Linda Yates | MMA Global

Linda Yates

Linda Yates
Founder and CEO
Mach49

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 with Harvard Press on her book tentatively titled, “Disrupting InsideOut: The How-to Guide to Creating, Building and Launching New Ventures,” to be published in March 2021.