Pattern Breakers: How to find a breakthrough startup idea | Mike Maples, Jr. (Partner at Floodgate)

You found that there's basically three elements of most breakthrough startup ideas.

The three are inflections, insights, and then founder future fit. Business is never a fair fight. What inflections let the founder do is wage asymmetric warfare on the present.

You reference this term that you use occasionally, the certain secret.

The way inventions happen is people get their hands dirty, being awake to the possibility that secrets are there. 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.

This connects with that stat that you shared that 80% of your biggest returning investments came from a pivot.

So startup never beats a big company by executing better. The way startups win is because it proposes a radically different future, disorients the incumbent, and chaotically moves people to that different future. The rock is the inflection, the slingshot is the insight that David shoots at Goliath. We're looking to create the conditions where we're going to get to play an unfair game by unfair rules that favor us.

Today my guest is Mike Maples Jr. Mike is a legendary early stage startup investor and with his firm Floodgate, which was founded over 20 years ago, was one of the earliest pioneers of seed stage investing as a category. He's made early bets on transformative companies like Twitter, Lyft, Twitch, Okta, Rappi, and Applied Intuition, and has been on the Forbes Midas List eight times. More recently, he's been spending a lot of his time researching where great startup ideas come from and what separates the startups and founders that break through and change the world from those that don't go anywhere. After spending years reviewing his notes and decks from the thousands of startups that he's met with over the past two decades, he's uncovered three ways that breakthrough founders think differently and act differently. In our conversation, Mike shares what he's uncovered, along with the pitfalls that he's seen many founders and startups fall into, how to apply these pattern breaking principles to large companies, and so much more. I have never seen anything like this sort of research done before on early stage investing and startups. And if you're a founder, a product builder, or an investor, this will change the way that you think about building successful products. Also, as an added bonus, Mike has offered listeners of this podcast a very cool offer. If you pre-order the book at patternbreakers.com/lenny, you will receive a second signed copy of the book for free. There are a limited number of copies available of this offer, so if you're interested, I'd encourage you to place your order ASAP. The book is coming out July 9th. To take advantage of this offer, go to patternbreakers.com/lenny. With that, I bring you Mike Maples Jr. Mike, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Lenny, thanks for having me. It is absolutely an honor.