Mothership Suitability and the Hexagon
"Hey Mach49 team, why do you give away your secret sauce? "
We get that a lot. We've opened up our methodology for venture building with The Unicorn Within, love to share VC insights and enjoy giving away tips on working with C-suite to spur innovation.
Now, we're proud to bring you the final instalment of Steve McCarthy 's Hidden Geometry in Venture Building series.
Throughout, Steve has illustrated complex concepts related to product, business and team, in a simple, intuitive manner.
Why do we share these graphics? Because we want you to use them. To invest in and build the most successful, sustainable and market-changing corporate ventures and make the world a better place.
The time to start is now. Enjoy!
By Elke Boogert, Mach49 Managing Editor
Don't miss Steve's previous editions of The Hidden Geometry of Venture Building
Mothership Suitability and the Hexagon
By Steve McCarthy , Principal Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Mach49
We've arrived at perhaps the most unique aspect of corporate venture building: the relationship with the mothership.
While the previous geometric frameworks have focused on universal venture building challenges - product desirability (circle), feasibility (triangle), business viability (quadrilaterals), and team capability (pentagon) - the hexagon introduces considerations that are distinctly corporate.?
Like a hexagon's six sides creating perfect symmetry, the alignment between venture and mothership must be carefully balanced to create sustainable value for both entities. Understanding and optimizing this relationship - what we call Mothership Suitability - is crucial for any corporate venture builder.
Here is a list of key questions that need to be answered when assessing Mothership Suitability, but ultimately these could be distilled into one question: Should we build it?
Impact Framing Zones
Impact Framing is a set of Mach49 processes and tools – developed by Rob Majteles – designed to help Motherships define, create, deliver, and communicate impactful goals that will successfully drive their ventures.
The process begins with one-on-one interviews with key executives to explore strategic ambitions, financial expectations, and desired team outcomes. This provides input for shaping impact statements that ensure venture teams share a common understanding with senior management of what success looks like across strategic, financial, and team dimensions before the venture journey begins.
When considering these dimensions, I've developed a helpful framework that I call ‘Impact Framing Zones.’ This framework identifies the synergies and frictions that may exist between each of the three dimensions. For example:
Strategic + Financial (Purple Zone)
Strategic + Team (Orange Zone)
Financial + Team (Green Zone)
Let’s look at two example impact statements from a mobility venture:
Financial Impact (Blue Zone): Ventures will unlock new revenue streams that drive meaningful growth for all mobility ecosystem stakeholders and help shift the Mothership's market perception from value stock to growth stock — as evidenced by increased replacement market share and recurring, repeatable, and higher-margin revenue for Mothership.?
Team Impact (Yellow Zone): Venture Teams will serve as a vivid example of the Mothership's ability to rapidly commercialize new offerings grounded in stakeholder pain; accelerate to both product-market fit and first revenue in a capital-efficient manner; agilely execute; and lead with a Founder's mindset.
These are great impact statements for helping a team know what the Mothership expects of the venture they are creating. But if the team then considers the interplay between the two statements – the green zone of the hexagon – they can begin to identify synergies and frictions.?
An obvious synergy would be that the founder's mindset approach naturally aligns with creating higher-margin revenue through efficient resource use – with the team's focus on capital efficiency creating:
An obvious friction would be that pressure to rapidly show revenue growth to shift market perception may conflict with building sustainable team practices, leading to team burnout and a quality vs. speed trade-off. If we take this one step further, a team lead could mitigate this risk with initiatives like resource allocation rules that ensure capability building is at least 20%, or regular wellness check-ins, or appointing dedicated fun officers.
The result of using Impact Framing Zones is that teams can begin their ventures with both clear alignment with the Mothership’s strategic, financial and team expectations, and also a plan for leveraging synergies and mitigating risks that exist between the three dimensions.
Growth Advocates
Perhaps the most practical application of hexagonal thinking to mothership suitability is the concept of Growth Advocate – key individuals within the mothership who have both the authority and accountability to help ventures access corporate capabilities efficiently. As my colleague Amos Manasseh has shared previously, these advocates are critical for forming a human interface layer between the venture and various corporate functions in order to steer the venture ship towards the safest and quickest route to success.
This framework identifies six essential types of Growth Advocates that ventures should look to cultivate as a priority. There will undoubtedly be others, but these are the ones that teams should focus on first:
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1. HR Advocates
Champions who can expedite hiring, navigate compensation policies, and help ventures build their teams while staying aligned with corporate HR guidelines. They ensure ventures can move quickly while maintaining compliance.
2. Strategy Advocates
Senior leaders who understand both corporate strategy and venture building, helping teams navigate strategic decisions and ensure alignment with mothership objectives. They provide air cover for bold moves while managing strategic risk.
3. Finance Advocates?
Financial partners who can streamline funding processes, help ventures access resources, and translate between venture metrics and corporate financial requirements. They bridge the gap between startup-style metrics and corporate reporting needs.
4. Operations Advocates
Operations experts who can help ventures leverage existing infrastructure, facilities, and processes without getting bogged down in corporate bureaucracy. They find ways to say "yes" while managing operational risk.
5. Go-to-Market Advocates
Marketing and sales leaders who can help ventures access existing channels, customer relationships, and brand assets appropriately. They facilitate market entry while protecting corporate brand equity.
6. Product Management Advocates
Technical leaders who can help ventures tap into existing IP, technology stacks, and development resources when beneficial and may ultimately become the product owners of the venture if it spins-in at a later date. They enable ventures to build on mothership capabilities while maintaining autonomy.
The key is identifying advocates who combine deep organizational knowledge with an entrepreneurial mindset. The best candidates often reveal themselves through their track record of supporting innovation projects, their ability to "speak both languages" (corporate and startup), and their reputation for getting things done despite organizational constraints. Venture teams should look for individuals who demonstrate genuine curiosity about new business models, who maintain strong internal networks, and who have sufficient organizational capital to influence decisions.
The engagement process should begin early - ideally during the venture's formation - with clear conversations about expectations, time commitments, and mutual benefits. Most importantly, Growth Advocates should be formally recognized and rewarded for this role, with venture support explicitly included in their objectives and performance reviews. This ensures advocacy that can scale across multiple ventures rather than relying on informal favors that may evaporate under pressure.?
When properly empowered, these Growth Advocates become the venture's secret weapon for accessing mothership advantages while avoiding corporate quicksand.?
The Unfair Advantage
The standout benefit of building a startup in a corporate setting is that large companies have assets and capabilities that a startup can only dream of – this is the ‘unfair advantage’ that corporate ventures need to capitalize on. In order to do this, The Unfair Advantage framework can help venture teams identify and categorize all of the parent company's core competencies, assets, and capabilities across six dimensions:
1. Brand Equity
2. Capital
3. Partnerships
4. Customers
5. Channels
6. Capability
Understanding and using these unfair advantages is crucial for corporate venture success, but it requires careful navigation. Teams must strike a delicate balance between independence and integration - leveraging mothership assets without becoming encumbered by corporate constraints.
The most successful corporate ventures are those that thoughtfully select which advantages to use, considering not just immediate benefits but also long-term implications for growth and scalability. By systematically evaluating each dimension of potential advantage, teams can ultimately build ventures that are both more competitive in the market and more valuable to their parent companies.
Understanding and assessing Mothership Suitability is fundamental to venture building success?
From the multidimensional analysis enabled by Impact Framing Zones to the critical human interfaces represented by Growth Advocates, and finally to the systematic evaluation of Unfair Advantages, these hexagonal frameworks are helpful for enabling venture teams to consider the complexities of Mothership Suitability.
Hexagons are, indeed, the bestagons.?
And with that, we conclude our exploration of "The Hidden Geometry of Venture Building." I hope that I have been able to justify the belief I stated at the start. That matching geometric frameworks to the core components of a successful venture can help illustrate complex concepts in a simple, intuitive manner. Each geometric shape can represent the fundamental principles and considerations necessary for evaluating or enhancing these core components.?
Principal Entrepreneur-in-Residence STEVE MCCARTHY has over 15 years of experience helping startups, blue chip companies, and public sector organizations develop products and services that put users first. At Mach49, he blends his expertise in innovation, psychology, design, and marketing to help global businesses disrupt their markets by pursuing customer-centric opportunities for growth.
Steve specializes in storytelling, teaching client teams how to articulate their journeys in succinct, stimulating narratives. He has led multinational teams and projects in the automotive, leisure and hospitality, healthcare, and engineering industries. He holds a BA and MA from Kingston University in London.