#89—Linda Yates: Building Your Corporate Ventures Growth Machine

Linda Yates is the founder and CEO of Mach49, the growth incubator for global businesses with clients including Goodyear, Gundersen Health, Hitachi, Intel, Pernod Ricard, Schneider Electric, Shell, and many more. She is a seasoned CEO and board member with over thirty years of experience bridging Silicon Valley and the Global 1000, creating global strategy, building companies, and driving innovation for large multinationals worldwide, and the author 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 e 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. As heard in the highlight clip, Linda believes 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 this episode, she shares: Why your company needs to learn to pivot and adapt strategy to execution asap or risk becoming part of the 88% of companies that won't survive next decadesThe four pillars needed to jumpstart your company’s growth engine How to overcome the reticence many companies have of allocating funding toward risky new ventures How to ensure your organization is ready to successfully accelerate and scale opportunities—and make these stages fail-proof while doing so. _________________________________________________________________________________________Episode Timeline:00:00—Highlight from today's episode00:46—Introducing Linda + The topic of today’s episode2:48—If you really know me, you know that...3:49—What is your definition of strategy, and what got you interested in it?8:29—What are your thoughts on the idea that incumbent companies are too slow, too archaic?9:00—Could you talk us through the four pillars that companies need to build their growth engines?12:15—How do you overcome the reticence of companies to invest in new riskier investments and be willing to invest in new ventures?13:20—Could you lead us through how to really get to the heart of understanding customer pain? 17:50—Could you talk to us about the need to understand customers' perspectives, and what we overlook around this topic?19:55—How do you go about conducting customer development interviews?23:10—Can you lead us through building a portfolio of opportunities in the pipeline?17:09—Do you have any advice to which pathway should a company commit to?29:40—How can people follow you and keep learning from you?__________________________________________________________________________________________Additional Resources: Mach 49 Page: https://www.mach49.com/Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/linda-yates-19550249Twitter: https://twitter.com/lindakyatesThank you to our executive producer Zach Ness, our producer Nazanin Homayoun Jam and our editor James Pearce. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, download, and subscribe. I’m your host, Kaihan Krippendorff—thank you for listening.Follow us at outthinker.com/podcast