Mike Maples of Floodgate joins Nick to discuss The OG Seed Investor, Mike Maples Jr., on Spotting Inflection Points, Living in the Future, and Why the Best Form of Competition Is No Competition. In this episode we cover:
- The Evolution of Seed Investing
- Identifying Exceptional Founders
- The Role of Inflections in Startups
- The Impact of AI on Startups
- Sea Changes and Business Model Migrations
- The Importance of Specificity and Narrative Design
- The Role of Pattern Recognition in Venture Capital
Guest Links:
The host of The Full Ratchet is Nick Moran of New Stack Ventures, a venture capital firm committed to investing in founders outside of the Bay Area.
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0:17
Mike Maples Jr. joins us today from Marin. He’s a Co-Founding Partner at Floodgate, an early-stage venture capital firm known for backing “Thunder Lizards”—wildly disruptive companies like Twitter, Twitch, Clover Health, Okta, Outreach, Chegg, Demandforce, and Applied Intuition.
Widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in venture capital, Mike has been named to the Forbes Midas List eight times in the past decade, recognized by FORTUNE as a “Rising Star,” and profiled by Harvard Business School for his lifetime contributions to entrepreneurship.
He’s also the author of the national bestselling book Pattern Breakers and host of the podcast by the same name, where he shares startup insights from the world’s top performers.
Mike, welcome to the show!
1:02
Thanks for having me, Nick. I’m a big fan of the show, so this should be fun. Well,
1:07
it’s good to finally do this. Tell us a bit about your story and your path to venture. Yeah,
1:11
it was pretty accidental. So I was a founder. I’d been involved with a couple of companies down in Austin, Texas, both of which went public. One was a company called Tivoli systems, and I was sort of on the startup team, although not really a founder there, but we went public in 1995 and then were acquired by IBM in 1996 and then in 1997 I started a company with some other folks called motive, which went public in 2004 and I was a little bit tired after motive went public. From 97 to Oh, four was an interesting time. It was the best of times and the worst of times, you know, you had the bubble and then the bursting, and then you have to navigate through it. And I also missed California, so I decided to come back. But if you had told me even 18 months before starting in venture that I was ever going to be venture capitalist, I wouldn’t have believed you. I had no reason to believe I was ever going to do that in life. And so that sort of came by happenstance. Amazing. Is
2:08
there anything about the current climate that reminds you of that time at all?
2:13
Actually, not very much, to be honest. You know, it’s back then. There were a lot fewer people in the business. Right now, there’s a whole lot more noise and people coming from all directions. And back then, you either raised angel money less than 250k or you went straight to $5 million series A it’s hard for people even imagine that there was a time when you couldn’t raise a million dollars in Silicon Valley. And so I’d say it’s changed a whole lot. We didn’t change that much, but the world around us changed a lot. So, you know, but it’s, it’s remains fun, right? Chasing down these founders and getting lots of parking getting lots of parking tickets, especially at Stanford and places like that. So
2:53
you, you had some formative experiences in Texas. It sounds like, what’s, what’s the founding story of floodgate and kind of your presence in the valley.
3:02
What happened in late 2004 was I started to realize that it was kind of time to get the party started again with the Internet. So at the time, O’Reilly had this conference called the web two Dotto conference, and then there was another conference called the O’Reilly emerging tech conference, and so I started to go to those and it seemed like the web was transitioning from a web of interconnected pages to becoming a platform that connected people, and people were starting to use RESTful APIs and web services in different ways. So at the time, we didn’t have words like social graph or any of that stuff, but you could tell that something new was happening and that it was worth paying attention to, and it was exciting. And so I decided I had to get back to San Francisco area, so I would commute so my my kiddos were in grade school at the time. So I would fly up every Sunday night and just stay in Silicon Valley till Thursday morning, Thursday afternoon, and then fly back to silicon, fly back to Austin from Silicon Valley. And that was that was kind of my life for about a little over a year. And I thought, Okay, I just need to find something exciting in web 2.0 and I started to spend some time with venture firms. Spent some time at foundation capital and August capital, and got to learn a little bit more about the business from some really smart people. And also Jim Breyer, who had been one of the investors in motive, was really encouraging, and me learning more. And so at the time he was at Excel, so, you know, I just started paying more attention to it, and got a little bit more interested in it. And just one thing sort of led to another,
4:41
amazing and you were part of, kind of this, this initial cohort of seed investors, right? It wasn’t really a thing as at the time, as you mentioned, you’re sort of the OG of seed investing with a handful of other folks. I mean, did you see the gap in the market and just move to fill it? Do. You forecast that this was going to become what it has become today, almost as its own mini asset class within venture What were you thinking at the time? Yeah.
5:09
So what’s interesting is, ironically, I was doing something that a lot of the founders that I work with do, sometimes without even realizing it. I was living in the future, right? So, and it wasn’t because of some premeditated set of things that I did. So like, when I talk to a lot of founders and I ask them, How did you come up with this great idea? Quite often they feel guilty because they’re like, Well, if you saw what I saw, it would have been obvious to you too. It was really that they were at a vantage point that not everybody was at. And so what I was seeing was I remember meeting F Williams, and he was starting audio at the time, and he was trying to figure out why he would ever want to raise more than a million dollars. And then I remember meeting Kevin Rose, who had just started dig, and he had started it for $1,500 over a weekend, and I remember asking him, Okay, well, are you going to raise this money so that you can spend more on marketing or things like that? He said, Oh, gosh, no, the last thing I need is more traffic. My servers are melting all the time. I need more servers. And so I remember saying, okay, my checkbook is in the car. I’ll be right back. I want to write you check. And he goes, Well, not yet, but eventually they let me, Jay and Kevin did so I saw more and more all these companies really wanted to raise about a million bucks, and in hindsight, you know, the reason is pretty obvious, but you had this shift in how startups were being built. You had lean startups and with the LAMP stack, and you had broadband becoming ubiquitously penetrate. You had open source software, and so you just had the ability to experiment with ideas much faster and cheaper than ever before. And so I was just kind of on the front lines of that trend. And not long after that, I stumbled into Steve Blank, who was talking about customer development. And then one of his proteges is this guy, Eric Reese, who ended up writing the Lean Startup, and he was hanging out with myself and Ann miraco, who was helping Steve teach his class at Stanford. And so all this stuff sort of came together at the same time, knowing these people, trading these ideas, meeting founders whose funding needs were not being addressed by the market, by the capital markets. And so I thought, maybe 500,000 is the new 5 million. And maybe what I should do is start a venture firm that invests 500,000 at a time, rather than 5 million at a time. And right around that time, I met this guy, Josh Koppelman, who was starting First Round Capital. And he would come out from Philly, and we would eat dinner at places like Ilford IO and places like that Palo Alto, whenever he’d come visit. And we’d look at each other and we would say, How is it not patently obvious to everybody that seed investing is going to become a giant thing? It was just it was completely obvious to us that this was going to happen, and that there were just so many opportunities. But at the time, nobody was really noticing it. You know, at the time, people were sort of still coming out of the fetal position after the.com meltdown, and there was a set of assumptions predicated venture. And so a lot of people were just looking for opportunities to invest $5 million at a time. And so Josh and I, for a while, just kind of had free reign. We just anybody wanted to raise a million bucks. There’s a couple three guys you call, and usually we were two of the three people you know, of the handful of half dozen of people that existed doing it.
8:35
And were you writing sort of Angel checks, or what was the original capital base? And how did you get LPS excited about the future, when sometimes that can be a hard thing to do. At
8:46
the time, I was writing quarter to half million dollar checks, and it was interesting, because neither Josh or I, or a lot of the early people had enough money to do a round on our own, and so usually whoever saw it first would call the other guy. And it’s not because we were colluding, it’s because we just needed enough money to make around, even come together, and then started to get some interest, so that there were people in Austin who I’d made money for in the past who expressed an interest in giving me some money to try this out for a few years. So I started doing that, and then I got the attention of some of the some of the more quote, unquote, legitimate LPs. So I got to know Phil Horsley and Horsley bridge right before I raised fund one. And then one day, he reads that I’ve raised fund one in the paper, and he says, Hey, why didn’t you pitch me? What’s, what’s up with that? And I said, Well, I don’t know you well enough yet, and I don’t feel comfortable asking. I’m not sure this is a career for me yet, but it was, it turned out to be great in hindsight, because it gave me a couple years to get to know Him, not under the pressure of fundraising. And so I could just talk to him, and we could, you know, bad ideas, back and forth. And eventually he said, Hey, would you consider. Are taking $15 million from us. And I thought, okay, that’s kind of interesting. Maybe I should really look at that. And so that one thing led to another, and I met a couple of other LPs, weather Gage, you know, Judith, elsia, Tim breamtis and those folks, Brad Hammond, and then University of Chicago. And they were really my first three, kind of legitimate LPs and fun too. And that’s when Anne and I started working together. So Anne was about to finish her PhD program, and we were starting to kind of informally work on things together, and then we kind of decided to make it official after we raised fund two I love that
10:36
he read the announcement in the paper. Yeah, the newspaper, right? That’s pretty good. Do you think it was easier to be successful back then than it is now? I
10:46
think it was, you know, there, there was just no competition, really, right? And so, generally speaking, I think that the best strategy is to not be the best, but to be the only. And so in those days, there wasn’t really the issue was not whether you had to compete for deals. The issue is, most people just didn’t think seed investing was going to matter. They just thought it’s just a, not a category that is valid in the venture landscape and so but, but by 2010 nobody thought that anymore. By 2010 there was a massive rush of capital. You know, I remember a lot of people, the venture firms and in the LP community, would tell me that everybody’s annual meeting in 2009 and 2010 had a slide about what they were going to do about the seed funds. You know, are we? Are we friends with Mike Maples and Josh Koppelman and Steve Anderson? Are we competing with those guys and but everybody had to have an answer to that. And so it went from being kind of this esoteric fringe thing to all of a sudden everybody was talking about it. It was kind of the the topic du jour in the VC community about five years in.
11:55
So I don’t want to jump ahead too much, but in today’s day and age, how do you how do you be a one of one? How do you not compete? How do you find the blue ocean adventure instead of playing in the red ocean?
12:06
Yeah, and it’s, it’s a great question, because several years into it, I was thinking to myself, I feel a little bit like a hypocrite here, because I say, I say to founders, you can’t play the comparison game. You know, startups lose when they play the comparison game, you have to force a choice and not a comparison. So I was like, if everybody is selling apples, don’t be a 10 times better apple. Be the world’s first banana. And not everybody’s gonna want your banana, but all the people who do, you’re the only person who’s gonna have it. And that’s what a successful startup feels like in the early days. That’s what seed funds were like. If you wanted to raise a million dollars, there’s only two or three people you talk to in all of Silicon Valley, and none of them can do it on their own. And so, you know, you just naturally gravitated to the good opportunities you didn’t have to find them. They found you. Now, all of a sudden, I found myself in a world of 2000 seed funds, and you had not just that, but you had accelerators, and you had angels, and you had Angel List syndicates and all this stuff. And so I was like, how do I say to founders, don’t play the comparison game, and then I’m one of 2000 of the usual suspects. You know, it’s not a very, not a very intellectually honest way of showing up in the world. So I modified my strategy over time what I decided to do, and this led a little bit to the pattern breakers book. As I said, What if I got good at helping founders stress test their ideas before they figured the idea out? What if I tried to get to know these people before there’s a startup, before there’s even a pitch of any kind? And so what if, rather than look for deals, I look for the very best people and start to get good at predicting who’s going to be a great founder someday. And so, you know, like in recent times, like 2017 I worked with this guy, Cass Eunice, who started applied intuition, and we spent 14 months together back and forth before applied intuition was a startup, before it was a company. And so more and more often, that’s how I’ve been practicing the business is, I’m trying to predict who’s going to be good in the future, and I try to spend time with those people, and I that’s how I avoid the comparison trap. So like, if you think about it, if let’s say that, that I work with somebody for several months, and I help them stress test their ideas. By the time they decide to start the company, I can say you’re going to pitch 10 firms. You’re going to get to know them all for all of two hours, if you’re lucky, and then you’re going to make a 10 year bet on who you want to work with. We’ve worked with each other for months, maybe years, so I got a question for you. Do you want to work together? And if we do, let’s figure out a way to make that happen, and I’ll probably pay a higher price than I want. You’ll probably get slightly more dilution than you want. But Isn’t life too short? And let’s just abandon the pretenses of posturing. Let’s just try to come up with something that feels fair to both of us, because you can’t. Reconcile a relationship with anyone that you’re going to form in this, you know, deal flow, pitch nonsense, and all you’re going to do is tell a whole bunch of people what your idea is, and is that really what you want to be doing? And trust me, if you raise money, and it seems like the investors are good investors, people are going to feel like they got they missed out on something. They’re going to be even more curious about what you’re doing when the time comes to raise a Series A and so more and more of my projects have been like that, where I’ve known the founder for some time, and we’ve decided already that we kind of want to work together, that we’re simpatico and then kind of leads to us finding, finding a path to doing the seed round. This
15:41
relates to a topic that we spent a lot of time at the firm thinking about, which is, you know, the characteristics that lend themselves well to exceptional, remarkable founders that build great companies. Mike, in your estimation, what are some of those non obvious hallmarks of a great founder that don’t show up on the resume, but you have used as these predictors of, you know, potential success. Yeah,
16:08
it’s tricky. I think that the first thing that you’ve got to do is you’ve got to reach out to people who have a chance of being one of those before you really even know them, before you’ve spent time with them. And we’ve gotten better at that over time. The challenge is that there’s a lot of surface level, obvious ways to identify potential founders. You can say, Okay, I’m going to go find the guy that runs products at figma, or I can GitHub or stripe or whatever. But the problem with that is all the multi stage firms have associates plug in that stuff into their data science platforms, and then you got guys like signal fire and other folks like that. And so you’re not going to find any alpha doing that. You’re going to what you’re going to find is credentialed founders to be who are likely to raise in a hot seed round. And so now you might still want to compete for some of those, but you’re not going to get fundamental insight. The best way I’ve found to get insight is to think about founders that we’ve worked with, where it worked out, or where we wish we’d invested but got there too late. So for example, right now, I’m working with a guy trip Adler on a company called created by humans, and he was the CEO and founder of Scribd back in the late 2000s and you know, he grew that company about 200 million in revenue, and decides he wants to do a new idea based on AI. And we were lucky enough that we found him just as he was transitioning out of Scribd. And one of the things that I do is I’ll do a forensic back test and say, what were the signals that he was about to leave that we could have deduced when he left at the time, that you would have wanted to engage him. You don’t want to engage too early, you don’t want to engage too late. You want to be just right. And so then you realize, okay, well, he posted something on LinkedIn that wasn’t really about Scribd at a certain time, he changed his title at a certain time. He went to some conference he hadn’t gone to and gave a speech at a certain time. So then you say, Huh, that’s interesting. I wonder if that’s true of other folks that you know, would we find that? And so those are the kinds of things I look for, you know. So for example, I think that Alexander Wong of scale AI is really smart and impressive. So what I try to do is I try to say, Okay, what’s the time we would have needed to meet him to have done that investment, and what was knowable then at that precise time about him? How would you have found that out? That I find is a lot better than generic approaches, right? Like anybody can say, hey, Keith Raboy is a good judge of talent, so I’m going to follow who he follows on Twitter or LinkedIn. But everybody’s doing that, and so there’s no there’s no alpha in that. So what, what you need to come up with is a way to to engage in what you know, Howard Marks would call second level, thinking about what makes a good founder to be, and what makes them in the right place at the right time to approach them.
19:07
Mike, a lot of startup advice starts with find a big market, look for the white space, go win share in pattern breakers. You challenge that framework. Why do you think it leads founders astray?
19:18
Yeah, well, first of all, I think it does, because I just noticed it did in my own lived experience, right? So I would Twitter guys. I mean, they were awesome to work with, and really smart, but they weren’t doing a lot of best practices that I could discern, right? They had the fail well all the time, and they, you couldn’t decide who the CEO was going to be. There wasn’t any business model canvas happening. There wasn’t any, you know, any of the stuff that people say you’re supposed to do. They didn’t do any of those things. And then there would be other startups I’d work with where, you know, they did all the stuff you’re supposed to do. You know, they would have been a case study at business school of how to do a startup, except for the they’d fail and and Nick, I don’t know if you’ve seen this in your own practice, but, like I’ve seen time. Time. This isn’t a one time occurrence for me, like time and again. I would see these companies that would pivot where it just seemed that we were just like on a path to disaster, and all of a sudden we find greatness. And, you know, we retroactively talk about how smart we were. And then I saw other companies where they did all the stuff you’re supposed to do, except for they failed. And so I started to say, Okay, I either need to retire before I get exposed for just being lucky, or I need to realize that there’s something deeper in this. And so it relates to your question, Nick, you know, what a lot of people do today is they say startups fail because there’s not a big market. So let’s go find big markets with a lot of white space, and go find underserved customers and unmet needs, and then go build a product that meets those unmet needs. But the problem with that is that when you start a company that way, as a founder, you’re unwittingly buying into a context which is the rules of the market as they’re defined are the rules. And if you’re playing in somebody else’s sandbox, you’re always going to be limited in the upside that you can capture, because that person is defining the rules that govern the competition. And so what I started to realize in pattern breakers was that the great startups avoid the comparison game entirely, and they create something that can’t be reconciled with anything that’s ever come before. You know, nobody when they saw Twitter said, How’s that different from blogs? And nobody when they saw Lyft said, How’s that different from taxis? And so if they ask, How’s that different from x, on some level, you’ve already blown it right. You’ve already not established fundamental enough of a difference. And so what I realized is a startup capitalist is a different kind of capitalist. Normal. Capitalists create value by serving the market, persistent compounding, building competitive moats, but a startup doesn’t have any of those things. So startup creates value by changing the subject. A startup creates value by showing up, seemingly out of nowhere with something radically different, and they disorient the incumbents, because the incumbents don’t know how to act. They don’t know how to react to the different strategy that the startup imposes. They don’t know how to deal with the new rules that get defined ideally, the rules are counter positioned to the old rules that existed. So that’s what I started to notice, is that the companies that seem to win were the ones that were harnessing these inflections to create these radically different, non consensus ideas that happen to be right. I mean, I’ve
22:31
been hosting this show for 11 years now, and I can’t tell you how many people I’ve had on that mentioned pattern recognition. I mean, does this suggest that most VCs are doing this wrong. I try
22:44
really hard not to comment on how other people are doing their jobs. You know, that’s up to them. I guess, the way I see it is that pattern recognition is a useful life skill. It gets us when I brush my teeth in the morning. It’s a shortcut compression heuristic. I don’t need to a debate from a first principles point of view, how to have clean teeth. I can just say, hey, that’s good enough for me. If I want to go from here to Cupertino, I can use a flat map to get from here to Cupertino, but I can’t to get here from Germany to Germany from here, because the the world is a globe, and a straight line isn’t the shortest path on a globe from here, Germany. And so I’m always asking, under what conditions is pattern recognition valuable? And under what conditions is it limiting? And what, what I find is limiting about pattern recognition, is it causes you to get trapped in a current approach, and it causes you to believe that things can’t change. There’s a study that Harvard did a long time ago where they would ask people to watch people in black shirts versus white shirts on a basketball court, and they’d be passing the ball, and they’d say, okay, in 20 seconds, how many times did the people in the white shirts pass the ball to each other, and in the middle of it, a gorilla person, a gorilla suit, walks out in the middle of the frame and starts doing jumping jacks and stands there and then walks out of the frame. Only 50% of the people in the study saw the gorilla because they were focused on watching people pass the ball, and so we we tend to believe that our pattern recognition represents the reality, but it’s just like Charlie Munger used to say, the map is not the territory. The map is a it’s a compression algorithm to decide how to deal with the territory in the moment, given your goals, but, but pattern matching to the extreme can be limiting, because it can cause you to not recognize the better future pattern that could govern the future. And so what the what the best founders do, I find, is similar to what the best scientists do, the best artists do. They come up with a. Different future. They come up with a different pattern. Picasso came up with Cubism. Einstein came up with a general theory of relativity. In that case for Picasso, he was breaking the pattern of what people thought good modern art should look like. And in the case of Einstein, he was breaking the pattern of Newtonian physics as the best explanation for how reality worked. And so what I find the best startup founders do is they create a new pattern that is more matchable to an impending future that’s enabled by inflections and enabled by change events that create new forms of empowerment. Is
25:38
there a balance to coming up with something that’s ahead of its time, but not too far ahead, right? Like, because you have the example of Van Gogh, who never realized his success while alive, because, you know, the audience or the consumers weren’t quite ready for it. That’s
25:53
right. So, like, the what I started to realize with the inflections. So, you know, to kind of put a finer point on it, so an inflection is something new that’s introduced that creates radical forms of empowerment for people. And so like, an example would be the iphone 4s had a GPS chip, and ride sharing depended on the availability of that chip so that you could locate riders and drivers algorithmically. So you could have had the idea for ride sharing before the iphone 4s it wouldn’t have mattered, because you could have implemented a system that embodied the insight. But if you wait too long until after the iphone 4s you know, Uber and Lyft have taken over the market, and so there’s kind of this Goldilocks window of time that’s just right. If you’re too soon, all you have is an idea and a science project. If you’re too late, you’re too obvious. And so the reason I use the term inflection is it’s like a turning point. And so, you know, technology improves all the time on these improvement curves, but I’m not interested in the curve. I’m interested at a point on the curve at which something new can happen that couldn’t exist before. So, for example, it’s costing less and less money for per kilogram to put something into outer space. But the interesting question is not that it’s like, what are the critical thresholds where, once they’re realized, a whole new set of things can happen. You know, when a cost per kilogram gets below a certain level, can you all of a sudden manufacture things in outer space you never could have manufactured before and so you know that’s or when a solar panel cost gets below a certain threshold can you put solar panels in places that you never
27:33
put it before, or cost of inference for instance
27:37
exactly, and so Cost Per megapixel in a smartphone camera, it was always getting better, but Instagram timed it just right. You know, the iPhone cameras in around 2010 were starting to get good. The Wi Fi connections were getting good, was getting better, and so and then filters were getting good. And so all of a sudden you had this convergence of circumstances where you could take better photos, you could filter them in real time, you could upload them faster and share them more easily, and more people had iPhones to view the content so a bunch of these inflections came together at the same time. But you’re always trying to ask, okay, why is this window of time the ideal window for this startup to happen?
28:19
You know, we play such a long game, and in our own portfolio I’ve seen something play out with mixed results, and that’s where the inflection we’re either wrong about the inflection or the inflection hasn’t happened yet, but we’re right about the founder, and the founder is the most deeply obsessed expert in whatever niche or space you could possibly imagine, and then maybe two, three years after we invest, all of a sudden, the inflection happens, and they’re the ones that are ready to pounce. Do you want to see the presence of the inflection before you’re investing? Or how do you think about that when we’re investing over, you know, such long time horizons?
28:58
Yeah. So Nick, I really like this question, because we do this, we do this exercise. We call 100 bagger time capsules. And so I have a list of startups where had you invested the seed round, you would have made more than 100 times your money. And you know, companies like zoom, Airbnb, Stripe, Slack, you know, folks like that, GitHub. And what I try to do is I try to create a time capsule that looks exactly what it looked like at the time. You would have had to decide in the seed round. So like, for example, if you look at zoom at the time, it wasn’t called Zoom. It was called saspy, and he thought it was a consumer product, Joe, every man’s conferencing solution. So now we didn’t see zoom at the time, so we didn’t pass. Fortunately, we didn’t pass. Would have felt even worse, but, but, but what I try to do is I try to say, okay, of the frameworks that we have in pattern breakers, inflections, insights, living in the future, what provided the most signal at the time? At the time, you would have had to decide. Right? Or are we just breathing our own fumes, and our frameworks are intellectually elegant, but not really applicable in the real world. And so we asked that with all of these what I what I concluded, in the case of zoom, was that you wouldn’t have known it from the product. It’s hard to argue you would have known it from the inflections, because I think part of Eric’s genius was not buying into the inflections that everybody else, everybody else was using, kind of the web conferencing standards. And instead, Zoom was trying to solve for every corner case and brute force it with bunch of engineers in China. And so in many ways, Eric’s contrarian Insight was to not leverage those inflections that everybody else was I think that the signal for Eric would have been that he’d been thinking about video conferencing for all the time, for a decade, you know, he’d been at WebEx, which was inside of Cisco. And so what I find is that typically, and I think that it corresponds with what you just said a minute or two ago, Nick, is that the best signal is quite often, is the founder living in a valid future, authentically? And are they obsessed with that future? And do they just think about it, and more than anybody else thinks about it in the world? And are they the ideally suited person to pursue that future? Because, to your point, if that’s if that’s true, they’re going to pick up the inflections along the way. They’re going to come up with insights that other people don’t have. And I don’t have to know what that’s going to be. I don’t have to be attached to knowing how they’ll figure that out. So I’d say whether they’re living in the future is a very powerful early signal that is probably the most durable, repeatable signal to look at. Whereas, if you look at the product, you wouldn’t have said yes, with with Zoom, you wouldn’t have it wasn’t even called Zoom, you wouldn’t have said yes, I don’t think with the inflections, and I don’t think that the Insight would have been clear enough, because he’s trying to sell to consumers. And so I think that it would have been living in the future. Would have been the best signal in that case,
32:05
I think we continue to see examples like that, like a bridge, one of the faster growing health tech startups started as a consumer and took a while to find its way. Mike you’ve backed companies like Twitch, Twitter and Lyft long before they became cultural phenomena. Justin tv, odo Zimride, is there a consistent thread between these three version ones that most investors missed?
32:29
I’d say for the most part, I think they were living in the future. And so, you know, it’s funny, like Justin TV, it starts out as Justin Khan doing a live reality show of his life on the internet. And so I met him in a coffee shop. He comes in with a backpack with wires coming out of it, and he’s got a baseball cap and a camera on it, and he walks up to me and he says, I’m I’m doing a live reality show my life. He turns the laptop around, facing me, and I’m on his laptop because his camera’s looking at me from his baseball hat and and he’s like, Yeah, you’re on my show now. And I’m like, Justin, come on. This is stupid. This isn’t even what reality TV is. You know, reality TV, you film the whole week, and you condense it down, nobody wants to watch you. 24/7 nobody wants to watch anybody. 24/7 and he’s like, you know, you’re supposed to be a seed investor. Why are you, know, why are you shitting on my idea? And I was like, well, it’s terrible idea, but, like, how does it even work? How are you how are you even doing this live stream? And he says, Well, we have this genius on our team. His name’s Kyle vote, and he’s connected DVD o cellular with internet software, so I can be anywhere that there’s cellular reception, and I can grab the video and I can translate it to internet live streaming. I thought, huh, that’s kind of interesting. And then I went home that night, and I looked up a little bit more, and I the last company that Justin had started was with Emmet Scheer. It was a calendar company called Kiko, and Google had decided to come up with Google Calendar, and so they decided they’re out of business. We need to sell the company. So they sold the company on eBay for $250,000 and I didn’t, I didn’t even know you could sell a company on eBay, you know, but that’s what they had done. And I thought, you know, these are my kind of guys, you know, I think these guys would be fun to get in trouble with. Now, back to living in the future. What I realize now is that Justin wanted to be internet famous before there was even a word for influencer. And he was really building the thing that he wanted for himself. And he was trying to push the limits of, you know, how a normal person could be an internet celebrity. And so he had really good instincts about what needed to be built. And so he actually was living in a valid future. Now he needed to pivot his his implementation was off and his audience was off. You know, they ended up pivoting the implementation to have gaming features, and they ended up focusing on gaming audiences, and then Twitch was born. But, you know, he was pursuing a future in. Differentiated way. You know the Zimride guys. The term Zimride came from this ride sharing service that Logan had observed in Zimbabwe, and so he wanted to do a ride share that was similar to the Zimbabwe ride share that he’d seen. And then you had John Zimmer, who was studying hospitality when he was getting his MBA at Cornell. And so those guys were also living in the future, right? They were, they pivoted the idea to lift obviously, but they were, they were exploring the terrain of the future in a very authentic, passionate way. At the time,
35:33
Mike talk a bit about specificity as a superpower in startups. You’ve written about this. You know? How can founders demonstrate it early on in their journey. Yeah.
35:44
So, so I started to see this happen a lot. Somebody would come in and they would pitch me a very conceptual, super high level pitch, you know, companies are going to roll out LLM based apps, and they’re going to want visibility and control their LLM apps. And I’m like, Okay, that sounds good. You know, conceptually, it’s hard for me to disagree that that would be true. Or they would say, you know, mental health is a crisis among teenagers we need to solve that. I’m building a mental health app to solve it. And so what I would, what I would do is I’d say, Okay, I’m, I’m with you so far. But, but specificity. You know, there’s a guy, I Hayakawa, who was a, I think he was in the Senate in California, and he talked about this hierarchy of abstraction. It’s like a ladder. So at the top, the top of the ladder is just like a concept, like, I’ll make something up novels. And at the bottom, you know, you can, then you can go down to the to the fact that it could be a book, or it could be fiction novel, or it could be, you know, the Count of Monte Cristo, and so, like, what a lot of people will do is they’ll say something, like, information should be free. And then you say, Okay, I’m, I’m willing to indulge that. But like, let’s, let’s go down a level. Do you think novels should be free? Here’s my copy of the count of Maya Christo. Do you think I should have paid the author for that copy? You think I should have paid the publisher? Do you think that should just be given to me for free, because it’s, isn’t that a form of information? And so let’s talk about startups. Then company comes in and says, Okay, I do LLM visibility and control for AI apps. The first question that I’ll ask them is, that sounds great. Can you tell me a specific person who has that problem? What’s their name? And they’ll say, Okay, well, you know retail CIOs, I’ll say, No, I want to know the guy’s name, his exact name. So like, when I was at Tiffany, when I was a product manager, we helped people roll out SAP, and one of the people that we served as a customer is this guy named Oscar clavins at NOVA gas. And we’d argue about features on our product team. And I’d say, has anybody asked Oscar clavins what he thinks about this feature? And usually No, right? I had his a picture of him on my desk, and I’d say, Well, why don’t we just call him right now? So we put him on the speaker phone. We call Oscar clavins Half the time. The stuff that we were debating didn’t even matter to Oscar clavins, right? He was like, these aren’t the droids you’re looking for, right? This is your opinion about what the problem is. But, like, you know, as long as you care about what I care about, here’s the real problem I want to solve that you haven’t solved yet. And so, so that’s the the thing that I asked next. So, so the first thing is, name me a specific person with a specific problem that you solve with this, and I want to know their name. Who is your Oscar klavins, and you could pick anybody you want, right? It’s your company, your startup. You could pick the best single example in the world of that person. And so then the next question that I ask is, what have they done so far to try to solve the problem that you solve, like, what specifically did they try? And then the then, the related question is, Why did it not work when they tried that thing? And so, why is it still a problem? And so, why? Why do I care about that? Well, Product Market Fit answers a specific question, what can we uniquely offer that people are desperate for? And if somebody’s desperate for what you do, they should have tried to solve it already. You know, it’s hard to argue somebody’s desperate to solve a problem they don’t know exists, and it’s hard to argue that somebody’s desperate to solve the problem they haven’t attempted to solve. And so, right, so, so I’m like, Okay, you get to have your example. And, you know, I don’t say it in a in a confrontational way. I’m like, Look, I really do want to hear the story of the best example of this, because I get a chance to learn something here. But like a great founder who’s obsessed with the future they’re pursuing, you know, if you’d asked Eric at zoom that, you would have gotten a clear answer, yeah. If you’d asked Evan Williams when he was doing audio that question, you would have got if you’d asked the Zimride guys, if you’d asked now, even though they all pivoted, you would have gotten very specific examples of that, because they were obsessed with the future that they were pursuing, and they were going very far down the idea maze. And the further down the idea may, as you go, the more specificity you’re going to have. I find specificity to be really valuable in many cases. So I’ll give you another example. And I hope I don’t get political here, but like, a lot of people love Elon Musk, what he’s doing with Doge, a lot of people hate what he’s doing with Doge. And so if, let’s say somebody hates what he’s doing with Doge, they might say Elon is, uh, causing a bunch of research to get shut down that’s really valuable. And I’ll say to them, okay, I’m willing to buy that premise. Can you give me an example of a specific scientist who has specifically valuable research that got shut down because of Doge and like, I guarantee you 99% of people won’t be able to answer that question. And so what you realize is that there, and by the way, I could say Doge is the best thing in the world, and I should be held to the same standard. Can you give me a specific example of fraud that Doge found, specific organization, specific people, specific amount of money, because if you can’t name one example, how can you make the general case for it? You shouldn’t really have an opinion. You’re not qualified to have an opinion, right? All you’re doing is you’re just you’re just parroting talking points or slogans. And like a lot of startups, they kind of have this quality to them, unfortunately, where it sounds like a Hollywood script, Uber for laundry, Pinterest for E commerce or whatever, and they’re conceptualizing. They’re trying to think of a startup, rather than provide specific value in a specific way to a specifically desperate person. Part of where I learned this from was from Tim Ferriss. So when, no kidding, yeah. So when Tim Ferriss wrote The Four Hour Work Week, a lot of people don’t know this, but he wrote it for one specific person, and he was he would run it by this one specific person above all other people. And what I learned from Tim was that it’s your specificity that allows you to capture the generality by solving a specific problem for a specific desperate person in a specific way, you tap into what’s universal about that person, and then it becomes universally applicable to a lot of people. The problem that most people have when they don’t do that, is they have a market with a million non desperate people. And that’s not a good startup market, right? It’s not what you want. That’s a $0 market. I
42:52
mean, there’s a lot of founders out there. They can’t even articulate the ICP, like here’s but they they can’t get down to the level of Steve or or whoever your example was, you know, before, from Tivoli, yeah.
43:04
And by the way, this isn’t just about founders. I find this true in general. I find that specificity is a is a superpower in life. And and you know, like, what most people will do is, like, if somebody says, I think Elon’s doing a bad job with Doge, they’ll say, Oh, well, you know, the amount of waste in our trillions of dollars of debt is insane. And you know, it’s just people talking past each other with their general talking points, and you just don’t get to any ground truth at all about the subject matter. Well,
43:34
it trains the wrong narratives and behaviors for people too. They they learn to get lost in sort of distraction instead of finding the truth
43:43
that’s right. And VCs do make, make the same mistake, you know, they get caught up in who’s gonna also be in the Syndicate, or they get caught up in what space is hot, or, you know, is this on my thesis? Or, you know, that kind of stuff. And a lot of times they themselves don’t get specific enough about the specific reasons that they think this company will get product market fit.
44:06
Well, the nice thing about the great ones with the founders is the you know, the more you’re asking the five whys, and the deeper you’re going down in the layers, the more excited they often get. You know, they’re like, leaning in. They just they they care that you care and like, want to share it all. Yeah,
44:23
usually, usually the really good ones, when I start to get specific in the questions, I struggle to keep up with them, yeah, because they just take it and run with it and like, they they’ve thought about 10 important questions I didn’t even know were important questions. Or they’ll, like my partner Anne, does this really well. She’ll send out a sample memo after a meeting where she’s impressed with the founder, and she’ll say, am I thinking about this the right way? This is the memo I’m thinking about putting together. And quite often, the very best founders will say in certain parts of it. You know, I hear what you’re saying here, Anne, but like you’re just not thinking. About it the right way. This is the way to think about it, and we actually want that right we don’t want them to just reflexively agree with us. We want to believe that they’re finding some kind of a deeper truth that’s hard for most people to ascertain.
45:13
Mike talk a little bit about narrative design, and, you know, founders sort of articulating the story and how to really spark transformation at the early stage. Yeah,
45:23
so the, you know, storytelling has gotten really interesting to me over the years. So there’s a there’s this woman named Nancy Duarte who runs a storytelling sort of communication firm, and she’s helped some really successful people, you know, Mark Benioff with Salesforce, and helped Al Gore do the inconvenient truth movie back in the day, and so I spent a little bit of time with her and read a bunch of her books. And what you realize is that stories have been in existence before even the written word, and so stories would get passed between generations, and stories are not just about messaging. So like a story starts out, I mean, let’s use Star Wars as an example, because probably everybody knows Star Wars, right? So Star Wars starts out with Luke, who’s the hero, and he’s on this dusty plant of tattooing, and he’s bored out of his mind. And then all of a sudden, there’s this call to adventure. A mentor shows up, Obi one, and he says, We got to go rescue the princess. You saw it yourself. R2, d2, hologram. Let’s go. Luke says, Hey, I can’t do that. I’ve got, I’ve got chores at the at the farm with Aunt brew and Uncle Owen. So he resists the call to adventure. And then he goes back to the farm and is burned down. He says, Okay, now I got nothing left here. I’m it’s go time. Let’s go. Let’s go take on the Empire. So he goes with Obi Wan, and Obi Wan goes to the Millennium Falcon. They meet Han Solo, Chewbacca, you know, co conspirators. And then they blow up. The Death Star emerged, transformed. And then, you know, they even get medals at the end. And so a great story starts out with a hero, and it describes the world that is, and it describes the world that is in a mundane way. So like Lyft, the world that is was getting a taxi in San Francisco sucks. It’s expensive. They never come. You can’t get one. You can’t rely on them getting you somewhere in time. So your alternative is to park. It’s hard to find parking. It’s expensive. People break into your car. And then the what’s interesting is the startup founder is not the hero. Your role is to be Obi Wan, not Luke. The people that you’re trying to persuade are Luke, and you’re trying to make them heroes in their own hero’s journey. And so in Star Wars, The tool was the lightsaber. The insight with the magic was the force. In the case of Lyft, the tool was the ride sharing app. The insight was that you could share unused car space the way Airbnb let you share unused housing space. But it’s important, like when you’re engaging early customers, early believers, you have to not just show them the product for what it is. You have to, you have to also communicate the insight, because the early customers have every reason to resist the call to adventure. You know, why do I want to go with this startup? Why do I want to stick my neck out when it’s 80% likely go out of business. Why would I take that risk? And so I have to believe that I have a credible chance of succeeding in my journey. And it’s the tool and the insight and the magic that gives the hero a credible chance to overcome the demons that are going to prevent him from self actualizing in this future better world. This was why, by the way, the mustache for Lyft was genius. Because, you know, it’s scary to get in a stranger’s car, but now, all of a sudden, you see all these cars going through San Francisco with these pink mustaches. And people are in these sidewalk cafes saying, Hey, what’s up with these cars the mustaches? Oh, haven’t you heard it’s this new thing called lift. You know, you tap this app, you get a ride. They show up, they fist bump you, they take you somewhere. And so what I realized is that the great founders are storytellers. They they they say, hey, the future is not a new and improved version of the present. The future is a radically different world that could be. And I’m going to help you get to that world that could be. And we’re going to co create the future together. So the founders co create the future with their early believers, and it’s best to think of their early believers as CO conspirators in creating that different future. So like, what I find is that people don’t move to a different future for practical reasons. They move for esthetic reasons. They move because they can’t unsee this future that the founder is portraying and corresponding to that is most people aren’t going to like what the founder is doing. Most people are going to dislike the new insight, because people don’t like it when you mess with their heads. They don’t like to change very often. And so you got to find that subset of people in this world who are prepared to believe what you believe,
49:58
and no Darth Vader. In your anecdote there, huh? Well, he’s slaying the drag
50:03
guy. Yeah, he’s the bad guy that you got to vanquish, right? That’s right, that’s good. And you got to have an enemy, right? You got to have somebody that represents everything that’s wrong. You know, like Benioff was genius about this in the early days of Salesforce, right? He says no software, and by that, he was really saying that enterprise on prem software was intellectually bankrupt, that it was expensive and rickety and hard to deploy and hard to manage, and you always had to upgrade it. And, you know, wouldn’t it be better if it was centrally managed in the cloud and easy? And so, you know, he was creating an enemy, you know, a sense of grievance against the way that things are.
50:39
So let’s talk about AI for a minute. What are founders getting wrong that you’re you’re observing right now with AI? Well,
50:48
I don’t know about founders. I guess what I see in a lot of AI ideas, well, what I’m seeing in a lot of AI ideas is powerful inflections, not powerful insights. So I’ll see a pitch, and I’ll say, I can totally see why I’d want that product. I can see why I would use it today. Fact I am going to use it. But then I say, Okay, why aren’t there going to be 10 just like it? And quite often, I can’t answer that. Quite often there will be 10 just like it. Quite often there are 10 just like it. And so in that kind of a situation, if they don’t have some proprietary distribution advantage, it’s hard to support the idea that this is the one that’s going to win. What you know, why this one and not the dozen others. So I’ve struggled to find AI ideas that embody both inflections and insights. They happen from time to time, right? I like, I like our investment in applied intuition, right, which is around autonomous vehicle simulation software. Or I like our investment around utia, which sells legal software, but to the chief legal officer in corporations, rather than to Attorneys at Law firms. I like our investment in smarter dx, but in those cases, usually the founder has very deep, multi disciplinary knowledge. They don’t just know a lot about AI, but they know a lot about the specific ways that specific people in that field are dealing with problems that they’re desperate to solve. It has to be something that Sam Altman can’t just announce at the next open AI Demo Day, right? It’s got to be something, you know, if you’re autonomous vehicle simulation software for Porsche, like you have to get very deeply embedded in Porsche’s design process and how they built cars. And so I’m looking more for things like that. And, you know, I’m also believing that the stage is set for some amazing consumer products, other than just the gpts. Haven’t seen as many of those just yet, but hope, hoping for the best. What
52:50
do you what do you think feels different about this wave and this paradigm shift, versus, versus some others that you’ve gone through
52:57
so many you know, I like to say that there’s inflections, but then sometimes you have something even bigger, which I call a sea change. So when I was young, IBM PC and the apple two came out, and the sea change was what I would call mass computation. And so you know, computers before then, were expensive. You tried to keep the mainframe running. Software was what you gave away to make the mainframe run, because it was expensive. Now, all of a sudden, computers were becoming increasingly free, and you had a computer on every desk in every home. What was the scarce, valuable resource? It was software. And it’s interesting. I have a as part of my obsession with these 100 bagger startups. I also have a taxonomy of business models, and as best as I can tell, there’s about 13 business models in all of human history, and most of them have been around since 600 BC, Mesopotamia, you know, like forever ago. The newest one that I’m aware of is over 200 years old. And so one of the things that I noticed is, when you have a sea change, there’s a migration of attractive business models. And so in the early days of the PC, you went from leasing mainframes and not owning them and giving software away to now, all of a sudden, you charge software licensing fee for the software. You charge, you know, you buy the computers outright. And you know, now, all of a sudden, the whole industry is different. It goes from being vertically integrated main integrated, mainframe centric, to horizontally integrated, where there’s a chip supplier and a PC company and a operating system and apps and all that other stuff. So but it’s important to realize that before the microprocessor, there were no software licensing, important software companies. They didn’t happen. But now all of a sudden, you had Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, all these companies. But what’s interesting is, with the internet, I can’t think of a single meaningful software licensing company that started after 1990 by 1990 Microsoft would run everybody out of business who started one of those, they’d bundle it into the operating system. They’d compete. With them. But now all of a sudden, you had the internet, and it became attractive now to have advertising business models, because you could aggregate the attention of a lot of people connected. It became attractive to have software as a service and subscriptions. You couldn’t have done that before the internet, but now all of a sudden, you could have one copy of the software running, and you could update it once to everybody, and you could have everybody buy a subscription. And so everything changed. So back to the AIC change. All My instincts tell me that there will be a migration of attractive business models from the current set of the internet centric to a new set of ai centric. So just like you know, just like the PC to mass computation and mass connectivity meant a shift from software licensing and per processor charges to SaaS and ads, I believe that we’ll see a migration of attractive business models, away from ads and away from SaaS to possibly charging for the labor, which is currently not thought to be scalable, but it’s like if you look at it through the lens of a sea change, the technology offers new forms of empowerment that make all of a sudden a new set of business models powerfully attractive that weren’t powerfully attractive before.
56:28
Do you have predictions about what some of those business models may be that can be successful beyond labor? I
56:36
have a few ideas, and I’m reluctant to say them all, but because I think that’s part of the part of the interesting question is, you know, what is the from to, you know, with the internet, you you eventually saw there’s a from two, you got 13 business models, and you got some that are more attractive in mass competition, and then some that become more relatively attractive in mass connectivity. And then I believe there’ll be some that become relatively attractive in mass cognition, which is AI, and so that’s what I’ve been focusing on. Now you could you could say, Okay, if cognition is becoming asymptotically free the way communication did with the internet, the way the computation did with the microprocessor, you might say, What business models are characterized by friction due to cognition being expensive, and where might if it went from being expensive and rare to abundant and free, how might the business model change? That’s kind of the question I’m asking, and that’s why I think that the discussion about or the incumbents having an advantage versus the startups is wrong minded. The incumbents do have the advantage when they have the incumbency. But what you want is business models that are counter positioned, right? So, like, Google was counter position to Microsoft. Microsoft couldn’t just bundle something in the OS and make Google irrelevant. You know, they had a totally different way of going to market. So that’s the thing I look
58:04
for here. So from pattern breakers to model unlocks, yeah,
58:08
and you know it would be, this is why sea changes are so valuable and interesting and compelling, is that you get a chance to have this sea change of value capture and different types of business models. And then this is where the upstarts have the advantage, because they can, they can start with a beginner’s mind and not not deal with the legacy of what they’ve already had. A
58:28
few quick wrap ups here. Mike, if we could feature anyone here on the show, who do you think we should interview, and what topic would you like to hear them speak about?
58:36
Let’s see. And some of these folks may have been on before. Yeah. If you had, if you had Roger before. Roger Arenberg, yes, okay, Andy Radcliffe,
58:47
not Andy. We haven’t had Andy yet.
58:49
Okay, so I would, I’d recommend that you consider Andy Radcliffe, one of the co founders of benchmark, invented the term product market fit. And so I’d say that that makes him pretty qualified, perfect
59:01
Mike, what book, article or video would you recommend to listeners? That’s
59:05
a good question. Lately I’ve been, I’ve been reading this book that is a little bit Zen, like it’s called, bring me the rhinoceros. And it’s about, it’s kind of about how to, kind of how to get the most out of life, and so it’s written by this guy named John Tarrant, T, A R, R, A N T. So like, Why do I like this book? So a lot of people will ask, what’s a playbook that I can follow to become a great founder, to build a great startup? And what I’ve come to believe is that there are no playbooks. There are no recipes like because breakthroughs, by definition, have been they haven’t been discovered yet. So there can’t be, there can’t be a checklist for something that hasn’t happened, right? Like you can, you can have a recipe for baking a cake because it’s been baked by somebody. But. You’re not inventing something. In that case, you’re just implementing the best practice. And so then you say, Okay, well, if there’s no recipe for coming up with a breakthrough, what’s the right mindset? I think that the right mindset is to become the type of person that notices breakthrough opportunities, and so the type of person that notices breakthrough opportunities is someone who lives in the future, someone who pursues something that they’re obsessed by for its own sake, not for the ROI of doing it. And it’s someone who is awake to the possibility of being surprised always, because most people are trying to get through the to do’s of the day, most people the Muse knocks multiple times on the side door, but we don’t answer it because we’re trying to deal with the stuff that’s in front of us. And you know, the other the other types of books that I like are things like the art of thought by Graham Wallace, and it’s a book where he studied Einstein and Da Vinci and Picasso and all these people who came up with breakthroughs. And try to understand, are there any common traits of breakthrough thinkers? And what you what you realize is that there are and and most of them, they would have their ideas, and it would seem like a flash of insight. You know, Newton the apple falls on his head, and it’s like it discovers gravity, or Einstein has the happy thought while he’s on a train and he notices the clock moving away in the distance. Archimedes says, Eureka, I have found it about displacement. Jumps out of a hot tub start naked, running through the town saying, Eureka, I found it. But it turns out that or Louis Pasteur, right, who is even famous for getting lucky in his discoveries, and had the famous saying that chance favors the prepared mind. And what you realize that chance favoring the prepared mind isn’t about luck or about some people being luckier than other people. What you realize is that luck visits all of us. It’s like in the ambient atmosphere, but most of us just aren’t awake enough to the possibility that we’re being visited by the muse to really look, to really notice. Pasteur was saying that prepared minds are more likely to be lucky, because they’re thinking originally obsessively about a new problem all the time. Right? Why did gravity occur to Newton when the apple hit his head? It was because he was thinking about it all the time, and all of a sudden it came together in a seeming flash of insight. And so I like books like that, the art of thought. Bring me the rhinoceros, you know, one that’s a little more Zen, like, is Zen in The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert persig. Another, yeah. I like, have
1:02:51
you read the creative act by Rick Rubin? By chance? Yeah. I like.
1:02:55
So when I was working on pattern breakers, I was gonna have a whole section on creative process of breakthrough founders, and I just thought, I’m going to open up a can of worms here. You know, I’m not a cognitive scientist, and people are going to doubt my credentials. Whereas I felt like I could say I’ve seen 10s of 1000s of startups. I’m an expert at zero to one. I’ve got a track record all this other stuff, but I but in the process of the stuff that was on the cutting room floor, I probably read 50 books on creativity and where it comes from and why some people seem to be more creative consistently than others.
1:03:31
Love it. Speaking of which, do you have any habits, tactics or behaviors that are a force multiplier? I think
1:03:37
that the thing that I’ve tried to do is I try to keep a journal, and apart from the things that people normally write in their journals, I also have an entry for what surprised me today. And so I think that being surprised is a muscle that you can develop. And if you, if if you, if you aren’t surprised, you’re not engaging in the wonder of the world. And so every day you know as a gift that you’re you’re not going to get that day back. And so part of the magic of the time that you have is the surprises you encounter. And so like every day, I wake up thinking, Boy, I sure hope I find a surprise today. And if you’re spending your time well with good people on interesting topics. That should be an easy bar, but you’d be surprised, like most people, if I ask them what was the biggest surprise you encountered the last week, they don’t have a good answer, and I think that’s a real tragedy.
1:04:34
And finally, here Mike, what’s the best way for listeners to connect with you and follow along with floodgate?
1:04:39
Yeah, probably the best way. So I’m on x at m2 Jr, and I also have a sub stack called pattern breakers. Dot, sub stack.com, those are probably the best ways. And then floodgate, you know, www.floodgate.com, is probably the best ways.
1:04:54
Well, he is Mike Maples, Jr, the book is pattern breakers. Mike, thanks so much for doing this as long. Overdue, and I’m so glad I finally had a chance to get you for a captive audience, because you’re the best and can’t wait to do it again. All
1:05:07
right. Well, thanks, Nick, I appreciate it. Thanks for taking the time. Thank you, sir.
1:05:17
All right, that’ll wrap up today’s interview. If you enjoyed the episode or a previous one, let the guests know about it. Share your thoughts on social or shoot them an email. Let them know what particularly resonated with you. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that some of the smartest folks in venture are willing to take the time and share their insights with us. If you feel the same, a compliment goes a long way. Okay, that’s a wrap for today until next time, remember to over, prepare, choose carefully and invest confidently. Thanks so much for listening.
