Linda Yates is the founder and CEO of Mach49, the leading growth incubator for global businesses. She is a seasoned CEO with over 25 years of experience creating global strategy and driving innovation for large multinationals around the world. As a native of the Silicon Valley, Linda has an extensive local and global network — serving as a bridge between the Silicon Valley and the board rooms and C-Suites of large multinational corporations her entire career.

She launched Mach49 as the first Silicon Valley Incubator/Accelerator focused on helping global enterprises leverage their talent, ideas, brand, assets, competencies, capital, and customers to drive meaningful growth. By Disrupting InsideOut: launching ventures, building incubators, and seizing the mothership advantage and Disrupting OutsideIn: building world-class corporate venture funds, guiding Executive Investment Committees to operate as top-tier VCs and maximizing the partnership value of external startups, Linda helps global enterprises beat the startups at their own game. Focused 100% on execution, Linda is committed to developing the client’s capability to create a pipeline and portfolio of new ventures on their own for the long term.

Linda spent a decade as a member of the Board of Directors for NYSE-traded Sybase Inc. (now SAP) and has been a board member and advisor to many entrepreneurs and private companies. Linda was CEO of Strategos — pioneering the field of Corporate Innovation with Co-Founder and Chairman, Professor Gary Hamel. Prior to Strategos, she spent six years with the Mac Group/Gemini, where she was Head of the San Francisco office, co-head of the High Tech practice on the West Coast and, later, Europe (based in Amsterdam). Her career began with two years at Smith Barney in corporate finance and M&A. Linda has extensive global experience having lived, worked, or traveled to almost 70 countries.

Yates is a Henry Crown Fellow with the Aspen Institute. She is an environmental activist having built Tah.Mah.Lah (http://www.tahmahlah.com), considered the greenest home in the US and a 21st-century education pioneer, including working to transform public schools and co-founding Creekside Learning Lab as a demo site for best practices in 21st-century learning. She holds a BA in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia and a MA in International Relations and Comparative Politics from Stanford University, where she guest lectures.

Linda is currently working on her book tentatively titled, “The Unicorn Within: How Companies can Create Game-changing Ventures at Startup Speed,” to be published by Harvard Press, August 2022.

“Every mature company in every industry in every part of the world is at risk from outside disruptors – and every large business in the world knows it.

In the face of this danger, senior executives often feel helpless. They have watched as one industry after another has been over-run by smart, agile new companies armed with the latest technology, tons of venture capital, and radically new business models. They have seen great companies stumble, or disappear, when they failed to find an adequate response. And they have had to explain to shareholders, why they have left billions of dollars of market cap on the table that should rightfully have been theirs.

In this book, we’ll offer a learnable, repeatable, scalable, process for disrupting from the inside out — helping you create, build, and launch a pipeline and portfolio of new ventures generated from within to drive meaningful growth. And just like a real Silicon Valley venture capital portfolio, some of those ventures you will kill, some will be singles, some doubles, others triples and yes, you too WILL produce Unicorns. As the well-regarded founder of Cowboy Ventures, Aileen Lee, noted when she coined the term Unicorn in 2013: A Unicorn is a startup company with a value of over $1 billion.

Imagine what a valuation like that would do to your market cap.

Whether you are the CEO, a member of the C-suite or an internal entrepreneur, this book is meant to create a virtual immersion into venture building, striving to get as close as we can to simulating the actual experience between two covers.”

Visit Amazon now to place your pre-order now for The Unicorn Within: How Companies Can Crate Game-Changing Ventures at Startup Speed, to be published by Harvard Business Review Press.

Mach49 is the Growth Incubator for Global Businesses.

We help large companies build a pipeline and portfolio of new ventures to drive disruptive growth.

Mach49 is 100% focused on execution.

We help companies disrupt themselves from the InsideOut™ and OutsideIn™ to beat the startups at their own game.

We’re a unique cadre of successful entrepreneurs, top-tier VCs, and C-Suite executives — an extremely experienced team that has collectively helped generate over $50B dollars in market value over our operating careers.

We have invested years developing a teachable, repeatable, scalable methodology and library of processes, tools, templates, activities and more to build client capability — not dependency.