What you hold in your hand or are perusing online is not just a book; it’s a venture. Like the startups we build and invest in with our amazing clients, it has gone through the whole spectrum of venture creation, from Ideate to Incubate to Accelerate—and now, with the help of so very, very many people, it is poised to Scale. Thus, the section you are reading now is more than merely acknowledgments; it is the one place in the book where I get to express my deepest, most heartfelt, and most profound gratitude for the people who have not just shaped the book, not just created Mach49, but have made me—helping me to learn, love, laugh, care, grow, pray, imagine, wonder. I have been so extraordinarily blessed: Paul, Kylie, Devon, Piper; family, friends, faith; colleagues, mentors, clients—many who fall into more than one of these categories. To all of you, thank you!

Let’s start with the book itself, which could not have happened without an incredible team led and curated by the incomparable Jim Levine, principal, Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency, who was a friend before he was my agent. Paul and I met Jim, really the ultimate Renaissance man, because of his amazing philanthropic work founding The Fatherhood Project. More than an agent, Jim has been a friend, mentor, and sherpa, leading me through this entire journey, including getting six publishers wildly interested in the book and then helping me choose Harvard Business Review Press as the publisher.

Wow! What an extraordinary experience working with HBRP has been. It all starts with the amazing Kevin Evers, my editor, guru, guide, coach, cajoler, cheerleader, and, when he needed to be, comedian. I told him I would need to write a whole chapter to acknowledge him, so I am at least going to devote this paragraph. If this book is readable and relevant, thank Kevin for that. While I composed the book the way we do Venture Building with clients in real life, Kevin organized it in the way a reader would find useful. When I had way too many visuals, artifacts, samples, and tools, he reined me in with analogies you couldn’t dispute: “I see this book as similar to a musical. Do we want scenes that wow people and take a more visual-first approach? Yes! That’s what chapters 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and others are for. Those are your Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dances. But we also need dialogue scenes and exposition scenes. It can’t all be dancing.” When the page count was too high, he made me cut it down—because we didn’t want the book to turn from “how to do this” into “how the hell will I ever find time to do this?” When I learned that a paperback, regardless of how many copies I had already presold (a lot) could not even qualify for two of the (shall not be named) bestseller lists (and digital copies don’t count either, in the twenty-first century—talk about an industry ripe for disruption), he held up the mirror and reminded me of our own methodology, driving home what it’s all about: customer/user experience. He wrote, “I’m also bullish on paperback because of the user experience. I don’t want the book to be a heavy tome that sits on people’s desks. We want teams to read it together and dog-ear the pages. As such, the book should be readable, transportable, light, bendable, durable. In our experience, readers prefer paperback in this format. And I don’t want to sacrifice the user experience to hit a list.” Besides his expertise, I must thank Kevin for his patience and endurance as I missed deadline after deadline until he finally said (always with a smile): “That 12/1 deadline is as immovable as Christmas Day. That’s when we need to lock up the interior. If we miss it, we all get coal in our stockings.” Kevin, you are the best, and I am so lucky you became my editor and will forever be a friend.

In addition to Kevin, I have to thank Stephani Finks for her incredible creative direction. Evidently, I have written the most difficult book to produce in the history of HBRP, but Stephani was the calm in the storm, bringing her unique blend of design, creativity, and book-business superpowers to ensure we created not just something useful but a manifestation of another Mach49 mantra: design matters! Equally stellar and expert is Jen Waring, the book’s senior production editor, whose experience manufacturing books in every form, for myriad functions, combined with her rigor, aesthetics, and attention to detail, is second to none. Ably assisted by the wonderful and laser-focused Alicyn Zall, and copyeditor, Jane Gebhart, I have finally met my match in the fine art of editing for perfection. Others I must add to the list of HBRP shout-outs and for whom I am incredibly thankful include fearless leader and publisher Erika Heilman, Julie Devoll (marketing), Felicia Sinusas (PR), Lindsey Dietrich and Jordan Concannon (both direct sales), Jon Shipley (UK team; foreign rights), Sally Ashworth (UK; publicity and events), and Rick Emanuel (manufacturing manager).

Jim introduced me to others who have played critical roles in the creation of The Unicorn Within, including Michael Malone, another multitalented human, author, educator, journalist, novelist, and now podcast producer. Since I was CEO of Mach49 and we were in hypergrowth mode, Jim thought it would be best if I had someone help me write the book, and Mike was to be that co-collaborator. Mike and I quickly realized that unlike a biography or academic treatise, if you are going to write a how-to guide you need to have actually done it—over and over again—so we swapped roles. And yes, I wrote the book, but Michael helped me in so many ways: editing, questioning, provoking, and bringing a flair, edge, and style that we hope makes this book not just useful but fun; not just a manual but a manifesto.

A manifesto needs a movement, which is why I am so excited to be working with Mark Fortier, founder and president of Fortier Public Relations, as our publicist. Mark, Dan Rovzar, and their team are literally the world’s leading experts in the business book industry, and I am humbled by their interest, excitement, and massive engagement in ensuring that not just the book but its messages of growth, action, optimism, empowerment, responsibility, disruption, design, inclusion, and change-the-world opportunities get out into the world.

Thank you to Rodrigo Corral and his team for the beautiful cover and design work. A special thanks to Adriana Tonello, who became the behind-the-scenes arms and legs. She worked closely with Brad Sharek, chief creative officer at Mach49, to whom I owe the greatest debt of thanks for taking on the design of the book; also, the many artifacts we included are ones he has created over the years. Besides being one of Paul’s and my best friends for over thirty years, Brad is responsible for how beautiful the book has turned out to be.

Thanking Brad leads me to the next set of people without whom this book has no reason for being, the Mach49 family. Little did I know when I founded the company how truly blessed I would be by knowing so many incredibly talented people. I am grateful to every single one of you who has joined me on this grand adventure. I wish I had space to acknowledge each of you by name, but please know I love and appreciate all of you. I do want to call out the people who have been with me since the beginning, who believed in the potential of what Mach49 could become and, most important for all of you reading the book, who crafted everything you find between these covers. They invented the methodology and even helped write several of the sections. Here’s to Russ Lampert and Brad, who both joined me day one—Russ as CFO, keeping me out of trouble and bringing venture business modeling and economics to our clients, and Brad, who for thirty years has been able to take what I imagine and bring it to life visually.

Thank you to David Charpie and Clement Wang, who have also been with me since the beginning, bringing their vision, superpowers, and prior startup-CEO and head-of-product experiences and success to a truly blank sheet of paper. They built and still run Mach49’s global venture-building, Disrupting Inside Out practice—the success of Mach49 and this book is due to their extraordinary talent at building ventures, working with large companies, and making the process teachable, repeatable, and scalable. Dave Blakely soon joined that merry band, after twenty-seven years with IDEO, bringing his rare mix of design thinking and deep technical and engineering prowess. Bill Kingsley, in his VC-in-Residence role, drove a whole new practice around the senior executives and the New Venture Boards. When Ed Ross joined as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR), he helped us stop reinventing the wheel every time and start documenting and codifying what we were doing. Paul Holland, who was supposed to “retire” but as yet another demonstration of why he is the most amazing life partner on the planet, jumped in to invent and run the Disrupting Outside In practice of venture investing and building world-class corporate venture capital (CVC) funds. Julie Price brought her years of experience in user research to help us invent what we now call customer development. Chelsea Hare and Mercedes Arenas were our first designers; they put exclamation points on finding customer pain and building narratives and stories to communicate value.

In this book, you will learn how to get into the market quickly—placing small bets, piloting, and experimenting in real time—and soon you will have access to a digital platform (code-named Mach149), thanks to Monifa Porter. Those of you in other countries who find that the material is designed for global audiences can thank our founding Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) team, led by the amazing Clare McKitrick and Steve McCarthy. James Beriker brought an entire cadre of experts, leveraging his network and multiple successes as a Silicon Valley–startup CEO to develop the Accelerate phase. Others who have been at Mach49 since the earliest days, including gracefully navigating the uncertainty of the pandemic, and who have helped incubate the methodology, tools, technology, practices, scripts, activities, and more that you find in this book, include Atif Hussein, Bobby Lalwani, Chris Tacy, Griff Resch, Kevin Ye, Marvin Scaff, Michele Chambliss, Mimi Gay, Mo Weinhardt, Nick Sohriakoff, Scott Seethaler, Shauna Arora, Shelby Hertzog, and my incredible sister Sharon, who, while thankfully keeping us organized at home, joined Mach49 to do the same for the firm and our venture teams. Two people who are exploring new ventures but are still part of the Mach49 family and played a critical role in the content development core to The Unicorn Within are wunderkind Collin Hartigan, whose name we tore off a flyer on the wall when we needed a designer and who grew rapidly to become EIR extraordinaire, and Drew Harman, incredible intellect, extraordinary entrepreneur, brilliant board member, and phenomenal friend, who helped develop the earliest methods and coined our now-iconic phrase: “Customer insights are the currency of credibility; everything else is uninformed opinion.”

Last on the Mach49 list but definitely not least, my everlasting thanks to Linda Liguori, my executive assistant and Mach49 director of administration. Loo, seriously, I could not live (and certainly wouldn’t know where to be) without your diligence, wisdom, creative scheduling (the book was late, but it would still be in the works now if she hadn’t found time for me to write and vigilantly guarded that time), organization, client acumen, management prowess, Dudley (M49 team dog), and perpetual positive attitude. Most importantly, thank you for being my friend.

To the people I have learned from, who have mentored me, believed in me, and inspired me—who gave me opportunities at very young ages and throughout my life that allowed me to grow and develop, to lead and build, to aspire and care—you too can take credit for this book, because without you, I would not be where I am today. The wonderful Jon Megibow might be surprised to find himself at the top of the list, but in chronological order, he is first: he was my University of Virginia adviser, literally there for me during the first of many Robert Frostian road-not-taken moments that have yielded untold opportunity and joy in my life (I met Paul shortly after embarking down that first path, and Mach49 is the result of another). Stu Francis gave me my first real job in investment banking after college and stands high above the crowd in terms of integrity, ethics, and grace. He made me think I might want to learn golf someday, which I have—and love.

Fred Sturdivant, fearless leader of the SF Mac Group office, who believed in me and gave me opportunities way beyond my years, continues to be my role model and my idol. You, along with Lucy Reid, Jennifer Bol, Mark Johnson, and Pierre Loewe (we have lost these last two and still mourn them), taught me the importance of a culture built on excellence, caring, inclusivity, curiosity, vision, merit, and fun. You all have superpowers to which I continue to aspire!

Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad (another great one who has passed) literally pioneered the field of corporate innovation with the publication of Competing for the Future, and then Gary gave me a front-row seat to the development of the entire field by offering me the opportunity to become CEO and cofounder of Strategos, the company we started in 1995. Gary is one of the great intellects, visionaries, and speakers of our time, and I owe a tremendous amount of gratitude to him for getting me into this field in the first place and for giving me the incredible foundation on which I have been able to build. And to my Strategos cofounders, colleagues, and friends, especially Peter Skarzynski, Jim Scholes, Chris Tchen, and Jon Lamb, I hope you are proud of how the field you literally helped create has evolved!

To Reed Hastings, good friend and ultimate disruptor, who nominated me for the Henry Crown Fellowship at the Aspen Institute; to Keith Berwick, Ben Dunlap, and Skip Battle—our HCF mentors extraordinaire, who more than practice what they preach; and to my entire High Five Class: you all taught me the true essence of values-based leadership, what integrity and ethics really mean, and why our entire lives should be devoted to changing the world. The altruistic reasons I founded Mach49 and the last two paragraphs of the book—encouraging venture teams and senior executives to do well by doing good—are for you. I hope the many ventures we have helped our Global 1000 clients build that are truly double-bottom-line make you proud.

Huge thanks to Tim Dyson and the entire leadership team at Next15, including Peter Harris, Jonathan Peachey, and Mark Sanford. Little did you know what a renegade you would be acquiring when you saw the incredible potential of Mach49 and realized you could leverage us to launch Next15 into the growth stratosphere. You truly believed in us and gave us a platform to grow that has enabled us to become a rocket ship and unquestionably reach escape velocity. We had turned down four prior acquisition offers, and it was the knowledge that HBRP was publishing this book that led you to throw your hat in the ring; it has turned out to be a stellar match. Thanks for sharing our values and letting us continue to be who we are, run independently, and bring this work to the world.

To the incredible minds and mentors who have gone before in all aspects of this field and whose ideas have sparked many of our own, including the faculty partners who have been there every step of the way—HUGE THANKS. It is on the shoulders of your incredible research and work, your provocative questioning, your challenges, your insights, your inspiration, and your client engagement that this book stands. To Huggy Rao, Stanford Graduate School of Business, who knows the Mothership and can get under the skin of the C-suite better than anyone on the planet, and Rick Kolsky, brilliant lecturer at Kellogg, who has been my mensch and mentor my entire professional career: without your respective encouragement, enthusiasm, and expertise, Mach49 and this book would not exist. As the first two academics I consulted (as well as great friends I knew wouldn’t just tell me what I wanted to hear), you continue to help drive ever more rigor into the Mach49 process, yielding ever-greater results, including our new research developing Mach49’s Growth Readiness Assessment™ to ensure companies are prepared to build their growth engine in the first place. Early on, Cindy Alvarez provided us with critical content and experience captured in her fantastic book, Lean Customer Development, Build Products Your Customers Will Buy. Whenever we had Cindy speak to New Venture Teams, they stopped thinking they knew it all and walked away hyperfocused on finding customer pain.

To Greg Galle and Mike Burn, founders of Solve Next and longtime members of the Mach49 family, your design-thinking expertise and world-changing Think Wrong methodology are second to none and continue to benefit so many of our clients. Readers can thank Greg and Mike for helping us build many of the tools you find in this book. I also have to thank the wonderful David Kelley, because without the work that he and his brother, Tom, spearheaded when they developed the whole field of design thinking at IDEO and that David continues to share with the world through the d.school at Stanford, Mach49’s methodology would lack a cornerstone.

Our relationship with Vijay Govindarajan, at Dartmouth’s Tuck, who early on saw the synergy between his excellent Three-Box Solution work and Mach49’s execution experience and expertise, has yielded a great friendship and tremendous collaboration, for which we are incredibly grateful. To Rita McGrath, your book The End of Competitive Advantage sounded the alarm bells and kicked the G1000 into gear, sending them searching for execution-oriented solutions that actually helped them grow rather than just talk about growth in a pretty set of slides. John Danner, University of California, Berkeley and Princeton, your genius, passion, wit, and deep expertise regarding corporate innovation, leadership, and entrepreneurship are ensuring that we take this work to an even higher level as we embark on the next layer of research, studying corporate growth engines across the globe and, more importantly, teaching the financial markets how to value the Unicorn within.

Finally, another entrepreneur turned academic to whom we owe a heap of gratitude is Steve Blank, who seeded the entire field of venture building, including corporate venture building—emphasizing the need to focus on the Mothership by famously noting that internal startups must “fight a two-front war, not just a one-front war.” Steve, we have you to thank for our beginning and our future. When we came to the ranch to share our ideas and sit at the feet of the venture-building master, you were supremely encouraging. You also said, as only you can, “You should build a platform.” With those words you made sure we were thinking from the future backward as we embarked on a very intentional journey to democratize what we do. This book is a major milestone along that path. Inspired by you almost ten years ago, the next step will indeed be to launch our digital platform, Mach149, to make this work accessible to the masses. Our goal was always to create a teachable, repeatable, and scalable model to build client capability so that we could work ourselves out of a job. Now that we have proven the model, with client after client evangelizing our work and their venture-building and venture-investing success, we hope you are proud of how we have leveraged your insights, focused exclusively on execution, and are answering your original challenge.

I must turn now to our amazing clients, the many “founding” New Venture Team members, the senior executive and C-suite New Venture Board members, the Venture Factory “Mach49 Inside” teams, the CVC fund leaders, the New Venture Advocates—you inspire us every single day. You are the vanguard—leading the charge, focusing on learning by doing, taking real action, and providing the examples and role models that the internal entrepreneurs, growth geniuses, and efficiency experts reading this book will learn from and leverage. Your ideas, talent, competencies, brands, customers, and courage have enabled you to drive meaningful growth for your customers, your companies, yourselves, and the world. There are now too many of you to name (I live in fear of leaving someone out), but you know who you are, and when we finally throw our Mach49 client alumni parties around the world, I will thank you profoundly in person! The greatest blessing for me is that many of you have become lifelong friends. Please know that we are always here for you and incredibly grateful.

Speaking of blessings, while I am sure this isn’t the norm, pretty much everyone who knows me knows that spirituality and faith are core to who I am. While I am acutely aware and an outspoken critic of the failings of the Catholic Church, it doesn’t detract from the incredible humans, the priests and nuns, whose thoughts, words, readings, homilies, and Monk’s Chronicles have inspired me, pushed me, carried me, encouraged me, and challenged me to strive to be better, more caring, more giving and forgiving, more understanding, and more inclusive; to pray, to be an activist, to strive for positive change and peace, to love others as He loved us—not just in my personal life but in my professional life. Some I have known my whole life; others I just follow. Some are now gone: Father John Olivier, Father Tom Moran, Father Egon Javor, Father Pius Horvath, Father David Ayotte, and Sister Anne Cronin have all passed but touched my life in both big and small ways. Others still light the way, holding up the mirror every week: Father Martin Mager, Father Matthew Leavy, Father Maurus Nemeth, Monsignor Lloyd Torgerson, Father David Guffey, and Father Eric Hollas. Readers, you don’t know these people, but if you are moved by certain parts of the book or find hope and humanness in it, you have them to thank.

I must also thank my friends. Paul and I have been supremely blessed with a lifetime of extraordinary friendships that continue to this day. The words of Joseph Parry’s poem—Make new friends, but keep the old; those are silver, these are gold—ring true for us. You know who you are … from childhood to college BFFs, to UVA (where Paul and I met), to San Francisco, to Stanford, to Amsterdam, to Palo Alto, to Portola Valley, to Ormondale, to Nueva, to the golf course, to Fun with Friends and the ILC. What you are is a kind, spirited, adventurous, thoughtful, live-life-to-the-fullest, upbeat, global group—all who have made our lives joyful and fun! Thanks for sticking with me as I have grown Mach49 and written this book; you have been nothing but incredibly encouraging despite the long hours, missed events, abandoned tee times, or too-short phone calls. I love and cherish each of you. A special thank you to Gladys Morales, who has been part of our family for almost twenty-five years and who has taken care of all of us in so many ways; forget the book, our lives don’t function without Gladys, we love you.

I am going to end this book where really it all begins, with my family. To my parents, Jane and Don Yates, who truly are the best parents the world has ever known, you have always believed in me and given me the courage to dream and the confidence to make those dreams reality. You truly are my role models and I love you tons and tons. I will forever miss my grandparents, Bud and Helen Buehler, inveterate travelers who encouraged Paul and me to explore every corner of the world together, which we are. And to Paul’s parents, Inez and Browder Holland, you taught me the value of humility, hard work, and putting family above all else. To my siblings, Brad, Sharon, Stacey, and Kim, each of you is amazing and have taught me so much. Lucky us to have such an incredibly loving, supportive, and connected family. The fact that I get to live near all of you and see you as often as I do is such a blessing.

To our girls, Kylie, Devon, and Piper, you are incredible young women, each with amazing talents you generously share with the world. You bring spirit, life, light, hope, and fun to everyone around you. Dad and I could not be more grateful to have you in our lives. Thank you for cheering me on every day and inspiring me to make the world a better place. I love you so very much!

And Paul, because of you I know pure joy and a sense of peace, belonging, and unconditional love for which I can never thank you enough. You are so right, we do have “the love for the ages.” You complete me and make me better. Mach49 and The Unicorn Within would never have happened without your unwavering support. Yet these are merely the latest chapters in the story of our grand adventure. We share a life together that knows no bounds. So, here’s to perhaps the greatest love story ever imagined, and here’s to what is yet to come. I’m so excited, I thank you, and I love you!