Mike Maples
Co-founder and partner at Floodgate, early-stage investor and author of Pattern Breakers
Where to hear and read about Mike Maples1 episode or test
Mike Maples Jr. is co-founder and partner at Floodgate, one of the earliest seed-stage firms, and author of Pattern Breakers. The most useful thing to learn from him is that startups win by proposing a radically different future built on an inflection, a non-consensus insight and a founder who fits that future, not by being a better version of the present.
If you're living in the future and you notice what's missing, your intuition about what to build is far more likely to be right.
Pattern Breakers: How to find a breakthrough startup idea | Mike Maples, Jr. (Partner at Floodgate)
Mike Maples: the story and the lessons
1Mike Maples and the research behind Pattern Breakers
Maples has backed breakout startups from the seed stage for over 20 years. Floodgate was founded more than 20 years ago and was one of the earliest seed-stage firms. His early bets include Twitter, Lyft, Twitch, Okta, Rappi and Applied Intuition, and he has made the Forbes Midas list eight times.
His research rests on two decades of seed-stage deal flow.
A Twitch windfall he barely noticed made him doubt best practices. Twitch sold to Amazon for $970 million and returned about 85 times his money. He had forgotten he owned the shares: Justin.tv split into Socialcam and Twitch, and he assumed the Socialcam sale was the end of it.
His LPs told him not to restate the financials and just send the money. Some sent champagne. He wondered whether he should retire before being exposed as lucky, then went looking for what else explained the results.
About 80% of his exit profits came from pivots, not textbook process. The winners did not follow popular best practices, and he never saw the Twitter team use the business model canvas.
Founders who shut down had done customer development, used the canvas and hired well. They would have made a Harvard Business School case study, except they failed.
He keeps the original pitch decks to see what was knowable at the time. His database covers startups where a first check would have returned over 100 times, including the early decks of Air Bed and Breakfast and Pinterest, some of which he passed on.
Founders tend to remember knowing more than they did, so the decks show what was actually visible before success.
He never asks founders 'why were you successful?'. That question makes founders recite their preferred reasons. He asks about specific changes instead, such as why a product's name changed between the seed deck and today.
He gleans facts over time in casual talks, not in a conference-room interview, and promises not to share what founders want kept private.
2How Mike Maples tests a startup idea
Maples says a startup cannot win by being better than incumbents. Business is never a fair fight. Incumbents start with the advantage, and 'better' only extends the present. Nobody riding Lyft asked how it differed from a taxi, so riders faced a choice, not a comparison.
Startups have no resources and cannot execute well, so he wants them to win where better doesn't matter. His line: 'You want to force a choice and not a comparison.'
He looks for three elements: inflection, insight and founder-future fit. He compares them to David and Goliath: the rock is the inflection and the slingshot is the insight. Implementation is not on the list, because the first implementation is often wrong.
A correct insight lets the founder steer the product to product-market fit, and the underlying forces make that effort worth it.
He builds on an external inflection, not a gap in a big market. An inflection is an outside turning point, such as new technology, a regulation change or a shift in belief, that makes a new empowerment possible. Lyft rode the iPhone 4S GPS chip, and Instagram rode better cameras, Wi-Fi and upload speeds. Moore's law is a steady curve, not an inflection.
Analyzing big markets for unmet needs buys into the market definition incumbents already set. He says he would rather have inflection and insight and pivot the product than have a clear product without them.
He stress tests an inflection with three questions. What is the specific new thing? Who does it empower, and how? Under what conditions will that empowerment be realized? For Lyft the conditions were that people would share location, GPS chips would not be banned and Apple would keep shipping them.
Telemedicine in COVID was a regulatory inflection, and the open question was whether the old laws would return after shelter-in-place ended. Nuclear power shows a power can be regulated away.
He wants an insight that is non-consensus and right. The insight comes from the founders, as Lyft's did with 'Airbnb for cars'. The best ones draw hostility or a shrug from most people while a few fall irrationally in love.
He calls contrarian another form of conformity, because it is still defined against someone else. Visionaries have no special binoculars; they get their hands dirty at the cutting edge.
3What Maples looks for in founders and customers
Maples matches founders to the specific future they are building. Fit asks who knows the most about the future, who is most intrinsically motivated, and who keeps the best company in that ecosystem. Applied Intuition's founders came from Detroit car companies, Waymo and Google Maps, so a car CEO could trust them.
There is no best founder profile. Young founders like Andreessen with Mosaic won with a beginner's mind, while enterprise sales favor proven operators like Okta's Todd McKinnon from Salesforce.
He asks 'Is this from the future?' of every founder. Good ideas come from futures that already exist for a few people. A pitch that says 'mental health is a huge problem' gives no right to an opinion; the question is which part of the future the founder has lived in.
Maddie Hall's early ideas, like laser tag, were weak. After a year as Sam Altman's chief of staff she found genetically engineered trees and started Living Carbon, marrying the inflections with the need.
He pushes founders to build for lighthouse customers already living ahead. Three routes: build what you are missing, as Zuckerberg, Wozniak and Gates did; serve a lighthouse customer you know well; or leave the present on purpose. The sign is how tech-forward the customer is.
At Silicon Graphics he worked with Industrial Light & Magic, not ordinary studios.
He wants experiments that can surprise the founder. Scott Cook of Intuit asked teams for their three biggest surprises, and concluded teams that named none wanted validation, not truth. Chegg tested fake rental prices from $35 up to $75 and found students would pay far more than $35.
Chegg's test site returned a 404 at the cart, but the demand data was already collected. Students paid more because they give the book back anyway.
He diagnoses a lukewarm customer as wrong insight, implementation or customer. Okta first built cloud systems management and heard 'meh'. Customers said identity management was their top priority, so the insight held and the product changed.
On-prem buyers who wanted other things were not living in the future, so their opinions were irrelevant.
He wants customers desperate enough to accept a half-ripe product. A customer with another way to solve the problem will not risk a startup. His image: nobody can be a ten times better apple, so be the first banana and skip the apple lovers.
Nobody is neutral about the Tesla Cybertruck: people hate it or cannot imagine a world without it.
4How Maples says founders move people: movements and stories
Maples tells founders to position against the incumbent's strength without attacking it. Airbnb said 'live like a local' instead of 'hotels suck', which turned the Four Seasons' consistent experience into something it must apologize for. Tesla's mission is to accelerate the transition to sustainable energy, not to beat Ford or Toyota.
He agrees this matches Hamilton Helmer's counter-positioning. Early customers, hires and investors join for belief and aesthetics, not pragmatism.
He builds movements from a minority's grievance, not a marketing plan. A movement forces a choice: you either believe or you don't. Markets form as movements accumulate, and what was heresy becomes conventional wisdom.
Floodgate treated seed investing as a movement and needed respected LPs, such as Phil Horsley and Dave Swensen, to believe in it.
He casts the customer as Luke and the founder as Obi-Wan. Use the hero's journey: the world that is, a call to adventure, a tool and magic that make the hero credible, and co-conspirators. Lyft's pink mustache honored that people resist the call of getting into a stranger's car.
Tailor the story to each audience, since investors, customers and employees each have a different idea of heroism. Jobs's iPhone launch toggled between what is and what could be. His line: 'Your job as the founder is to be Obi-Wan, not Luke.'
He wants a seed deck with what you do, the insight, then proof. Slide one says what you do as if the reader knows nothing, such as 'we let you rent an extra room in your house'. Slide two states the non-obvious insight, and slide three gives proof points.
For Floodgate's first fund, the insight slide said $500,000 is the new $5 million thanks to lean startups, and he told LPs that if they disagreed the rest wouldn't matter. Founders can return to the insight slide when investors raise competitors or objections.
He warns against a 'Franken deck' built from non-believers' objections. Founders collect advice from 20 people, many of whom don't believe in the different future, then add a slide for every objection. That hides the message from the one investor ready to believe.
He says it's fine if most investors dislike the idea; find the ones prepared to move with you and make sure they know exactly why.
5Maples on disagreeableness, small bets and his own misses
Maples argues that a startup is a disagreeable act by nature. Founders must break free of the conformity trap and risk their place in the social hierarchy because the mission matters more than fitting in. He compares them to Jonathan Livingston Seagull, banished by the flock.
Before winning, people say the idea is stupid. After winning, they say you cheated or are too powerful. He calls criticism after success part of the job description.
He wants founders who listen, understand, then decide for themselves. Maples advised Ev Williams not to raise much money, since startups spend whatever they raise within 18 months. He calls it Mike's Law. Williams agreed it sounded right, raised a lot anyway, and it worked.
He says he used to joke that his whole job was to give Williams advice that he ignored.
He says startups beat big companies through chaos, not better execution. A startup wins by proposing a radically different future, disorienting the incumbent and moving people there. Every startup he has seen was wild on the inside.
He doesn't mean people shouldn't get things done, only that execution is not the source of the win. He cites a friend's line: 'Make your mess your message.'
He favors small bets that can fail often. Airbnb began as a site built to pay rent during a design conference, not as the real startup. Early bets should be small enough that founders stay playful and unattached to success.
Inside large companies he wants pattern-breaking projects run as hidden, autonomous units under a maverick, like Skunkworks, the IBM PC and the iPhone. Vinod Khosla's idea is to put about 10% of profits into likely failures with asymmetric upside.
He passed on Airbnb after a messy pitch and now calls it a lesson. The meeting with Brian Chesky was a mess, with cereal boxes everywhere and a demo that would not run. He was offered a chance to invest at about a $1.5 million valuation and guesses he would have made roughly 6,000 times his money.
He passed because nobody would stay in a stranger's house. His lesson: a good or bad presentation says nothing about whether to invest, so stay awake to what the company could become. That miss made him ready to believe in Zimride, which became Lyft.
He says 'do your best' is his guiding motto. His father meant honoring the gift of time, not being the best. When Maples skipped effort on a throwaway English test, his father said it didn't sound like his best.
Showing up as your best self means you stop copying and comparing, and compare yourself only to perfection.
Pattern Breakers: How to find a breakthrough startup idea | Mike Maples, Jr. (Partner at Floodgate)
Breakthrough startups combine an inflection, a non-consensus insight and a founder who fits that future, then act differently through movements, storytelling and healthy disagreeableness. The lessons come from Maples' database of seed-stage pitch decks and founder histories behind Twitter, Lyft, Twitch, Okta and Applied Intuition, where 80% of his exit profits came from pivots.
Maples has backed breakout startups from the seed stage for over 20 years. Floodgate was founded more than 20 years ago and was one of the earliest seed-stage firms. His early bets include Twitter, Lyft, Twitch, Okta, Rappi and Applied Intuition, and he has made the Forbes Midas list eight times.
His research rests on two decades of seed-stage deal flow.
A Twitch windfall he barely noticed made him doubt best practices. Twitch sold to Amazon for $970 million and returned about 85 times his money. He had forgotten he owned the shares: Justin.tv split into Socialcam and Twitch, and he assumed the Socialcam sale was the end of it.
His LPs told him not to restate the financials and just send the money. Some sent champagne. He wondered whether he should retire before being exposed as lucky, then went looking for what else explained the results.
About 80% of his exit profits came from pivots, not textbook process. The winners did not follow popular best practices, and he never saw the Twitter team use the business model canvas.
Founders who shut down had done customer development, used the canvas and hired well. They would have made a Harvard Business School case study, except they failed.
He keeps the original pitch decks to see what was knowable at the time. His database covers startups where a first check would have returned over 100 times, including the early decks of Air Bed and Breakfast and Pinterest, some of which he passed on.
Founders tend to remember knowing more than they did, so the decks show what was actually visible before success.
He never asks founders 'why were you successful?'. That question makes founders recite their preferred reasons. He asks about specific changes instead, such as why a product's name changed between the seed deck and today.
He gleans facts over time in casual talks, not in a conference-room interview, and promises not to share what founders want kept private.
Maples says a startup cannot win by being better than incumbents. Business is never a fair fight. Incumbents start with the advantage, and 'better' only extends the present. Nobody riding Lyft asked how it differed from a taxi, so riders faced a choice, not a comparison.
Startups have no resources and cannot execute well, so he wants them to win where better doesn't matter. His line: 'You want to force a choice and not a comparison.'
He looks for three elements: inflection, insight and founder-future fit. He compares them to David and Goliath: the rock is the inflection and the slingshot is the insight. Implementation is not on the list, because the first implementation is often wrong.
A correct insight lets the founder steer the product to product-market fit, and the underlying forces make that effort worth it.
He builds on an external inflection, not a gap in a big market. An inflection is an outside turning point, such as new technology, a regulation change or a shift in belief, that makes a new empowerment possible. Lyft rode the iPhone 4S GPS chip, and Instagram rode better cameras, Wi-Fi and upload speeds. Moore's law is a steady curve, not an inflection.
Analyzing big markets for unmet needs buys into the market definition incumbents already set. He says he would rather have inflection and insight and pivot the product than have a clear product without them.
He stress tests an inflection with three questions. What is the specific new thing? Who does it empower, and how? Under what conditions will that empowerment be realized? For Lyft the conditions were that people would share location, GPS chips would not be banned and Apple would keep shipping them.
Telemedicine in COVID was a regulatory inflection, and the open question was whether the old laws would return after shelter-in-place ended. Nuclear power shows a power can be regulated away.
He wants an insight that is non-consensus and right. The insight comes from the founders, as Lyft's did with 'Airbnb for cars'. The best ones draw hostility or a shrug from most people while a few fall irrationally in love.
He calls contrarian another form of conformity, because it is still defined against someone else. Visionaries have no special binoculars; they get their hands dirty at the cutting edge.
Maples matches founders to the specific future they are building. Fit asks who knows the most about the future, who is most intrinsically motivated, and who keeps the best company in that ecosystem. Applied Intuition's founders came from Detroit car companies, Waymo and Google Maps, so a car CEO could trust them.
There is no best founder profile. Young founders like Andreessen with Mosaic won with a beginner's mind, while enterprise sales favor proven operators like Okta's Todd McKinnon from Salesforce.
He asks 'Is this from the future?' of every founder. Good ideas come from futures that already exist for a few people. A pitch that says 'mental health is a huge problem' gives no right to an opinion; the question is which part of the future the founder has lived in.
Maddie Hall's early ideas, like laser tag, were weak. After a year as Sam Altman's chief of staff she found genetically engineered trees and started Living Carbon, marrying the inflections with the need.
He pushes founders to build for lighthouse customers already living ahead. Three routes: build what you are missing, as Zuckerberg, Wozniak and Gates did; serve a lighthouse customer you know well; or leave the present on purpose. The sign is how tech-forward the customer is.
At Silicon Graphics he worked with Industrial Light & Magic, not ordinary studios.
He wants experiments that can surprise the founder. Scott Cook of Intuit asked teams for their three biggest surprises, and concluded teams that named none wanted validation, not truth. Chegg tested fake rental prices from $35 up to $75 and found students would pay far more than $35.
Chegg's test site returned a 404 at the cart, but the demand data was already collected. Students paid more because they give the book back anyway.
He diagnoses a lukewarm customer as wrong insight, implementation or customer. Okta first built cloud systems management and heard 'meh'. Customers said identity management was their top priority, so the insight held and the product changed.
On-prem buyers who wanted other things were not living in the future, so their opinions were irrelevant.
He wants customers desperate enough to accept a half-ripe product. A customer with another way to solve the problem will not risk a startup. His image: nobody can be a ten times better apple, so be the first banana and skip the apple lovers.
Nobody is neutral about the Tesla Cybertruck: people hate it or cannot imagine a world without it.
Maples tells founders to position against the incumbent's strength without attacking it. Airbnb said 'live like a local' instead of 'hotels suck', which turned the Four Seasons' consistent experience into something it must apologize for. Tesla's mission is to accelerate the transition to sustainable energy, not to beat Ford or Toyota.
He agrees this matches Hamilton Helmer's counter-positioning. Early customers, hires and investors join for belief and aesthetics, not pragmatism.
He builds movements from a minority's grievance, not a marketing plan. A movement forces a choice: you either believe or you don't. Markets form as movements accumulate, and what was heresy becomes conventional wisdom.
Floodgate treated seed investing as a movement and needed respected LPs, such as Phil Horsley and Dave Swensen, to believe in it.
He casts the customer as Luke and the founder as Obi-Wan. Use the hero's journey: the world that is, a call to adventure, a tool and magic that make the hero credible, and co-conspirators. Lyft's pink mustache honored that people resist the call of getting into a stranger's car.
Tailor the story to each audience, since investors, customers and employees each have a different idea of heroism. Jobs's iPhone launch toggled between what is and what could be. His line: 'Your job as the founder is to be Obi-Wan, not Luke.'
He wants a seed deck with what you do, the insight, then proof. Slide one says what you do as if the reader knows nothing, such as 'we let you rent an extra room in your house'. Slide two states the non-obvious insight, and slide three gives proof points.
For Floodgate's first fund, the insight slide said $500,000 is the new $5 million thanks to lean startups, and he told LPs that if they disagreed the rest wouldn't matter. Founders can return to the insight slide when investors raise competitors or objections.
He warns against a 'Franken deck' built from non-believers' objections. Founders collect advice from 20 people, many of whom don't believe in the different future, then add a slide for every objection. That hides the message from the one investor ready to believe.
He says it's fine if most investors dislike the idea; find the ones prepared to move with you and make sure they know exactly why.
Maples argues that a startup is a disagreeable act by nature. Founders must break free of the conformity trap and risk their place in the social hierarchy because the mission matters more than fitting in. He compares them to Jonathan Livingston Seagull, banished by the flock.
Before winning, people say the idea is stupid. After winning, they say you cheated or are too powerful. He calls criticism after success part of the job description.
He wants founders who listen, understand, then decide for themselves. Maples advised Ev Williams not to raise much money, since startups spend whatever they raise within 18 months. He calls it Mike's Law. Williams agreed it sounded right, raised a lot anyway, and it worked.
He says he used to joke that his whole job was to give Williams advice that he ignored.
He says startups beat big companies through chaos, not better execution. A startup wins by proposing a radically different future, disorienting the incumbent and moving people there. Every startup he has seen was wild on the inside.
He doesn't mean people shouldn't get things done, only that execution is not the source of the win. He cites a friend's line: 'Make your mess your message.'
He favors small bets that can fail often. Airbnb began as a site built to pay rent during a design conference, not as the real startup. Early bets should be small enough that founders stay playful and unattached to success.
Inside large companies he wants pattern-breaking projects run as hidden, autonomous units under a maverick, like Skunkworks, the IBM PC and the iPhone. Vinod Khosla's idea is to put about 10% of profits into likely failures with asymmetric upside.
He passed on Airbnb after a messy pitch and now calls it a lesson. The meeting with Brian Chesky was a mess, with cereal boxes everywhere and a demo that would not run. He was offered a chance to invest at about a $1.5 million valuation and guesses he would have made roughly 6,000 times his money.
He passed because nobody would stay in a stranger's house. His lesson: a good or bad presentation says nothing about whether to invest, so stay awake to what the company could become. That miss made him ready to believe in Zimride, which became Lyft.
He says 'do your best' is his guiding motto. His father meant honoring the gift of time, not being the best. When Maples skipped effort on a throwaway English test, his father said it didn't sound like his best.
Showing up as your best self means you stop copying and comparing, and compare yourself only to perfection.