to have their industry's equivalent of Tom Siebel on the Board. But Tom's number is not exactly in the phone book. So the question is, *how* does a company get those people on the Board? How does a company identify and even get in the door of those marquee companies? While the book gives a few snippets and a case comparison at the end, it really left my practical appetite unsatisfied. Maybe the whole book was a consulting proposal - if you want the "hows" you pay the piper.

I wish I had the knowledge imparted through this book when we started Lycos in 1995. Things might be very different today.

Blueprint to a Billion is filled with millions (no...billions) of dollars worth of information. Thomson has created a comprehensive and practical book that truly provides a blueprint for how to make your company a success.
Unlike the hundreds of "how to" and "get rich quick" books on the market, I found Blueprint to a Billion to back up its statements with hard facts and also to structure itself in such a manner that I would not hesitate to have every employee in one of my companies read it.

I highly recommend Blueprint to a Billion. To me, it is the "Good to Great" of 2006 and beyond.

This book could have been called 'A Billion Dollars Made Easy'. What an awesome book! This book fills a much needed niche. As a CEO of a company on it's way to $1B, I am incredibly grateful that David has mapped out the 7 Essentials -- making our job of building a globally admired, billon brand much easier. Thank you David!!

My years in telecoms have included experiencing life with one of Dave's study companies. We hit the $billion mark in the 6 to 7 year timeframe and what a ride it was. Dave's book captured the reasons for that success exceptionally well. Far better than any 'how to' management book if you are trying to drive your company to similar exponential growth.
I find myself driving a similar opportunity today and the insight's from Blueprint to a Billion are being put to great use!
If you are a VC, read this and then look at your portfolio companies in a new light. You might also want to get those independent board members on the team sooner!

Thomson has done an outstanding job of giving us a guide of the essential steps to get a company from $50-$100 Million to $1B. His story telling is spot on and his research is the best I've seen in such a fast paced book.

The big 'aha' for me was the finding that a company with all 7 essentials in place as it crosses the $100M mark has an 80% chance to make it to $1B in less than 12 years. I wish I knew that 10 years ago.

I think that Thomson's work will have an impact on the way investers view young companies. It will also have an impact on how large companies choose to direct their sales investments in emerging companies.

Most of all, this book points the way for America to stay competitive by offering a blueprint to business building.

A must read!

This is in all honesty, a terrible book. I've read hundreds of books on investing, finance, and business. This is definitely one of the most over-rated books in the finance category.

When a book is bad it gets genuinely bad reviews, but this one seems to miss me somehow. I keep thinking maybe I don't get it. Or maybe I do get it...

Let me write a book about some unhelpful statistics, make stupid pyramids and diagrams that are just for looks, obvious statements, and throw in a hundred management type cliches. Corporate dynamics create fluid inventory in top down chain structures. Max the Power to the Extreme. That kind of junk talk.

I've sat through many business analyst meetings, and when someone gives me the fat like the way this book gave me, I zone out. People who talk and write like the writer in this book are genuinely unoriginal people. They mask it with this almost corporate zombie like language, so that it sounds like they know.

Just off the top of my head, I can name several ideas that would make this better. Relate the exponential growth of these companies to lighting, nuclear bombs, and blackjack card counters. Yes, these are all examples of exponential growth and damn interesting.

Try writing something truly eye opening or at the very least, something that passes off as a not too beaten idea.

I'm a skeptic about David Thomson's methodology. A billion dollar company is a black swan event that is slightly more complex than a post mortem analysis of an inflection point in revenue, and time series analysis of partnerships and board composition. That is not to say that that "Blueprint to a Billion" is a poorly executed book, there are in fact a number of good observations and takeaways for any business, I just wouldn't call it a "blueprint". The author makes a lot of prescriptive observations which fit the collected data, but all of which have very little predictive power for future generations. This could have been a much stronger book.

The book was recommended to me through a LinkedIn connection. But unfortunately, it only scrapes on the very surface of success. All the items are intuitive, none of them reminded me of some hidden gem that I forgot or that was suddenly appearing in a new light, no "connecting the dots", and most of all, no "how-to" methodologies. Sure, a lot of examples, but I'm not Google, the world has turned, and I think Google will be a couple of steps ahead of me.

Sure, I need a "breakthrough" value proposition and sustain it, but how do I find it, how do I identify "breakthrough", and by what means / concepts / approaches do I sustain it --- beyond "stay ahead of the curve", "innovate", "blablabla buzz words" / "high profit margins" / "economies of scale".

Beyond that, there are a few things that are not for everyone and I would challenge like the high-growth market segment (versus top premium, high-profit margin, stable segment untapped).

I think I agree with previous reviews: If you had some business or consulting training, this is a bit too basic. So maybe I'm just disappointed because I'm not the target audience.

In "Blueprint to a Billion", David Thomson does a great job at illustrating what has worked and why it has worked. I appreciate that the qualitative claims are well substantiated by a thorough quantitative analysis. I had the opportunity to work for some Blueprint companies, like Siebel Systems, where I was managing the CRM SBU and the Blueprint provided me with a fascinating framework to look back at what had happened!
I particularly agree with the emphasis on innovations that do deliver tangible and "monetizable" benefits to customers, as well as the quest to acquire marquee customers. But of course, your company has different potential futures that are shaped by the decisions you're making right now, so get back to work!

I've had the pleasure of hearing David speak about this book and the research and concepts he developed for the Blueprint to a Billion. I was struck by the simple yet powerful concepts that David ferretted out of his research. As a business leader I appreciated the enumeration of easily actionable fundamentals that are not readily discernable from everyday observation.