In this episode of Marketing in the Now, David Reske sits down with Cornelius Schmahl, founder of Unicorn Coach and a growth advisor who has helped scale companies like Lazada and Uber, invested in over 100 startups across six continents, and turned nine of them into unicorns. Cornelius unpacks why product-market fit is a spectrum rather than a yes-or-no question, why “patching AI on top” of old processes is a trap he calls the ignorance tax, and why the real winners are rebuilding lean, AI-first teams from scratch instead. The conversation moves through his framework for finding the most profitable slice of a business, why aggressive outsourcing beats hiring, and why he believes personal growth — even therapy — is the real bottleneck to building a billion-dollar company. It’s a candid, high-energy look at what it actually takes to scale in the age of AI.