I just read a great post over on Medium by Salim Ismail (@salimismail) on The Secrets of Unicorn Companies a discussion on scalable organizations.

10-step plan for building a billion dollar venture:

1. Select a Massive, Transformative Purpose (or MTP) like Google’s “Organize the World’s Information or Quirky’s “Make Invention Accessible”. All ExOs we’ve found have such a mission.
2. Join or create relevant communities (see Meetup!). Chris Anderson’s DIY Drones community is a great example. Over 50,000 drone enthusiasts participate. In the most advanced companies, the community drives everything but the purpose.
3. Compose a founding team (optimally four people). We recommend a visionary, UX expert, engineering guru and a business/finance expert.
4. Select a breakthrough idea that delivers a minimum 10x improvement over the status quo. Let’s note that we don’t begin with the core idea — that way you’re not tied to a particular solution, but rather the problem space.
5. Build your Business Model Canvas (see Lean Startup). This simple process generates nine key elements to consider in the business model (including partnerships, channels to market, USP, etc).
6. Find your Business Model — basically, how will you make money? Many startups today deliver new business models as a way to compete against legacy companies (Netflix being a prime example).
7. Build the Minimum Viable Product (or MVP — again, see Lean Startup). What’s the smallest feature footprint that allows you to get to market and get feedback from users? Note for many successful web products (e.g. Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook), their initial product was quite flaky — the design flawed and the user interaction questionable. But they iterated rapidly with initial customer data and were ultimately successful.
8. Validate marketing & sales channels. Groupon spent 18 months in one city getting the sales and marketing footprint just right. Then they quickly replicated that in dozens of cities.
9. Organize so that core mission-critical functions are occurring outside the core organization (e.g. Uber’s matching of driver and passenger is not handled by its core team).
10. Aim to be a platform. Successful ExOs (Apple, Google, Amazon) are all platforms. Companies that didn’t achieve that (Yahoo, Blackberry, Nokia) ended up in trouble.