Mach49 Launches Venture Strategy, Promotes Chris Tacy to Chief Strategy Officer

Mach49 expands to offer strategic guidance for corporate growth in fast-changing markets

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., July 18, 2023 — Mach49, the growth builder for global businesses, announces Chris Tacy as Chief Strategy Officer. Tacy will lead our new Venture Strategy practice. This development builds on Mach49’s track record of helping many of the world's largest companies build and invest in successful new ventures.

Venture Strategy uses Mach49’s outcome-driven approach to achieve venture-style growth for our clients. It combines conventional strategy rigor with lean, customer-focused design thinking, boosting the strategic capacity and readiness of the firm’s clients. Mach49’s team of battle-tested entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and executives, work hand-in-hand with clients to unlock new growth opportunities.

“Execution matters. Failing to execute is always a fail, but so is the perfect execution of a flawed or missing strategy,” says Tacy. “Everything we do is grounded on logical, smart strategy.”

Traditional business strategies struggle to generate growth in a disruptive, ever-changing environment. Companies need strategic guidance that’s adaptive and flexible. This is crucial as AI transforms work and opens up new business models.

“Change is inevitable,” says Tacy. “Companies that stick to old methods will be out of business in less than a decade. Our Global 1000 clients need execution and venture-building expertise at the strategy level. It's a matter of survival.”

The practice is helping clients use AI as a growth-driving tool. The team helps refine decision-making processes and optimize growth strategies.

“The Mach49 team was fantastic to work with,” says Chris Fisher, Chief Strategy Officer for Xerox and Managing Partner for Xerox Ventures. “They quickly brought to bear a tremendous amount of subject matter expertise and market data. They operated swiftly and efficiently, and in deep partnership with our teams, which assisted us in making decisions rapidly across numerous topics and projects.”

Linda Yates, Mach49 Founder and CEO, recognizes Tacy’s background and experience makes him the perfect link between Global 1000 boardrooms and Silicon Valley.

“Chris understands what our clients are going through because he’s gone through it too,” she says. “He’s been a founder, he’s been in the C-suite of a publicly-traded company, he’s been a VC, and he’s worked in private equity. That’s an incredibly rare combination that allows him to help clients see the growth opportunities that this period of rapid change is creating.”

When joining Mach49 in 2017, Tacy brought over 25 years of experience blending business, innovation, strategy, and entrepreneurship. A proven entrepreneur, he launched or led four successful startups. He managed a $325M corporate venture fund, played a role in many M&A deals, and closed more than $2B in partnerships. As an investor, he made over $100M in returns from $7.5M in invested capital. Past clients of his include Oracle, Google, Lockheed Martin, Sony, Viacom, and Nike.

About Mach49

Mach49 partners with global businesses to build their growth engines through venture building, venture investing, venture transformation, strategic partnering, and targeted M&A. We are 100% focused on execution, helping our clients disrupt existing markets and create new ones to drive meaningful growth.

The company is a unique cadre of successful serial entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and C-suite executives who have collectively generated over $60B in market value over their operating careers in companies they've invested in, managed, created, or built. Mach49 was founded by Linda Yates, author of The Unicorn Within: How Companies Can Create Game-Changing Ventures at Startup Speed (HBR Press, October 2022)—named "10 Best Business Books of 2022" by Forbes, and recently selected by Malcolm Gladwell and Dan Pink as one of "7 Startup Books Every Entrepreneur Should Read." Mach49 is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices in Redwood City, Boston, London, and Amsterdam. www.mach49.com