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Transcript

Sean DeLaney: Mike, welcome to what got you there. How are you doing today?

Mike Maples Jr.: I can’t complain. Thanks for having me.

Sean: I love that you always seem to have an optimistic approach. Is that something that just came naturally wired in you?

Mike: I guess that, I’m probably temperamentally well suited to startups, right? Because startups are impossible. And you just almost, you almost can’t do the job if you’re not recklessly optimistic. in fact, I’ve got a sign in my office here Practice Reckless Optimism, which was given to me by,Dom Zane, who’s one of the founders that I worked with on around.

And so, uh, yeah, I suppose that I’m, guilty of being opt, you know, all things being equal. I’m probably more optimistic than most

Sean: Is that one of the key things you’re looking at when, a new entrepreneur walks in front of you, walks into your room to pitch? Is that what you’re thinking about? How much optimism do they have?

Mike: well, To, to some, to some degree. I, I’d say that there’s, here’s the main thing I look for and, and, and there’s that movie where the guy says, I have a particular set of skills,I have a particular set of interests that may, may overlap with some people in your audience, but, but maybe not everybody.

So like, startups are not normal, at all, especially the ones I care about. And most businesses are a going concern. They have a business, they have a business model, they have customer supply chains. they’re trying to build a sustainable moat. And, those are precisely the types of companies I don’t invest in.

So like, I invest in companies that are an affront to the status quo. I invest in companies that, Don’t want to have a fair fight that wanna be David against Goliath, that want to, not acknowledge the current rules, but wanna change the subject.I like to call these, startups, pattern breakers.

And so, you know, that human mind is a pattern matching system. And without even knowing that we do it, we assume certain things are true about the world. and what great founders do, at least the ones I like to work with, they propose a new pattern. They say, Hey, no, taxis aren’t the way to get from point A to point B.

We should do ride sharing apps. so they, and and in order to break the pattern, you have to succeed at two things. One is you have to have a pattern breaking idea, an insight about the future that’s not obvious, but that can, change the rules. And then the second thing you want is a pattern breaking founder.

And, you know, pattern breaking. Founders have to be willing to. challenge the status quo. And they have to be willing to pursue their, their mission sometimes at all costs, especially because the present is gonna fight back, right? And the, the status quo, status as part of the status quo.

They value their status and they find your efforts to subvert their status offensive. And you need, you need a founder who has the courage to be disliked by the people who should dislike them. And, the founder who can, rally, the people who believe in their secret, to start a movement.

And so those are the, those are the main, you know, optimism’s part of it, but like, optimism to me is a word that, it reminds me of the word passion, right? If you’re not careful, you can have misdirected passion, you can have misdirected optimism. What you’re really trying to do is find somebody with a very deliberate idea of a different future of their design, and who’s prepared to do what it takes to make that come true.

Sean: Mike outta those two, the idea and the founder, which one is more rare?

Mike: I would say that they’re, they’re, they’re actually both quite rare. the main thing that I would say is that,uh, business is never a fair fight. if you, you, you’re trying to engage in a fair fight in business, you’re already lost because the other guy’s gonna fight unfair, whether you know it or not.

And so the default position in this world is that the status quo has an unfair advantage. The status quo has the inertia. Of the present pattern of how the world works. And everybody just naturally assumes that the way they define things is the way things work. And so if you’re gonna have a breakthrough, you have to break free of the status quo.

You can’t be better than the status quo because if you’re better than the status quo, you’re, you’re acknowledging their rules are valid about how to compete, and they’re gonna, they’re gonna usually beat you in that game because they get to define the rules and they’ve, they’ve defined them from the first place.

And so what you wanna do when you’re a breakthrough startup is you break free from the current rules by having an idea that just changes the subject, that refuse to refuses to buy into the premise, the rules. Hey, I’m not gonna participate in the taxi medallion system. I think it’s bullshit. I think it’s intellectually bankrupt and corrupt.

We’re just simply not gonna even negotiate with that. We’re gonna propose something that just blows it up. And, redefines, our very idea, our very notion of how to get around. And so the idea is really important. Like a, a great founder with a not so great idea is always gonna be limited because they’re gonna be trapped in the gravitational pull of the incumbency and the rules of the incumbents, right?

But, great ideas that don’t have someone who can actualize those ideas. They don’t happen in this world, right? So you have to have, you have to go from having a pattern breaking idea to engaging in the types of pattern breaking behaviors that are necessary to overcome, the resistance of the presence

of the present. 

Sean: In all your experience, what do you think comes first? Does the founder tend to have these type of ideas first, and then they develop the skills to be able to bring that to fruition? Or are they the embodiment of this type of founder you’re looking for and the ideas come later?

Mike: Yeah, it’s, it’s funny, I, I think about this a lot. I guess to me, over time I’ve started to realize that,breakthrough startups are a fundamentally disagreeable notion. And,people tend to, to value folks in this world who like to keep the peace. But you know, when you think about it, a startup is a provocative act.

A startup by definition says I think that the way things are done is the wrong way. And so I believe that, a lot of the great startup founders naturally tend to gravitate to thinking and acting in ways that are a little bit, a little bit disagreeable, a little bit, I’ve got the gleam of the pirate in my eye.

I’ve got, you know, I sort of enjoy the prospect. Of stirring the pot and, and breaking a few things here and there. And,so I think that there is a, and, and th that can be true in the realm of ideas as well as activities, right? Like, a lot of times I find that the best founders are not naturally inclined to believe that the status quo is that good.

They, they tend to, they tend to be, willing to argue, against things that other people just take for granted. And they tend to, naturally gravitate to thinking that the current way isn’t the best way. And then, and then that same personality trait can often cause them to be willing to en engage in the types of behaviors that you have to engage in where your social status is threatened, where your respectability is threatened.

Because, like, we haven’t really gotten into this, but like, Brian Chesky, who unfortunately I foolishly didn’t invest in. Funded air bed and breakfast in the early days, right? What became Airbnb by selling Obama owes cereal and Captain McCain Crunch cereal. That’s not a normal way to do business, and that’s not a normal, that’s not on the list of options that most people would consider.

You know, Asman Rashid, who I did work with at Chegg, Ran up three and a half million dollars of, credit card expenses, buying textbooks because he couldn’t, we couldn’t raise money, to, to buy ’em, with venture capital. All we had was floodgate seed money, but we, we were gonna need to raise tens of millions.

And so, you know, Amex eventually starts to call him and says, Hey, what’s this, what are you, this, you know, young Pakistani doing, buying three and a half million dollars of textbooks. And, you know, he ended up having to have like 10 Amex credit cards because you can only swipe an Amex credit card once every seven seconds.

So he convinced the customer service rep to give ’em 10 cards. Well, now, now they’re like, okay, well if this company goes bankrupt, we’re gonna be on the hook, for these creditors, for these textbooks. And so they’re about to shut ’em down. And Simonon kind of tells a little bit of a white lie and says, well, no, actually we’re, we’re creating a library, And, uh, and his mom’s like, well, you know, it’s kind of a library. You know, we classify the books. They go on a shelf, they can be checked in and checked out. it’s kind, technically speaking, it’s kind of a library. So, you know, a lot of, you know, Lyft, when they launched the Lyft Service, it was illegal.

And so, you know, they were getting seasoned desist letters every day. And, and the, the question is, is San Francisco gonna shut us down before we ever have a chance to, to make a meaningful difference? And so, you know, most, you know, Justin Kahn, before they started Justin tv, which became Twitch, he sold his first company Caico on eBay for $250,000.

And two guys, like, who does that? And so part of this, type of behavior is, a willingness to act differently than how normal people act. And, and understand, you know, embracing that because you’re gonna, you’re gonna have to do some things. you can’t achieve outsize results in life by doing the things that other people do.

You have to do things radically different than what other people do. That’s, you’ve had Howard, Howard Marks on your show. He would argue the same is true in investing. You, you can’t outperform the consensus by being the consensus. You have to be non-consensus and Right, or you can’t outperform.

Sean: Yeah. this makes me think about you and your embodiment of who you are. Does this come through in your investment approach? Because everything you’re, you’re describing, Mike, it, it makes me think of a story from when you were back in college and how the social status was essentially threatened for you.

And I’m wondering what you did during that time.

Mike: Yeah. part of why I decided to become an investor was, I, I’m actually pretty agreeable person,I was a, I was a founder, but like, my roommate in college was this guy named Joe Mont, who’s a Forbes 400 billionaire, way better executive than I am. And, um, and, and part part of the reason that he’s way better at it is he’s just not afraid to piss people off.

 he’s not worried about what you think about him if, if, if you think that he has good manners or not, or whatever. whereas, Everywhere I’ve ever been. I was, had lots of friends and got along with folks and if I’m in a meeting and somebody’s there who I’m not a hundred percent sure needs to be there, I’m not usually that guy who’s gonna say, Hey, I don’t know what, who you are, what you do, please leave.

Whereas like Steve Jobs, that’s what he did all the time. Right. And, and but what I, what I think I can do is I think I really understand, what makes these types of people tick. And I understand the struggles they go through, and I have a, a level of sympathy for what they go through that I think makes me effective at spotting them, spotting them in their ideas.

Because in some ways I’m spotting something that I wish I could do that I wish I had the temperament to do, but that, you know, I know I’m just not gonna be crazy enough the way they would be to do it.

Sean: Mike, I’m intrigued by this. I’m always looking for when the people’s natural authenticity aligns with those skills. Right. Like you were saying, the embodiment of who you are really aligning with picking unbelievable companies. When did you feel that merger, the blending of those two, where you were really comfortable and who you were as an individual and your unique skill sets and that blending of those two?

Mike: Yeah. Well, I think from a young age, like for, for some reason, I got this notion when I was really young that, there’s this great paradox in life that, the fact that you get to live it all is amazing when you think about it, right? it’s a miracle, but we’re all, we’re all gonna die unless, unless something happens that I don’t know about that we invent, but I’m, I’m, I’m not betting on it, right?

So it’s, it’s sad that we’re gonna die, that our time’s limited, but it’s a miracle that we have any time. And so then you start to realize that the time that you do have is a gift. And that really what you should do every day is try to honor the gift of your time. And the, the best way I know how to honor the gift of your time is to, is to figure out, The highest purpose, use of your own skills, your own passions, your own, capabilities.

And part of that requires you to be self-aware and to know where you can make a difference, where you can’t. too many people I think, aspire to be like somebody else, and I think that, really the best that you can do is to try to be your best self and not, not try to be like somebody else. And, and your best self is a function of who you are and how you wanna honor the gift of your time.

And realizing that you’re not gonna get that time back. once today goes by you, that day’s gone. all you’ve got is n minus one future days.

Sean: Mike, there was a line I had saved from you when I was doing the research for this, and it’s, I’d like to emphasize to people when they start a company, start a company that’s worthy of your talents that you think represents the absolute utmost gift you have to offer to this world in your life. I thought that was incredibly powerful.

I’m wondering, when young founders come to you, how do you uncover that? Right. I feel like so many people might think, how do I even begin to understand what my greatest gift is? How do you, how do you navigate that for a younger entrepreneur?

Mike: Yeah. usually, you know, it’s funny, a lot of times there, there, well, there’s a few questions that I ask, right? some of them relate to the idea and some of ’em relate to the founder. Right? So the, the first thing I’m trying to do is to understand. Do I believe that they had the right motivations and intentions behind this idea?

Right? So like a lot of people, they just want to do a startup and you know, they, they read articles about founders and they see, Zuckerberg or Elon Musk on the cover of a magazine and they think, I wanna be like that. And that’s, that’s a terrible reason to wanna do start. Cause startups are impossible, right?

And, and, most people, if they had any idea what they were getting themselves into, they’d never do it. so like, why are they doing this? And, you brought up a quote, that I, that I said once, most of the founders that I’ve seen have real breakthroughs, have massive outcomes, are those who, have an idea that’s from the future that embraces a set of inflections that allow them to just show up with a product that totally changes the subject.

And so the first thing I’m trying to fi find out from a founder is, How did you come up with this idea, and do I believe that this, the, the way you went about coming up with this idea suggests that this, that this project has a chance to have massive impact, that it can break free from the present, that it can, impose a new order on things.

and, and, w we can delve into any of these topics, right? I explore what is the inflection that, underlies the idea I explore, uh, what is their fundamental insight and why is it non-consensus and right. And then the other question I like to ask is, is this from the future? Future? And so, uh, are they, are they living in the future already?

or did they just try to think of a startup? So I like to say that paradoxically, the best startup ideas come from not trying to think of a startup. instead what you do is you live in the future. And as you experience firsthand what the future’s like, you experience firsthand what the difficulties are in the future, and you end up building what’s missing in the future.

that that’s the kind of stuff I look for first. So that, all that stuff’s related to the idea, itself. And then I have a set of questions that I ask about the founder as well.

Sean: I would love to go behind the door of one of these investment pitches. is there any examples you have where you, you went further with a founder to really stress test their thinking? I’m just wondering what it looks like, what follow-ups you’re intrigued to hear about, when, when you’re asking ’em these questions.

Mike: yeah, so like for example, um, 85% of our profits have come from Pivots, right? And that, and that’s the, the companies that worked right? So Lyft started as Zimride. Okta started as Saher. Twitch started as Justin tv. And That means I have to not be too attached to my belief about whether the product that they’re presenting to me is gonna work.

Because if they succeed, there’s an 85% likelihood that they’re gonna pivot. And so you, you say, okay, what am I investing in then? and, and so the first question I ask is, what are the fundamental inflections that underlie this idea? And so why do inflections matter? So an inflection is something new that gets introduced, that creates a, a set of empowering conditions that an entrepreneur can harness.

So like, uh, you know, we talked about Lyft a minute ago, and ride sharing with Lyft, apple introduced the iPhone 4s. And the iPhone 4s had a G p S locator chip. So now you could locate someone who had a smartphone with an algorithm within one meter. And so then you say, okay. What, why, who does that?

Empower? Well, it empowers everybody with a smartphone. How many people is that? That’s a lot of people. And under what conditions will that empowerment assist? Well, you’d have to believe that Apple will continue to put g p s locator chips in smartphones. You’d have to believe that the other guys will too.

That seems like a reasonable bet. Right? so that’s the inflection. the reason that I call it inflection rather than like just performance improvement curve. like Moore’s law is that an inflection is like a turning point. And a turning point introduces the element of timing. So before the iPhone four s, you could have been right, that there’s a future that embraces ride sharing.

But you couldn’t have built a product that delivered on that vision because you wouldn’t have been able to algorithmically locate riders and drivers in real time. So only after those embedded g p s locators existed, was it possible, right? To implement a ride sharing network. and timing is a big factor in these things, right?

so that’s the, in the, the inflection, the insight is, okay, so what, right? So the inflection happens external to the startup. The insight is the entrepreneur’s creative, instantiation of an opportunity. It’s the breakthrough discovery. So like for, for Lyft, the insight was, oh, that means you could do sharing economy for cars.

and, a, a good insight is usually non-consensus. The non-consensus part of it was, Are people gonna want to get into a stranger’s car? That sounds scary. but we believe that they would, because we had foolishly passed on Airbnb because we didn’t think people would wanna stay in a stranger’s house.

And events proved us wrong. And so we were like, we’re willing to take that risk where other people might not not take it. But the, you know, you can see that the inflection, inflection happened whether Lyft happened, whether uber happened, it was out there, it was in the ambient world. The insight was where the invention happens, where the founder says, oh, that means that I can do something that is going to propose a different future.

and, and the reason that the inflections are so important is that the different future that we propose needs to be radically different, and it needs to empower people in ways that overcome any, inertia that the incumbents can impose on us. So I,

Sean: Yeah, no, I, I’m curious about that, that empowerment. What does that look like to overcome that inertia?

Mike: That’s right. the inflection is like the Rock and David Slingshot. The inflection is what lets the founder wage an unfair fight. We’re not interested in having a fair fight, right? And, and we know it’s gonna be unfair. And so there’s no middle ground. The only question is, are who’s gonna play unfairly?

Are you gonna play unfairly as a startup founder? Are you gonna let the incumbent have an unfair advantage? And if you let the incumbent have an unfair advantage, you might still have success, but, but the upside will be limited in your success because you’ll always have to operate under the conditions, that have been defined by the incumbency.

Whereas if you, if you show up with a radically breakthrough product that harnesses inflections and ha proposes a radically different future. Now you get to define the discussion that happens. Now you get to decide what ride sharing is and isn’t. You get to decide, how, how to frame, the discussion of how transportation should work and you force other people to react to what you do.

Sean: Totally different ballgame then. This has me so intrigued that you said 85% of your successful startups were pivots. What then are you doing during those pivot periods to help them successfully navigate the pivot?

Mike: So like, if you think about it, a, a breakthrough breakthroughs are tricky because, they can’t be planned explicitly, right? Like you can have a recipe to bake a cake. But like, if, if you and I bake a cake with the same recipe, we’re gonna bake roughly the same cake, apart from just skills and cooking and stuff.

But breakthroughs by definition haven’t happened yet. nobody understood the theory of relativity until Einstein discovered it. So you can’t have like a, a very structured process to get to one. you have to become the type of person who’s likely to get one. And so I believe that you do that by following these inflections and insights.

 When I work with a founder, what they really are doing is implementing a first mover advantage into the future. And their, the first product that they have is really a reference implementation of their insight. But the first product, the implementation might not be right.

Customers might not be desperate for what they built. And so we have to answer a simple but profound question, which is, what can we uniquely do that people are desperate for? If we have an insight, we’ve answered the uniqueness part, now we have to find out what product can we build that someone will be desperate to have.

And if our insight about the future is value valid, and it has massive empowerment, there should be someone desperate because it will offer something radically empowering to someone. And when that someone sees it, they won’t be able to unsee it. So that’s what we’re trying to do, right? And the first version of the product might not achieve that goal.

So then what we need to do is we need to ask ourselves, Does that mean that it invalidates our insight? Or does it mean that it invalidates our implementation? And if our implementation is invalidated, then we need a new implementation. If our insight’s invalidated, I think we should just stop. Right? I don’t think we have a business because the, the whole premise of what we’re doing is wrong, has been proven wrong, right?

so that’s kind of what, what we do, what most people fail at when they pursue breakthroughs is they look at risk as the probability of failure. What they don’t understand is that if you define it that way, you’re gonna pursue opportunities that are more obvious, where, it, there’s a more clear path to getting success.

But what I believe is that if you have powerful inflections and insights, you don’t have to know how the dots will forward connect. What you’re doing is you’re pursuing a. An underpriced, but massive upside future, and you navigate your implementation to the right implementation. And usually what’s beautiful about that is you’re learning things that other people aren’t learning.

 even if you’re not succeeding, you’re learning what others don’t learn because other people aren’t brave enough to pursue those kinds of futures because they’re, too afraid to take the risk. But you can’t have massive upside without taking massive risk. It can’t happen, you know, it’s the same what Howard Marks would say, right?

You can’t, you, you know, the opposite side of a coin that says can’t lose, might as well say can’t win. so you have to, if you win big, you have to risk big, by definition.

Sean: Yeah. Anyone who wants to dive further into, Howard’s thinking, he has an incredible memo he probably wrote a decade ago. Dare to Be Great and then dare to be great too. That talk that truly exceptional. 

Mike: another one more recently called I Begg to differ, which is also really

good. Yeah. 

Sean: His stuff’s incredible. Mike, you have another, this makes me think of another line I have saved you and it’s, I’m not a risk taker outer.

I’m a luck multiplier, and I’m wondering for you, how you’ve gone about increasing that surface area luck in your life, and then multiplying that luck.

Mike: Yeah, so I guess the way, I do look at risk, you know, most people, and particularly this would be true in a big business, they look at risk as something bad and scary. I look at risk as how you behave in a world of uncertainty. And so I think risk is something you take actively with agency. Most people don’t like that. Most people don’t like to take risk. They like to avoid risk. but like when you look, when you’ve realize that risk taking is really just the willingness to pursue an unambiguous, massively high upside in a, in an ambiguous future. The expected value, the payoff function is actually quite good.

 what I really invest in is very risky projects with wildly asymmetric payoff functions. So the expected value of the risk is actually higher than the risk that most people are taking when they think they’re taking lower risk. so that’s kind of how I look at the world.

and that’s, how I, how I try to work with the founders. And so when I invest in a seed round, we try to get really clear about what the risks are, and we try to do, as much as we can to take out the most important risks as quickly as we can. Because if we, succeed at that, we’ve done the number one thing we can do to add value to the company. if we don’t succeed at that, either we need to find another approach or we declare it a failed experiment, but then we haven’t spent millions of dollars on something that wasn’t destined and the entrepreneur gets their time back.

but yeah, it’s risk is something you take always, at least in my opinion.

Sean: I’m curious about your view. Where do you develop this approach to the world?

Mike: so I would say that my temperament is pretty agreeable in general, but I would say that my thought processes are usually pretty independent, right? So I think I’m pretty good at thinking for myself and, not, not always buying into the conventional logic of things. And so I try, to understand startups in a very first principles way.

And I came to realize over time that a startup is not a company. A startup is a provocative challenge to the status quo. And, in order to succeed at making that provocative challenge real, right? You have to have these insights. And you have to create these movements to move the world to that different future.

And, if you’re gonna do those things, you have to have a different outlook towards risk, 

Sean: Mike, you mentioned a pretty independent thinker. What is it like in your head as you’re stress testing these ideas? Internally?

Mike: Yeah. I have a huge benefit that I get to work with some of these founders who are just like in amazing, right? And like, for example, there, there’s this big five framework of personality, temperament. they call it ocean, I, I’m not sure if any of your guests have ever talked about it before, but there’s, ocean stands for openness to new experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

 this framework is probably the most scientifically grounded at trying to predict someone’s personality and temperament. And, What I’ve found is that a lot of the founders that I’ve worked with have had great success, are open to new experiences, conscientious and disagreeable.

And so like, I’ll just kind of notice that, right? Maybe I’m reading an article in a psychology magazine about this, and I’ll just be like, as I’m reading the article, I’m like, Hmm, maybe, maybe founders are more disagreeable than agreeable. And then I’ll just reach out to, you know, uh, Michael Seibel or Mark Andreessen or some of these guys and just say, Hey, I’ve been thinking about Disagreeableness.

does anything jump out at you? And then a lot of times they’ll say, oh my gosh, totally. And then they’ll give examples or they’ll be, I’m reading on this topic too. And so, you know, I I just tend to, um, go down these rabbit holes of where I’m curious,

and, and, and then usually they lead you somewhere.

Sean: That’s kind of interesting. You, you 

Mike: yeah. Where,

Sean: No, Mike, you mentioned Big five. I, I just researched cause I took this a few years ago. Can I read you my results and just say, what if I walked in your room, what you would say?

Mike: Sure.

Yeah. 

Sean: extroversion 33. Emotional stability. 62 agreeableness. 11. Conscientiousness. 72. Intellect imagination. 95,

Mike: Okay. That’s, so that’s, um, you know, now we’ve gotta be careful because, you, you can, you can over rotate to believe in this stuff.

Sean: I’m, you believe me? I’m, I’m not, I’m not holding you or this test, Eddie.

Mike: Yeah. But I would say that, that, that what you’re describing lends itself pretty well to entrepreneurship because like, openness to new experiences is an openness to be willing to, Embrace new ideas to sort of say the default assumption is that the way we’re doing things doesn’t have to be the best way.

people who are open to new experiences tend to value aesthetics. They tend to value they, when they’re in conversations, they enjoy engaging, in the realm of ideas. Whereas like, not everybody’s like that.my wife for example is much more interested in what makes a person tick than I am when they’re in a conversation and, and not in a cynical way.

That’s just what animates her interest in people. Whereas like, when I’m having a conversation with somebody, and perhaps you’re this way too, I’m really interested in what new ideas do they have and I’m interested in kind of stress testing their ideas and them stress testing mine. And like there, there’s an aesthetic aspect to ideas for me and for a lot of founders, conscientiousness High is good.

Because you gotta see projects through, right? Great art of ship. And so you have to, you have to have an ethos of not just getting caught in your head, but like making things happen in the real world. Th this is an area of struggle for me. and probably why I’m better suited to be an investor than a operator because,I can get lost in something.

 I’ll start reading about some framework and I’ll just get lost in it for five hours. most of the great entrepreneurs I know have a, have an urgency of making progress and an execution tempo that they insist upon, maintaining they’re fast in their email inbox. They’re, more, more here and now than I am.

And, I’d like to be better about it. And then I’d say that, uh, you know, the agreeableness versus disagreeableness, I think that, disagreeableness is generally speaking a benefit as long as you’re not just totally a jerk. because disagreeableness, you know, if you have to, if you have to make everybody happy or you have to preserve harmony or you have to, protect, how you’re viewed by other people, how you appear in this world, you sacrifice freedom because you’re, acting in ways, that are aligned with other people’s interests rather than the interest that you have in your own mission or your own thing that you wanna bring about is change in the world.

And disagreeableness buys freedom. It buys freedom of action and pure movement towards the different future of your design, whereas I would say agreeableness. Works really well in bigger companies because you wanna, you want all the people on the team marching in the same direction. You want to have your competitive advantages persist for a very long time.

You wanna build, defensible moats, you wanna create a franchise. And so it’s just, just different temperamentally. And a lot of times this is why startup founders, when their companies get acquired by big companies, they just can’t wait to be fully vested so they can get out of there because they just like the idea of managing the politics and making everybody feel happy about what needs to happen is just like soul crushing to them.

Right.

Sean: Mike, where did you develop this level of self-awareness?

Mike: I don’t know. You know, I just, uh, may I guess just lucky I guess.

Sean: hmm. what about just analyzing yourself? Has there been a mindset of yours besides reckless optimism that you think has just had a monumental impact on your life and has been with you for a long time?

Mike: I think that that, I’ve always been very curious. And so, um, you know, the, the strength in my weakness, right, of not always getting back to people’s emails quick enough or not always being present enough, is that like if I get interested in a notion, like I’ll just, like, I’ll go like ridiculously far down the rabbit hole.

Sean: Walk me through that learning process.

Mike: yeah. So like, like for example, Twitch gets bought in 2014 for 970 million and it had started as an investment in Justin tv, which was a terrible idea. and then they pivoted into two companies, Twitch, twitching, social cam, and, and Twitch didn’t even make sense to me at first. And then we have this big exit, nine 70 million, we make 84 times our money on the investment. And I’m like, what business am I even in? like, is this just, NA to lab talks about the Lucky Fool? I’m like, have I just been a lucky fool? Twitter and Chegg both went public within a week of each other in 2013, and both of them had been massive pivots. And so I’m like, what, what am I doing?

And it’s like, and if, if this is all just about luck, then I should just retire before I get exposed because you know what? Luck giveth luck can take it away. So I’m like, okay, I’m either just a lucky fool, or there’s something happening here that I don’t fully understand. maybe instinctively I made some good bets without fully understanding why I made them.

And so I spent about two years, talking to, breakthrough Founders and trying to understand, what was it that animated the breakthrough? and, and you know, I would, you know, I’d go to somebody like say Mark Pincus at Zynga. And I’d say, okay, uh, when you pitched me, this is what you pitched.

 but I, I don’t recall that that was the game that took off. So can you tell me, can you explain to me like what happened? What you don’t wanna do is ask, why do you think you were so successful? Because people come up with stories about why they’re successful, right? It’s easy to misremember what really happened.

 what you’re trying to do is get as objective as you can. You’re trying to say, what did the pitch look like in the seed round? And what did it look like in the A round and what was different and when did the business start to inflict and what was the thing that happened that caused that to, what were the surprises that you encountered that were positive surprises?

What were the surprises that were negative surprises? and so you’re trying to be sort of like, um, Joe Colombo detective. And, for me, this topic was just like in insanely interesting because like if you look at startup frameworks, They tend to emphasize not failing. They tend to say startups fail cuz they don’t have a business model.

So you need a business model. Canvas startups fail cuz they don’t have a customer, so you need to do customer development. Startups fail because they do waterfall development, so you should do lean development. I agree with all those things. I agree that all of those things can mitigate the chance of failure, but it doesn’t explain why Twitter did pretty much none of those things and was massively successful.

So I’m like, okay, what are these things underlying these power powerful startups that gave them their power? not only the things that you wanna do to avoid failure, but what are the things that could signal this is worth pursuing because it might lead to massive success. And so as I spent more and more time with these founders, I don’t know where the epiphany came from, but I was like, oh, it’s the inflections and the insight.

That’s what they had, Google, there was like 30 search engines when they came out. But if you look at it through the lens of insights, which was page rank, there was only one. when you realize, oh, that’s what I’m evaluating when I invest, I’m not evaluating the product necessarily. I’m evaluating the insight and the inflections and then the capabilities of the founder to change the future.

Sean: Hmm.

Mike: And I can, I have to get comfortable with the idea that I don’t know how it’s gonna play out in the future,

Sean: How hard was that for you to learn?

Mike: not as hard for me to learn, but I’m like, um, I guess I have a very high, tolerance for ambiguity.

Sean: Okay.

Mike: and that’s probably part of why I’m good at going down these rabbits because I, like, I don’t, you know, you can’t, breakthrough ideas come from pursuing something that you’re just in incredibly interested in for its own sake. because if you’re,pursuing something that somebody else is interested in or a job that somebody else assigned to you, you might deliver a great deliverable, but it’s very unlikely that you’ll come up with a breakthrough. Right. you come up with breakthroughs by pursuing an idea that nobody else thinks is important as you think it is.

and so therefore you, push the frontiers of knowledge and you,it’s like a fractal. you go down a new fractal and then you, bam you open up an entire world of new understanding, and then you be, then it becomes addictive. You, just go faster and faster because you’re like, oh my gosh, I’m seeing things that now all of a sudden, what

I was blind to. Now I’m seeing now I see it. And so then, and then now you have a language to talk to other founders. I can go back to Brian Chesky, I can go back to Mark Pincus. I can go back to Justin Kahn. And say, Hey, I think that maybe the thing that powered Justin TV was these inflections.

And he is like, dude, yeah, that’s right. And he is like, and the ones you listed are only three of ’em, but there was this, and have you thought of this and have you thought of this? then you start to talk to your team about the terms and you know, the having a language to describe the new set of things can be valuable because then people use that language and it teases out more examples and, and stress test the thinking a little bit.

Sean: I’m just thinking about that natural curiosity you have and then some of the impressive people that you’ve been in the same room with again and again. Who are the people using your language really pushed the frontiers of your knowledge?

Mike: let’s see. Oh, there’s so many.

Sean: I’m looking for those rare few that you’re like, whoa, what the hell just happened there?

Mike: I would say that, uh, Reid Hoffman, Was very helpful in the early days in, helping me understand the value of, thinking about a problem in a very first principles way and thinking about, how we’re gonna get distribution and how important distribution is. In almost every startup, most people think the product’s the most important thing, but if you can’t get your product to the people that you want to get it to, you fail, right?

So you have to, get distribution regardless of what business you’re in, if it’s b2b, b2c, whatever. so I would say Reid Hoffman, really had a strong handle on startups, and he really had a strong handle on how do you think about the startup as a set of investment thesis, if you will, that the entrepreneur should have an investment thesis, the entrepreneur.

Is making a risky bet on an uncertain future. And so they should be clearer, they should think in bets and be clear about that. another person who helped me think this way was Annie Duke, who, wrote a book called Thinking In Bets. And, how do you separate the, the decision quality from the outcome and how do you document your knowledge about the decision you were making so that you can evaluate you?

You, you don’t make the mistake of resulting. You don’t just say, Hey, I was a genius investor in 2020 cuz I bought Bitcoin. Because the only thing you know is that Bitcoin went up in 2020. You don’t know that it was a good decision. You may have just been lucky. And so the only way you know it was a good decision is if you capture your thought process and then you can go back to it and say, does the thought process I had, did it comprehend the right way to navigate the uncertainties that ensued?

Uh, so she was helpful, she was really good. and then it. I’d say those two and then Steve Blank, Steve Blank and Eric Reese. So I got to know them really early, right? before they got famous. I used to go, I used to help Steve Blank in his class that he taught at Berkeley and Stanford, and Steve. Well, so it was funny because I, I moved to California from Austin and, everybody’s telling me there’s this guy named Steve Blank, who’s really smart marketing guy, and I’d heard about him. So I reach out to him and I explain who I am and stuff. and you know, at this time I, I hadn’t really done VC yet.

I just moved from Austin. I’d been an entrepreneur, and he says, Hey, yeah, I’d like to have breakfast with you tomorrow. And I was like, wow, that’s kind of, that was really responsive. So we’re having breakfast and I say, Hey, why don’t I explain my background and why I wanna reach out? He goes, oh no, I know your background.

I teach the motive case in my class. And so the, the motive was the company I’D started and Harvard Business School did a case on. How we went to market. And Steve said, you’re the only case I’ve ever seen where the startup team did customer development without, knowing that they were, you know, you did it by instinct, but that’s what you guys were doing.

And so I teach that case, as an example of customer development. So will you come with me to the class? that’s why I met with you for breakfast, cuz I want you to come to my class. So I was like, okay. And what he would do is kind of funny. he’d have me sit in the back of the room and, and the, the, basically the premise of the case is, we don’t have software yet, but I’m charging customers $50,000 to be part of our early access program.

And it’s like a few months have gone by. Nobody’s signed the check yet. And, should I cave in and say, Hey, you can use it for free, or you can do a free pilot or whatever. and at the end of the case, I’m like, no, I’m gonna stick to my guns and charge 50,000. And so Steve would ask the class, how many of you think, Mike Maples is a genius for doing this?

Raise your hand. And how many of you think he’s an idiot? And usually more people raise their hand thinking I’m an idiot. and then he would say, well, why don’t we ask Mike to explain what happened himself? And I’d be sitting in the back of the room and I’d just walked down after all these people had their hands up saying, I’m an idiot.

And then we would just talk about, what happened and, what, what the learnings were. But, but like Steve has played a very important role in, us understanding entrepreneurship, right? Like the, you know, People didn’t really study business as a discipline until the early 20th century.

 and in the early 20th century, you had Harvard Business School and they were trying to be the west point of capitalism, right? Somebody had to figure out, how do I run these big train companies, or how do I run DuPont or how do I run Ford? Or, nobody had seen companies of this size before and so they were trying to be the west point of capitalism.

And so from that, a whole bunch of theories about business emerged, Michael Porter’s five forces and, core competencies and activity-based costing and all kinds of different management frameworks and all this. What Steve understood was that a startup isn’t a company, and so that people were mistakenly force fitting business frameworks for corporations onto startups.

They were saying, you should have a business plan. They were saying you should have a VP of marketing and a VP of sales and a VP of this. The VP of that. Steve’s like, no, that’s not true at all. A startup is a temporary organization searching for a business model, hoping to one day become a company. And so the way a startup creates value is totally different from the way a company creates value.

And so that insight was really profound. And from that flows a whole bunch of logical conclusions that, you need to navigate the uncertainty of a startup, which means you apply the scientific method to a series of experiments that you run to validate a set of hypotheses that you’re not certain about or to invalidate hypotheses.

And so from that flow to all of these things that he did with customer development, then Eric Reese was his protege in many ways. And so Eric took a lot of the ideas of customer development and applied it to this notion of the lean startup. but you know, that was the first time anybody had ever asserted.

That entrepreneurship education was a different field than business education. and now I think that that’s, starting to become more widely recognized that we’re, we’re at the beginning of infinity, of understanding how startups really ought to work or how they do work. And that’s, that’s just super interesting to me.

Sean: Yeah. What’s super interesting to me is you mentioned moving from Austin to California. No real venture investing prior to that, what made you think you could do this?

Mike: well, I, I wasn’t really sure. It’s just that I was in Austin and, I saw what was happening with, at the time they were calling it Web two Oh. And I was like, man, I gotta get to San Francisco. That’s where it’s happening. This is gonna be, it’s time to get the party started again on the internet.

This is where, this is where it’s gonna

be. 

Sean: there something specific You saw that you said This is it.

Mike: a lot of things, you know, I started to see,podcasting. I started to see BitTorrent, I started to see, um, flicker. what was happening was that the web was transitioning from being, interconnected pages to being, a platform and a platform that connects apps and people.

And I was like, okay, that’s wildly interesting. and then, you know, I went to the O’Reilly Web 2.0 summit and saw O’Reilly talking about, you know, data is the intel inside and mashups and remixing things, and all the, I was like, oh my gosh, like, there’s gonna be a new internet.

And I’m in Austin, Texas, which is a great place to live, but it’s not where it’s gonna happen. It’s gonna happen in San Francisco. I came up to San Francisco without a job, I would, my kids were still in school, so I would fly up every Sunday night and stay till Thursday. And just the goal was to find something exciting in Web 2.0.

and I didn’t know what it was gonna be. I didn’t have a preconceived notion. I talked to some venture firms to see if I could get a job in venture, but I wasn’t, I wasn’t convinced that that was gonna work. Right. and in the course of doing that, I kept noticing that people were raising less and less money to fund their startups.

They, they, they didn’t wanna raise 5 million, they wanted to raise 500,000. And I was like, huh, that’s, that’s curious. Why is that? And that, that’s when I started to see that you had this thing called the lamp stack, where, you had Linux and Apache and MySQL and P H P and you had, um, this ability to experiment for radically less cost than in, it costs me five mil or costs our team at motive $5 million just to build a product.

But now you could build one for 500,000, get traction. And so then I, I was like, man, 500,000 is the new 5 million. And then that’s kind of what got me down this path of, uh, starting a seed firm.

Sean: Hmm. Was there that inner belief prior, prior to it, or did that belief come after some of these successful exit.

Mike: It was the inner belief prior to it was completely obvious to me that, the, the way that startups were gonna get built was gonna change that in a world where you can prove or disprove a product idea for less than half a million dollars, that was gonna be a game changing difference.

And yeah.

Sean: what are those shifts you’re feeling right now? what are the spidey sense attuned to?

Mike: Yeah. You know, it’s, um, well the tricky part now is, there’s over 2000 seed funds, right? So, like, I first started doing this, people didn’t think seed funds were gonna be a thing. They didn’t think they were gonna work. They didn’t think that seed funds whatever fund the companies that mattered. By 2010, nobody just debated that, right?

By 2010, Steve Anderson over at Baseline had invested in Instagram, I’d invested in Twitter and Twitch and a bunch of companies that were working Okta. nobody questioned anymore that seed funds were gonna be a a thing. But the problem is there weren’t that many barriers to entry to starting a seed fund cuz by definition they’re small.

So next thing you knew, they were everywhere. And so, a lot of what I’m working on today is, trying to predict who’s gonna be a good founder before they start their startups. I say to entrepreneurs, you have to force a choice and not a comparison.

Sean: What What do mean by that? 

Mike: So like, um, so like if, if, if the incumbents are selling apples, you don’t show up and say, I’m at 10 times better.

Apple, you show up with a banana and you say, I’m the first banana that’s ever been. And if you like apples better than my banana, okay, that’s your choice. But like I. Nobody’s gonna say, how does that compare to my apple? Right? They’re gonna say, I either value bananas or I don’t. And like I say to a startup founder, what you wanna be is a banana.

And then find all the people who value the advantage of a banana, and they’ll be desperate for that advantage because they have no alternative. And if they have an alternative, they won’t be desperate. Only if they don’t have alternatives will they be desperate for your advantage. For your insight, right?

And so I’m like saying this to entrepreneurs and I’m one of 2000 seed funds, and I’m like, that makes me a hypocrite because if, if I’m just being one of the 10 usual suspects that an entrepreneur pitches, I’m playing the comparison game. I’m doing the exact same thing I tell entrepreneurs not to do.

But what I decided was that I’m gonna try to find these founders before they start their startups, get to know them, and then have these frameworks to help ’em stress test their ideas. it’s not my job to have an idea, but I can ask you really good questions. To help you decide whether you think it’s worth pursuing or not.

some ideas that sound plausibly good aren’t that good. Some ideas that sound stupid might be stupid, but they’re still worth pursuing because they have powerful inflections and you’re following an interesting insight. And so what I’ve learned is that that’s how I can force a choice and not a comparison.

Because by the time they have an idea, I can say, look, you can go pitch 10 firms if you want, but like, I just have a question for you. Do you wanna work together? And it’s like, if we wanna work together, let’s figure out how to do that. But like, what good is it gonna do you to go pitch 10 firms?

And you’re gonna get to know all of ’em for two hours if you’re lucky. And we already know what it’s like to work together. And why don’t we come up with a deal that makes us equally unhappy? like it’ll be a little bit higher price than, I want, a little bit lower price than you want, but let’s just get on with life and abandon the pretense of posturing or any of that nonsense.

Sean: Yeah, Mike, this makes me think of, uh, do you know who Greg Popovich is? The San Antonio Spurs coach?

Mike: I know of

him, but 

Sean: so one of the greatest coaches of all time, this makes me think of Tim Duncan, NBA Hall of Famer. and when he was thinking of drafting Tim Duncan, Tim Duncan, I’m pretty sure it’s from Barbados.

Greg Popovich flies down there, stays in his home for four days, doesn’t mention the word basketball one time. All he was trying to do was uncover the underlying ways this guy operates in the world. that story just always stuck with me. So I’m thinking for you, Popovich…

Mike: and, sorry, not to interrupt you,

but 

Sean: please do.

Mike: you mention that because like I, I spend a lot of time in the realm of going down the rabbit hole of recruiting, like, like Coach K, how does he recruit basketball players at Duke? Sam Hinkey. How did he. Arbitrage, his understanding of good players when he built the 76 ERs.

if, if you go down the path of what’s gonna make a great founder, you start to cover some of the same intellectual territory that you would cover if you wanted to find LeBron James in high school. And, and so, you know, you, you kind of go down that area. So, sorry, I didn’t mean to interupt you.

Sean: No, no. anything you say is gonna be 10 times more fascinating. Interesting than what, what’s gonna come outta my mouth here, Mike, but, I, I’m wondering, so Popovich has top of funnel. He’s got college basketball, high school basketball. You said these people that you’re looking at now have never started the company.

So for you, what are you, how are you even getting introduced to these people?

Mike: yeah, it kind of depends. A lot of times the founders I work with will introduce me to other founders. So that’s like one of the, one of the unfair advantages that you get in venture if you have some success early is that, You get better deal flow because people think you know something, but you also get better deal flow because you, the, the founders that succeed know a bunch of people who are really good and so they, they start to send them your way.

Right? So like, when I was working with Kevin Rose at Digg, he’s the one who’s introduced me to Neil Young at NG MoCo. Right. Which ended up having a really good exit. and then the other thing that you learn if you’re involved with really good companies, you get a lot of proprietary insight, right? So like there were a lot of people who, who were saying to me, Twitter is not gonna do realtime search.

And I’m like, eh, I I don’t think that, I don’t think you’re right. I think, I think they are gonna do real time search. And because cuz I know something when it relates to that topic, right? So you get, you also get a lot of proprietary insight, when you’re working.

 let’s imagine that you’re on the board of, uh, box. well, it’d be interesting to ask Aaron Levy. What types of files are being stored on box that are growing the most?

Sean: Hmm.

Mike: And let’s say that the answer to that is corporate videos. I’m just making this

up. You would have a, an insight about the future.

Now an entrepreneur walks into your office and says, I’m using AI to do corporate videos faster. You’re like, Hmm. That’s the biggest growing file type out there. you start to draw connections that you might not have ordinarily drawn.

Sean: yeah. Interesting.

Mike: Yeah. so that’s kind of what you’re trying to do.

And you’re trying to do the same with people, right. And you’re trying to, um, you know, the other thing has to do with, the types of questions that you ask. And so, um, I’ll ask questions like, um, tell me something that you practice at a lot. Because if somebody practices something a lot, and I don’t care what it is, playing the piano art, a sport of some sort, where they’re trying to get meaningfully better, that means they have an ethos of compounding that means that they’re likely to grow in their job.

That means that, they’re likely to be much better in the future than they are even now. or, you know, I’ll ask, um, what’s a project of your own that you did, just because it was interesting to you when you were young? so you try to, you, you try to understand what makes them tick.

And then I try to understand what, unresolved differences they have with the world. were they picked on in high school? So someday I’ll show you guy who picked on me. I’m gonna be, captain of the industry. you’ll see, so there’s sort of, you’re trying to, you’re trying to understand them in a very sort of fundamental way.

Sean: do all of those underlying motivations, do they have to come from, let’s call it a negative space, you’re being fueled by anger, resentment, something like that? Or is there a…

Mike: i, I think it’s a, I think it’s a combination, right? I think there’s, positive and negative emotions, right? but I do think that you have to, you know, startups are impossible. And, you have to be so in love with the mission that you’ll never give up, but you also have to, I, I believe it’s helpful to have unfinished business with the world because like, then your temperament becomes such that you just, you, you just can’t even fathom failing, right?

You just like, you just can’t even imagine a world where you fail and you’re just like, I’m gonna do, do what it takes to MacGyver, my way to success.

Sean: yeah. I, I would say 90% of the people that I’ve worked with are more from the negative space. Two of the people that I can never get outta my head though, Roger Federer, a true artist on the court and how he approaches his craft, how he approaches it, just has always stuck with me being so pulled by love and beauty of the game.

And then also Brune Cuccinelli, the legendary fashion designer. obviously he came from an incredibly poor background, but he seems so pulled towards the future.

Mike: Yeah, and most of the founders that I work with are more that way.you know, it’s funny, most founders that I work with who start great startups, they do it for aesthetic reasons. they believe that the, their aesthetic view of the future is superior to the present aesthetically. And so they, you know, disruption in some ways is an unfortunate word.

You know, like the Logan and John, when they did Lyft, they weren’t like death to taxis, they were just like, Ride sharing’s gonna be awesome. And so, like, you know, the, the founders that I work with, who I’ve had the best results with, usually come from a place of wanting to create abundance.

And they come from a place of, um, you know, want wanting to actualize an aesthetically better future.

Sean: Hmm. So always thinking about that better future. We’re gonna wrap up here in a minute, but I’m thinking about that better future for your kids. What type of lessons have you tried to show them over all these years?

Mike: I guess a couple things. one is we talked about this a little bit already, but, none of us knows how long we’re gonna have. but the fact that we have any time is a miracle. And so honor the gift of your time every day because, it won’t last forever. And in fact, the day won’t last beyond the day. But then the other thing is, because we get to live it all, because we get to honor the gift of our time at all, it helps to be optimistic about the future, right? It helps to like view the world in a glass half full way because you got to live another day. And, there’s a lot of forces in this world that conspired make you pessimistic about the human condition or what’s gonna happen or things like that.

and I just think that optimism is a better way to go through life. you don’t wanna be delusional optimistic, but believing that you can change things for the better, I think is a better sort of, um, is a better way to show up in the world than not believing you

can. Um, so those are the main things.

And then, and then the other most of it too is honor the gift of your time. Don’t, don’t try to do anything like how I did it. Don’t try to, don’t try to emulate anything. In fact, don’t even have any heroes. having heroes is a symptom of immaturity. you can admire the traits of certain people, but your job is not to be like anybody.

Your job is to be the best version of you that you can be. And there’s only one you. Right? And so if you’re your best self, you’ll be impossible to compete with.

Sean: Hmm.

Mike: And so, you know, that’s, that, that’s the other thing is, is, uh, you know, lean into the idea of being your best self and don’t apologize for it.

Don’t wish you were something that you’re not. That kind of thing.

Sean: I love that. Mike, final one. You’re so curious. Say you could do this long form interview, sit down with anyone dead or alive, who would you love to spend in the evening with?

Mike: Um, Jesus. and not, not for the reasons that some people might think, I’m not super religious, but. Jesus had a philosophy that was really interesting, that I think is lost on a lot of people. And, and this has nothing to do with whether you believe everything that’s in the Bible or not, right?

Jesus basically proposed the idea of, unconditional love, right? Like so before, before Jesus, whenever you have conflict, there’s kind of this Renee Ardian sort of sacrifice ritual where somebody would be sacrificed and blamed for the tension, and then they, once they’re sacrificed, there’s this big release and there’s harmony again.

What Jesus said by sacrificing himself, Jesus exposed the myth of sacrifice as a way to have harmony, and he exposed the injustice of not respecting the rights of people. And so what did his philosophy emphasize? The first thing that it emphasized was, Loving yourself, understanding that you have a right to exist for its own sake.

And that, a lot of times people get upset because they, don’t believe in themselves or they feel disrespected or they feel self-conscious. And then the second thing is unconditional love of the other. and so like, let’s say you’re in a relationship and you do something and that the other person doesn’t like it, they start to complain.

Well, it is tempting to say, why are you such a complainer? But like, if you unconditionally love the other person, you wouldn’t say that because you’re not helping them by saying that you’re not helping anybody. So what you would say instead is like, look, somehow we got crossways here. let’s just go backwards because like, we have unconditional love for each other.

So like, It’s crazy that we would fight over this. Like, let’s figure out how to fix this, but I’m gonna assume that you are showing up in good faith. You assume I’m showing up in good faith. and then the third is own your own behavior. So when you make a mistake, you say, Hey, this is how I would’ve handled it differently.

And I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna expect you to apologize. I’m not gonna like, I have enough regard for myself that when I make a mistake, I can just own my own behavior. And it doesn’t, it doesn’t have anything to do with what you’re willing to do or not do. And so, like, when you think about it, most conflicts that happen between people, it’s, I find it’s either they, they lost sight of their self regard, they lost sight of unconditional love for the other, or they wouldn’t own their own behavior because they expected somebody else to do something before they did.

And I find that when I returned to that, As a way of thinking about stuff that it helps me a lot. I would’ve liked to have talked to him about that. Right. I think, I think he would’ve had some interesting ideas about that. And, but I would’ve, I would’ve liked to have talked to him like in the realm of philosophy, not in the realm of, is there an afterlife or more in the realm of like, how should relationships work and how was the, how had the paradigm of the way society’s worked up until that point been broken and how could it be improved?

Sean: Hmm. Mike Maples Jr. This has been one that I’ve been looking forward to for a long, long time. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this. Where do you want the listener staying connected with you and everything that you guys are doing at Floodgate?

Mike: Yeah, I guess, uh, you know, uh, www.floodgate.com is our website. My Twitter is, uh, at M two Jr. And then my podcast is, uh, starting Greatness. so a lot, lot of the stuff we talked about today is kind of the themes of the podcast, right? Like, what is it,what was it like when a company was in zero to one that ultimately had a breakthrough?

What can we learn from the things that they got? Right? we have some pretty good guests on the show.

Sean: Well, you have some amazing guests, but then you dive so specifically on certain tactics for shorter episodes, which are just incredibly impactful for any entrepreneurs. So yeah, I think the podcast is exceptional. So really good work there.

Mike: Hey, well, thanks. Yeah. mean, it’s, it is fun and it’s like, it, plays into, it plays into some of the things I know about, right? Like, I can, ask certain things of the founders that wouldn’t be as obvious for somebody who hasn’t invested in startups. yeah. So it’s, it’s a, it’s a fun group of people to work with for sure.

Sean: Great. Well thanks so much for joining us today and what got you there?

Mike: All right. Thanks for having me.