Building Your Corporate Ventures Growth Machine with Linda Yates
Linda Yates is the founder and CEO of Mach49, the growth incubator for global businesses with clients including Goodyear, Gundersen Health, Hitachi, Intel, Shell, and many more. She is the author of The Unicorn Within: How Companies Can Create Game-Changing Ventures at Startup Speed. She is a seasoned CEO and board member with over thirty years of experience bridging Silicon Valley and the Global 1000. With her firsthand experience in one largest geographic incubators of unicorns in the world – Silicon Valley - Linda has fine-tuned a proven framework for building and sustaining corporate ventures.
Linda believes – as do I – that incumbent enterprises CAN unlock their innovative capabilities. Contrary to commonly held dogma of large, established companies as being stagnant, and slow, the reality is that it is these large companies have many advantages to launch transformative projects that start-ups can only dream of. In our conversation, she shared:
Here are some of the key takeaways from our conversation:
"I fundamentally believe in the ability of large companies to disrupt themselves from the inside out and from the outside in. And to build growth engines to drive meaningful growth."
4. The job of any entrepreneur or internal entrepreneur is to remove the greatest amount of risk and the least amount of capital. When launching a new venture, you should be able to answer the following questions: What problem are you trying to solve? What are the risks involved? What are the series of experiments you're running to mitigate those risks? What are the metrics and milestones that will demonstrate you can mitigate those risks?
"If a startup comes to me, the first question I'm asking is, 'What's the pain you're trying to solve?' If they can't answer that, then I'm not meeting."
5. To identify pain points, conduct customer interviews: The problem with many entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial initiatives is that smart engineers come up with a smart idea, but they don't actually go out and talk to customers. The first step is to talk to customers and identify and underlying pain point. Next, develop the service or product that will solve that pain, then determine if there is a business model. Then begins a constant process of iteration, improvement, and continued conversations with customers.
"Surveys are statistically significant but strategically irrelevant. Do real customer interviews."
6. Legacy companies should maintain a constant portfolio of ideas and ventures: In Silicon Valley, the average venture capitalist hears from 2,000 ventures a year, does due diligence on 200, invests in 20, and two return the investment. Their success rate is only 12 percent. No large company can survive on that success rate, so they should be exploring ideas and ventures at every stage from from ideate to incubate to accelerate to scale.
Episode transcript:
Kaihan Krippendorff: Linda, thank you so much for taking the time to be here. I know you're on a crazy whirlwind tour right now. Where are you joining us from?
Linda Yates: Right now, I'm joining you from London, but in the last 2 weeks, I've been in the Dominican Republic, Stockholm, Helsinki, Copenhagen, and Oslo.
Kaihan Krippendorff: Wow.
Linda Yates: Been crazy. Been wonderful, though.
Kaihan Krippendorff: Well, I'm glad that we were able to land you for a few minutes to talk to us about your work and your book and your approaches. But I wanna open up with 2 questions to ask everyone. First, just to get us to know you a little bit personally. Could you complete the sentence for me? If you really know me, you know that...
Linda Yates: That's a great one. If you really know me, you know that despite the fact that I'm a Silicon Valley kid, I passionately believe that the large challenging problems we face in the world from climate change to sustainability to water, to poverty, to racism, to education, actually need our large companies leaning in and able to experiment, innovate, and disrupt to drive change because our governments, many of them, are transitional at best, dysfunction at worst. And as much as we love NGOs, they have a hard time driving change at global scale as global 1000s have the ability to do. So I really believe that to fundamentally change the world, we need our large companies leaning in and helping to make that happen.
Kaihan Krippendorff: I love that. And the numbers make that so clear, and it's really not helpful. The who's going to save the world? Is it gonna be the government? Is it gonna be the NGOs? Is it gonna be startups? Is it gonna be the big companies? Our problems are bigger than that. So this is a podcast on strategy, and you do lots of strategy for a long time. So I'd like to answer this question for you: What's your definition of strategy?
Linda Yates: That's pretty easy for me. I think, really, strategy should help you define the from-to shifts that you want your organization to make to drive meaningful, sustainable growth. To help you to do that, it needs to define the domains that you want to explore to drive that shift, and it needs to identify who matters most and what matters most, who are the stakeholders that matter to your organization, and what's the pain that they are experiencing that you want to solve within those domains. That's really what strategy is. All the rest should be about experimentation and execution.
Kaihan Krippendorff: Yes. And I start seeing the outlines of your approach that you bring to large incumbents in that. So I wanna get into that. But I'd like to know, first of all, what are you interested in strategy. Why is strategy important? I kinda hear that in your answer, but I'd like to hear from you.
Linda Yates: I always whenever I introduce myself, I tell people I'm a native Californian, right? Which is only interesting because I grew up in Silicon Valley with all the people founded the venture capital industry. They're all friends of my family and my parents, so I've been deeply immersed in that ecosystem literally since I was born, but most of my professional career has been in the boardrooms and C-suites of the global 500. So I was really never interested in strategy for strategy's sake. I consider myself bilingual between the boardroom and C suites and the VCs and startups of Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley where it's started, but also now having lived, worked, traveled in 70 countries, familiar with all the ecosystems of innovation that exist around the world. But I've always been really, really interested in entrepreneurship. Right? So how do you basically start with that definition of strategy we just discussed, but make that strategy really agile, really customer responsive, really actionable? How do you drive from strategy to execution? And so, you know, I talk a lot about why I think doing another strategy or developing a bunch of PowerPoint slides really isn't going to get companies where they need to go. So they really need to continue the dialogue past, okay, great. Here's our strategy. Oh, here's our another strategy. Here's another strategy. If you actually don't take action on that strategy, then it's really a challenge.And I can go through some of the interesting statistics that have happened recently if that's of interest.
Kaihan Krippendorff: Yeah. Yeah. Please do.
Linda Yates: Okay. So this is why I feel really, really strongly that strategy is really important to kick the thinking off into cast the net wide and really imagine what those from-to shifts are. You've got to drive execution because if you think about it, companies are going out of business faster than ever before. If you look, Forbes did a really interesting study. And if you actually look at the average life expectancy of a company on the Fortune 500 list 50 years ago, The average life of a company on that list was 75 years. Today, it's 15 years and declining. But the scarier statistic is that of the companies on that list 50 years ago, 88 percent of them are off the list, out of business, are completely irrelevant, only 12 percent remain. And guess what? Every single one of them did strategy projects. So it's not a failure of strategy definition. It's a failure of strategy execution. If you wanna look at a more recent statistic, Price Waterhouse released their annual survey of global CEOs at Davos this year in January. 40 percent of the chief executives surveyed basically are convinced that their organizations will not be economically viable within 10 years if they do not transform. And so if you look at the statistics, the statistics are dire and it's not for lack of strategy, it's a lack of execution. And even if you don't think these companies are going out of business, even today in our recession, pseudo recession, wherever we are right now, there are over 1200 unicorns. Right? These are startups with evaluation of a billion dollars or more that have not gone public yet. Over 1200 unicorns with a total valuation of almost 4 trillion dollars. Okay? So that means even if you're not going out of business, you're leaving a lot of money on the table. I have this slide that I share in my keynote that basically says, listen, there is no reason that any of the hotel companies could not have created Airbnb. There's no reason that any of the titans of financial services could not have created Stripe, which today still has a 65 billion dollar valuation. Many people are using Miro boards. Right? Well, Miro boards are just digital stickies. Who invented the digital sticky? Today, Miro is valued at almost 17 billion dollars as a unicorn.
The whole point is, look, and it's not that these people don't have these ideas. Their failure is not a failure of imagination. It's a failure to build. That's what [inaudible] has said, and you think about it, the barbarians are still at the gate.The VCs are still there sitting on billions of dollars of capital trying to disrupt these companies.
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Kaihan Krippendorff: So many people would cite those examples as evidence that there's just something wrong with these dinosaurs, these incumbents, but you take a different view. Why is that?
Linda Yates: I fundamentally believe in the ability of large companies to disrupt themselves from the inside out and the outside in, to build growth engines to drive meaningful growth. I mean, if you think about it, right, these companies, they have ideas, they have talent, they have brand, they have channels, they have customers. So there's really no reason that they cannot beat the startups at their own game. It's just about helping them build their growth engines, which include 4 pillars, which are venture building, venture investing, strategic partnering, and targeted M&A. But those growth engines have to be really focused on execution.
Kaihan Krippendorff: Can you walk us through those 4?
Linda Yates: Yeah. So let's talk about those 4 pillars. Right? So we literally say, you know, and this is really why we wrote the book. Right? It was to democratize what we do in to basically enable people to build these growth engines to drive meaningful change. So if you think about the 4 pillars, 1 of the pillars is organic venture building. I absolutely believe large companies need to do their own venture building, not just buy/partner/invest, which are the other 3 pillars. But that one's really important. Why? Because you have incredibly smart people inside every organization. And if all you do is go outside, they're gonna be saying, wait a minute. What about me? You know, give me a 120,000 dollars. Put me in that incubator. I know where the bodies are buried. I know where the core assets and competencies of the organization are. I know how to build these ventures. I've had this idea. And so you really want to leverage the incredible talent and internal capability that you have to build ventures. And it's also that these are people really understand your business, your customers, etcetera. But then the other opportunity, though, is besides the venture building, the other 3 areas are on the venture investing side. 1 is a lot of large companies are creating CVCs. Very, very important because if you have your venture building on 1 hand, that's great. But the CVCs keep you current what's happening out in the world. And so you've got the CVCs, and that's where you're venture investing. And we're helping large companies create CVCs all over the world. Amazing. And what does it allow you them to do? It allows them to place small bets and to be looking at areas of adjacency that they might not be totally ready to dive into, but it allows them to place those small bets to invest in them and to in essence follow what these organizations are doing and not do it through a third party. Right? You don't get a seat at the table if you invest through a third party. You've gotta really do that investing directly yourself. The other piece is strategic partnering. In some cases, you've got large organizations that literally don't invest a dime. But what they're really, really good at doing is being strategic partners for startups and using that as a way to solve their own pain or their customer's pain. So strategic partnering is also a really interesting way to dip your toe in the water and stay current on what we call the art of the possible. The third is what we call targeted M&A. So a lot of people, the way that they have basically driven growth is through inorganic growth. Right? It's through acquiring other companies. At some point, you get so big. You can't acquire more growth. You can't find enough companies with enough revenue to acquire growth. So we lead the big corporate development big M and big A to our investment banking friends.What we're focused on, we talk about targeted M&A. So we have a large industrial client, we have a venture that we have gotten to 50 million in revenue. That's a unicorn by Silicon Valley standards, but it's a 60 billion dollar company. So that doesn't move the needle. But we can get it to a billion dollars in valuation by leveraging the cash that large companies have on their balance sheet to buy a hundred million dollar company. And so targeted M&A is a way to augment and accelerate the ventures that you're building, and that's an amazing way to beat the startups at their own game because they're not gonna have cash on their balance sheet to enable them to execute that kind of a roll-up strategy.
Kaihan Krippendorff: I got it. So how do you over come the reinvestment of the cash on the balance sheet, there's gonna be a treasure that's gonna wanna say, well, we need to balance this out with an investment that is a lower risk investment rather than take a risk on something that could maybe be a unicorn. How do you overcome that?
Linda Yates: The reticence of...
Kaihan Krippendorff: Yeah. I mean, because this is where a financial principle is our, you know, assets and liabilities should be at equivalent risk profiles. You know what I mean? What do you say when a client brings that up? What would your answer to that be?
Linda Yates: I say you've left 4 trillion dollars on the table right now. Right? I take my logo slide and I do the morphing of large company with start up that they've left money on the table. But I think the real thing is, look, there's 3 fundamental things that talk about with our clients when we come and focus on this. Because a lot of people will say, okay. Well, we can't do this because we're a large company or the CFO because we have to balance our assets But my argument to them is listen, especially for a CFO. The whole way you're doing this is you're basically building in a way you're removing the greatest amount of risk and the least amount of capital. So 1 of the things that we talk about, what's the underlying 3 philosophy behind what we're doing, why do I say that the not so secret secret about the Silicon Valley is that it's actually not that hard. Right? And so it's all about, first of all, understanding customer pain, Nobody in the world said that they wanted a minivan, a microwave oven, or a DVR, or a VCR. But what they could tell you is what their pain was. And they could tell you that they didn't get home to cook a healthy meal, that they were never able to watch their favorite show, or they were having to cart an increasing number of kids, dogs, and sporting equipment to myriad places. Okay? So they could tell you their pain. It's up to you to then identify how to solve that pain. And what I say to CEOs all over the world and heads of strategy all over the world is, look, surveys are statistically significant, but strategically irrelevant. Because all you've done is outsource your visceral understanding and empathy for the customer to somebody else who then is gonna repackage it and sell it to somebody else. You've got to actually do real customer interviews. Okay? So that's number 1. Understanding customer pain, then you marry that with the art of the possible. What are the current trends and technology you can use to solve that pain? This is why having a CDC is really important, why venture investing and partnering is really important because it's keeping you current on that art of the possible. Uber doesn't exist if we don't have mobile phones, real time payments, and GPS. So the CVC can help you.And if you don't have a CVC, then you've got to figure out how the mother ship is gonna stay currenton the art of the possible so that you can bring that I say to people all the time. Look, if you have incredible customer pain, but to solve that pain, it's time travel, but we don't have time travel yet. So you gotta shove that idea. It's not feasible yet, or you gotta kill it.
Kaihan Krippendorff: I love it. So there's the visceral understanding of customer need. There is the art of the possible in understanding whether technologies even would offer a solution or not? And then can you take us from there? What's the third part?
Linda Yates: Then the third thing getting back to your CFO question is removing the greatest amount of risk and least amount of capital by basically placing a series of small bets. So this is my message to the CFOs. The way we think about funding in Silicon Valley is that we think of funding like an onion. Every layer of onion is a layer of risk. It could be financial risk.It could be market risk. It could be technical risk. In the case of a large company, it could be governance risk. You love it to death, Starve it of oxygen. Right?So the task of of any entrepreneur and any internal entrepreneur, is to basically remove the greatest amount of risk on the least amount of capital by basically running a series of experiments, placing a series of small bets, as you go and launch the company. And the idea is what are the risks? What are the experiments or pilots you're running to improve? You can mitigate the risks. What are the metrics and milestones that you have got to achieve that demonstrates you've mitigated that risk? And only then do you unlock subsequent rounds of funding. So number 1 is reducing the amount of funding from a CFO's perspective. That's important. But the second thing that the CFO should be helping drive is we've got to look at this as a portfolio. No venture capitalists invest in only 1 venture nobody builds only 1 venture. You've got to do it at scale. And to do it at scale means you've got to adopt a venture capital mindset and not be throwing too much money at these ventures that you're either building or you're investing. This is placing small bets. So my argument back to the CFOs is You don't have to worry so much about this balancing. If you're being very rigorous and disciplined in the method by which you are funding your ventures as they go to market.
Kaihan Krippendorff: Yes. You're derisking that investment. It feels a little bit like our friend Rita McGrath's Discovery Driven Planning approach. So on 1 hand, you may want to figure out all of the what would have to be true's and then make a big bet. But instead of what you're doing is you're chunking them and doing it in sequence.And that derisks it.
Linda Yates: Yeah. But it's not about planning. It's about execution.
Kaihan Krippendorff: Yes. Right.
Linda Yates: So, again, this is a great point. Right? This is why Rita is a great friend of ours and why she's the faculty partner at Mach 49, is because you're going to be focused on the strategy, but that strategy has then to be translated into execution. The whole point of the book, The Unicorn Within: How companies can create game changing ventures at startup speed is for it to be a how to guide, right, to democratize what we do. To enable people to be there with a catcher's mitten say, great, hand me that strategy. Hand me those domains that you're interested. Hand me that pain you think we're trying to solve. But now let's go build ventures. Let's go invest in ventures. Let's build a growth engine to actually drive growth for our companies, drive change for our communities, for the world, whatever their aspiration happens to be.
Kaihan Krippendorff: Love it. I wanna go back to the first point. Because you said something that I've heard and I feel is right, and I love this phrase from Steve Blank. The answer is not in your office. You have to get out there and talk to customers. And you talked about the needing to have the visceral understanding. Philosophically, I love that. And makes sense to me, but I wanna know why is that? Why do we need the visceral direct understanding of customer need?
Linda Yates: So everybody talks about the unicorns in Silicon Valley. Right? What we don't talk about so much is the roadkill. If you think about the average VC the average VC hears about 2000 ventures a year, does due diligence on 200 invest in 20, and 2 return the fund. Their success rates about 12 percent. So no large company can survive that kind of success rate. So that's an important thing we can talk about later. But part of the reason is you have super smart engineers who think they have super smart idea, and they actually don't ever go talk to the customer. And so they bring it to market, and guess what?Nobody wanted it. And so we're very, very methodical. My friend, Drew Harman, he has this great line, which is, "Customer insights are the currency of credibility. Everything else is uninformed opinion." So a CEO comes to 1 of our venture teams that we're working with, and they say, I have this really great idea. I think this is what we should build. The team, because their focus on actually interviewing real customers will say to that person, great. Where is your customer quote? We'll load it in Airtable, which course they don't have because this is mostly coming out of their heads. But we will then say, Oh, if you don't have that, we will test it. Because if you're not constantly testing and iterating, experimenting, and pivoting based on what the customers are telling you what the customer need is. Right now, you have obviously have other things. Right? There's 3 things that go into incubating a venture, understanding the customer, then identify what's the service solution, the product, you could build or buy or partner invest to basically solve that pain. But then there's also is there a business model? Right? Like, can you make money on it? So there's lots of things that go in. It's not just the customer pain, but you gotta start with the customer pain. Because if there is no customer pain and the market's not big enough, then you're dead in the water. You can have the best product all you want. But if nobody wants it, forget it. It's very important that what people hear is that we're not talking about user research. We use the word customer development very intentionally because every interview and in the course of 12 weeks, venture teams, we expect them to do somewhere between a hundred and 400 in person interviews. Could be by Zoom, upon, it could be whatever. But this is not surveys. Now, yeah, you're gonna use surveys later, but in the initial development of a venture, you're actually talking to customers all the time every day, and we'll go through 3 different types of interviews in the course of those 12 weeks. 1 is what we call open-ended pain point interviews. You're not asking them, hey. Do you want this? You're basically saying, tell me about the last time you tried to basically read to an office. Or tell me about the last time you tried to buy a car, tell me about the last time you tried to decarbonize your supply chain. Right? Or you were part of having to be part of decarbonizing a supply chain. That is the first way we start. Then you're gonna start to see patterns. That pain, you're gonna synthesize that pain. Then you get to move to the next type of interviews, which is what we call value proposition or storyboard interviews. You're getting to put dozens of storyboards in front of customers to basically show them potential solutions to solving the pain that you've basically heard over and over again.
Kaihan Krippendorff: Just to make sure I understand the storyboard in this state is the possible from-to. It's not necessarily what the solution looks like.
Linda Yates: No. Because that's third. That's the prototype.
Kaihan Krippendorff: Yes. Right. Okay. Good.
Linda Yates: So there's an in between. So it's from open ended pain point interviews story board interviews that are hand drawn. They're literally story boards. Right? And you could iterate on them very quickly. And the reason why they're very low res to begin with is because the neuroscience tells us that if you put something too polished and too finished in front of someone you are interviewing, they will think you've put a lot of time into it feel sorry for you, and they will not tell you the truth.
Kaihan Krippendorff: Interesting. Wow. But, yes. Yeah.
Linda Yates: So there's a lot of neuroscience behind the mechanisms by which we do this. So the second is you're doing storyboards. Again, you're gonna start to narrow down. You're gonna do NPS score. You're gonna do ranking and ratings, and then you get to go to your prototypes. And prototypes, if you're doing digital or obviously gonna be wireframe, you're gonna start with low res, go to medium res, to high res. If you're doing hardware, you're doing mock ups, if you're doing an experience, you're gonna do simulations. Right? So prototype covers a broad definition. But customer development, the reason why we use that word instead of user research that every moment you are interviewing a customer, a moment for them to say, wait a minute.You're really listening to me. You really wanna solve my pain. Well, guess what? I wanna do the next interview, and then I wanna be in the prototype interviews. And, oh, by the way, by the end of 12 weeks, we're not here to do some theoretical abstract exercise. You were there to build a new line of business, to build a new venture that's going to launch, which means that by the end of those 12 to 14 weeks that it takes you to incubate a venture, you should have pilot customers raising their hand saying, wow. This has been incredible. I wanna be a pilot. So this, again, is all about execution and about doing it. But that's why the customer is so important. That there's a methodical rigorous robust way for going through that exercise with customers, at least in the incubate phase. If you're investing, you should be having the same expectations of those entrepreneurs. If a startup comes and pitches to me, the first thing I'm asking them is what's the pain you're trying to solve? If they can't answer that, then I'm not investing.
Kaihan Krippendorff: I gotcha. You've made so much clear for me that wasn't clear before, but also you've opened up so many other questions. And we're reaching the top of our time with you. So I don't have time to ask all of these questions, and people can get the book. They can find you on on Mach 49. So give you 4 questions and ask you to just pick 1 that you think is the most useful. This idea of living with the 15 percent success rate, how is that possible, is it not possible, and what do you do? You need a lot of ideas. You're talking about thousands and thousands of ideas, in my experience, these large companies don't have very big pipelines. Is that a problem? Or how do you do that? Where does it sit? Who organizes it? Who does the incubating and the interviews? And the last more open ended question is, what are the top things that incumbents get wrong that they should look at?
Linda Yates: Yeah. Great questions. So let me just hit it at the high level. The goal here is to build a pipeline of portfolio of new ventures across the spectrum of new venture creation from ideate to incubate to accelerate to scale. Large companies are really good at scale, They're not as good at the ideate incubate accelerate.Problem with ideate to your point is garbage in, garbage out. So, typically, clients will come to us at 1 of 4 stages of the ideate process. 1 is they already have an idea. Great. We take them straight into challenge framing. We won't have time to talk about it, but it's in the book. You can look at what challenge framing is, but it really is the way that every venture should start, what's the pain you're to try to solve, and who matters most. So the other way some people come to us is hey, I had too many ideas. And so you have to learn how to do a portfolio review and adopt a venture capital mindset. What's incubatable? What's not? The third is you have companies that come, like, we had 1 company come and say, we're really interested in road safety, food, and water. Well, you can't incubate water, but you can't incubate a zero water phone project venture like what we did with 1 of our large Japanese client. And then the fourth way people come is, look, I wanna know where my internal entrepreneurs are, and I wanna come up with ideas you can run a venture competition. Now there's good ways and there's bad ways to run a venture competition, but that's ideate. Then you move into incubate. We've talked a lot about that. Right? It's customer product, and then by the end of 12 weeks, you should have a very robust and rigorous business and execution plan. Not a 5 minute demo day, not a speed dating pitch. You really have to have a robust business plan. That's what you can do. And then from incubate, you move to accelerate, and this is actually where most large companies fall off the cliff. They get really excited. They decide to launch it. They decide to put money into it, and they forget that they still need to be removing the greatest amount of risk and the least amount of capital and running experiments. So when we think about accelerate, we think about it in 3 phases, kind of a seed phase, a series A, series B, what we call build to validate, build to automate, build to grow. Mhmm. But more importantly for your listeners is that within accelerate, they're actually what we call 5 swim lanes. 1 of them is product.Yeah. Everybody thinks about they wanna build a product. They wanna run experiments. They wanna run pilots. They're super excited, but you're here to build a business. So the other 4 swim lanes, you need to be running experiments and placing small bets and running pilots is also in what's your go-to-market? How are you gonna reach your customers? Are you doing inside sales, field sales, are you doing digital? What's your business model? Swim lane 3. How are you gonna price?How do your customers wanna pay? You gotta run experiments there because you might build it as a SaaS model, but then people wanna pay it in a different way. So you gotta run experiments there. Third is how you're gonna deliver. You can have the first 3 swim lanes perfect, but it's so expensive to deliver that product service or solution.You can't get to positive unit economics. Your venture's dead in the water. And then the last is team. Team is super important. Are you able to recruit and retain the talent you need to build this particular venture? Which is why we often get into conversations about compensation with large companies, which we don't have time to go into today. But how do you create phantom share plans? You pay your salespeople. So that is the big picture process. And then what they get wrong, there's only 3 things people get wrong. 1 is no methodology. That gets to your point about, you know, you can't afford copy the VCs or the traditional start up incubators because they only have a 12 percent success rate, and you gotta hit higher or the stakeholders won't let you do this very long. And, usually, what that means is you need methodology. You need a repeatable, scalable model where there's a lot of rigor and it's very robust and you get real execution plans. So that's 1. The second is mothership friction. I used to talk about mothership management in a more negative way because the orthodoxy's inertia and antibodies would still exist, but flip it around. You can seize the mothership advantage. You have the idea, the capital, the channels, the brand, the customers. If you figure out a way to get a lot more people engaged in the growth story, then you have that opportunity to seize the mother ship advantage. And then the third big mistake, and this is for your CEOs. It's your chief strategy officers. Your CMOs. It's your c Suite and your board members is that the senior executives failed to grow. They have gotta get rid of the management review board mindset, right, where you're gonna come and present your idea, and I'm just gonna dump all over it because I'm the senior guy or gal, you've got to shift that mindset to becoming a top tier venture capitalist. You need to be thinking in terms of portfolio, you need to be thinking in terms of option value, not net present value, and you need to be thinking in terms of a new set of metrics. Right? I'll leave you with this because I think this is super important. 1 of the pieces of research that we're doing is on valuing the unicorn within. Okay? Why the financial markets need a new model for valuing the global 1000. This is super, super important because the c suite needs to adopt a new set of metrics for their ventures that is different from the way you value the core and legacy business. It's not appropriate to measure them on the core legacy business metrics. We know, by the way, they're trying to take you into new markets. And, b, it's not appropriate to measure them on a quarterly basis. So what they have to do is they've got to adopt the same types of metrics that a VC would.And, oh, by the way, those just happen to be the same set of metrics the financial markets already know how to value. They do it every single day. They take a start up public. Right? They value them on customer acquisition and revenue growth. Your ventures that have access to your 20 million customers and are doing a similar thing to that startup have way more opportunity to become a unicorn than that start up does. But the financial markets, they need to kick in the butt because they know how to do this, but they're not doing it. And, frankly, I hold the financial markets accountable for the hundreds of thousands of jobs that are lost when a Kodak or a GE goes out of business, because they are not valuing the growth and innovation efforts that these large companies are making in the same way and giving them the same hall pass that they give the start ups in Silicon Valley.
Kaihan Krippendorff: That's a great point. And that could open up a whole another several series of podcasts. I agree one hundred percent. Well, Linda, thank you so much for taking the time to unpack this for us. And I love that you've taken this experience and put it in such a structured set of frameworks and tools that really democratizes it for everyone. The impact of this gonna have, how can people continue to learn from you and connect with you?
Linda Yates: Oh, thanks so much. Well, I can go to the website. They can follow Mach49, which is great. Can buy the book, obviously. And then the other thing is is that we've just announced we've launched our digital platform called 2401, which is 49 squared, which is, again, it's providing access to what we do to a much broader audience because it's a SaaS based platform that allows people to build and invest in ventures, leverage all the same tools and templates and technology that we use when we're working with our clients. You know, a lot of our clients are really trying to, you know, not just do 1 venture, but build their growth engine. So we help them kind of fly the plane while they're building the plane, but our whole goal is to build capability, not dependency, and to work ourselves out of a job. So if people have questions, they can email me linda@mach49.com, very easy, but we always are open to helping people and answering questions and really helping people to drive change in their organizations and, frankly, for the world.
Kaihan Krippendorff: Awesome. Well, thank you for doing that. Thank you for being open to us, and for sharing with us here today. Thanks, Linda.