Pattern Breakers
Host Mike Maples Jr. from venture capital firm Floodgate offers lessons from the rare startup super performers — BEFORE they were successful. Pattern Breakers features interviews with some of Silicon Valley’s most legendary entrepreneurs and thought leaders, including Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Kreiger, business maverick Mark Cuban, and Shopify co-founder Tobi Lütke.
Episodes
James Beshara: How a Dangerous Problem Led to a Magical Solution
For most of his 20s, James Beshara tried to go big as a startup founder in a hot category where he burned tons of money in hopes of getting big fast. Instead, he ended up with a heart condition and a fire sale. So he decided to radically rethink his approach, and start with a problem that he actually had. With coffee off the menu due to his medical condition, he began asking what he could use to s
Immad Akhund: How Mercury Saved The Day For Startups
When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed over 48 hours in March 2023, it marked the third-largest bank failure in United States history and the largest since the 2008 financial crisis. But the fintech company Mercury was willing and ready to save the day for startups in need, landing $2 billion in new deposits in five days. That's what it looks like when a founder who thinks about a problem all the time
John Zimmer: Pink Mustaches, Rideshare Wars, and the Legacy of Lyft
Lyft co-founder John Zimmer helped spark a movement to revolutionize transportation, but the road was never a smooth one. Zimmer and co-founder Logan Green had to outmaneuver entrenched taxi monopolies and rewrite the rules of urban mobility on the fly, all while scaling a business model that many experts insisted was a logistical impossibility and battling Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick for mark
Spenser Skates: How Perseverance Paid Off for Amplitude
When Amplitude launched in 2012, the analytics market looked crowded, and the company spent more than a year struggling to find any traction. But co-founder and CEO Spenser Skates prioritized truth seeking over narratives. He studied the outcomes of past Y Combinator batches and noticed a simple rule: Most companies died before they even learned enough to make something that people want. All Ampl
Wade Foster: Why Zapier is Built for the AI Revolution
When Wade Foster was a kid growing up in Jefferson City, Missouri, there weren’t many models for how to carve out a career in entrepreneurship. But when he and his friend Bryan Helmig developed an easier way to help users connect web-based applications, they ushered in what would eventually become Zapier, a remote automation giant that’s now worth an estimated $5 billion and is ideally positioned
Howie Liu: Building Airtable to Feel Magical
Spreadsheets were originally designed for finance people. But when Howie Liu and his co-founders started Airtable in 2012, they had a deeper insight that a spreadsheet-database hybrid could be used by anyone for just about anything, including project management, content calendars, recipes, and even travel itineraries. Now the company is valued at an estimated $4 billion, and it’s a prime example
Joe Liemandt: The AI-Powered School Rewriting the Future of Education
Long before he attended Stanford, founded software giant Trilogy, or became the youngest member of the Forbes 400, Joe Liemandt wrote a high school paper about the potential for a futuristic technology called Artificial Intelligence. Four decades later Liemandt sits in the principal’s chair at Alpha School, an AI-powered private school founded in Austin, Texas with a revolutionary approach to lear
Mårten Mickos: Essential Lessons From A Legendary Tech CEO
Mårten Mickos isn't the kind of CEO who tries to dream up world-changing ideas or invent brand new markets. Perhaps best known for leading MySQL to becoming a $1 billion success story that powered Facebook, Google, and YouTube, Mickos also led teams at Eucalyptus and HackerOne and has consistently shown an ability to convert the potential energy of an idea into the kinetic energy of execution.
In
Eric Schmidt: The Implications of Superintelligence
Best known as the CEO who helped transform Google from a promising startup into one of the best businesses in human history, Eric Schmidt has recently become one of the most important voices in the global conversation about artificial intelligence. He’s co-written two books on the subject including the New York Times bestseller Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit, co-writ
Pedro Franceschi: Lessons from an Evolving Entrepreneur, from Hacking iPhones to Building Brex
At just 13 years of age, Pedro Franceschi was one of the first to jailbreak the iPhone. By the time he was 15 he had co-founded a payments company that would process over a billion in transactions. And by the time he was in his early 20s, helped transform a last minute YC pivot into Brex, one of the most iconic fintech breakout stories of the decade.
In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr. of Floodgate
Mitchell Hashimoto: How Solving His Own Problem Sparked HashiCorp
The most successful founders don't usually chase startup ideas. Instead, they're pulled toward problems they can't ignore. Back in 2009, Mitchell Hashimoto set out to fix what frustrated him by hacking nights and weekends, open sourcing the tools he wished had existed for over a year. His quiet persistence and commitment to fixing the problem ignited one of the decade's most influential cloud co
Jake Knapp: The Founder’s Guide to Product-Market Fit
For startups in the zero to one phase, finding product-market fit isn't everything. It’s the only thing. And there are few people in the entrepreneurial world better at solving the product-market fit puzzle than Jake Knapp, who helped build Microsoft Encarta and Gmail, co-founded Google Meet, and has advised teams at Miro, Slack, LEGO and NASA on product strategy and time management. Knapp also w
Amjad Masad: Resolve, Persistence, and the Rise of Replit
Amjad Masad's journey is defined by relentless persistence. Born and raised in Jordan, he borrowed computers to teach himself coding, and then earned money building software for local internet cafes. He applied to Y Combinator again and again, finally gaining acceptance on his fourth try. His constant drive fueled continuous improvement, culminating in the breakthrough success of Replit, the $1.1B
Aaron Levie: The Restless Founder Plotting the Future of Cloud Storage and AI
When the team behind Box first went looking for funding back in 2005, they tried just about every trick in the book. They sent Bill Gates a fax. They dropped a prospectus off at Paul Allen’s house in Seattle. And they took a shot at convincing Mark Cuban to join two ambitious college kids with a hunch the way businesses stored and collaborated around information was about to change. Two decades l
Guillermo Rauch: The Product Visionary Fueling Vercel and Millions of Developers
Guillermo Rauch didn’t find success by accident. He began working on computers as a kid growing up in Argentina and was hooked immediately, eventually falling in love with programming and open source before moving to Silicon Valley. Since then his blend of technical foresight, audacious ambition and obsessive attention to detail in products has made him the successful CEO of Vercel, the cloud pla
Zach Perret: The Survival Story of a Fintech Giant
Long before Plaid became a $13.4 billion fintech juggernaut, it was just another struggling startup. Co-founders Zach Perret and William Hockey burned through cash and pivoted from one failed idea to the next, ultimately getting turned away by roughly 100 VCs during seed round funding. But Plaid persevered, and eventually revolutionized how financial data moved through the internet, eventually boa
Baiju Bhatt: First Robinhood, Next …. Outer Space?
As the co-founder of Robinhood, Baiju Bhatt didn't just help launch a company. He sparked a movement that fundamentally shifted the dynamics of investing, and created a new path for everyday people to participate in the markets. But can the man who changed the way people think about money do the same for energy? In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr. of Floodgate speaks with Bhatt about the origins of
Josh Reeves: How Gusto Took The Pain Out Of Payroll
When Josh Reeves, Tomer London and Edward Kim founded Gusto in 2012, roughly 40 percent of the employers in the United States were still doing their payroll by hand. Thousands of small business owners spent their time reading up on various federal and local tax codes or buried in late-night paperwork, drained of the energy to truly chase their dreams. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr. of Floodgate
Breakthrough Lesson: RIP To Old-School Marketing
Most startups stick to traditional methods of getting their message out. Pattern Breakers, however, don't follow the old rules of marketing. Instead they ignite a movement where they ultimately rise to the top, uncontested, while others later scramble for the leftovers. In this Breakthrough Lesson, Mike Maples Jr. of Floodgate examines three lessons learned from the recent viral breakout of the ed
Niels Hoven: Teaching Two Year-Olds to Read Like Second Graders
The team behind the educational technology company Mentava is a small one, but its product idea is extremely ambitious: An app that teaches two year-olds to read at a second grade level. The idea is the brainchild of founder Niels Hoven, a father of four committed to accelerating K-12 education and helping high-achieving kids reach their true potential. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr. of Floodga
Daphne Koller: Changing Lives With Coursera
Few startup founders follow a path to success like Daphne Koller, a polymath whose academic career in machine learning, computer vision, and computational biology make her a force far beyond the business arena. Koller left her academic career at Stanford in 2012 to co-found Coursera, the world’s largest platform for massive open online courses (MOOCs). After building the company into a global phen
Pattern Breakers: Which Startups Change the Future?
On this special episode of Pattern Breakers, host Mike Maples Jr. of Floodgate joins LinkedIn founder and legendary investor Reid Hoffman for a conversation on Hoffman’s podcast Masters of Scale, where iconic business leaders share lessons and strategies that have helped them grow the world's most fascinating companies. Mike discusses the insights he’s gathered from decades of investing, inflectio
A Sneak Peek at Pattern Breakers
Today is a huge day for Pattern Breakers, the book.Co-written with Peter Zeibelman of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Pattern Breakers has been dubbed “the most important start-up book of the last ten years” by legendary entrepreneur and co-creator of the Lean Startup movement Steve Blank. Pattern Breakers draws from decades of experience in entrepreneurship and venture capital from its
Maddie Hall: A Different Path to the Future
There is no single path to becoming the founder of a pattern-breaking startup. For Maddie Hall, her journey began with a crucial choice: to brainstorm startup ideas or to spend time with people already shaping the future. She chose the latter, following Sam Altman at OpenAI as his Chief of Staff. This experience, along with the connections and knowledge she gained, inspired her to co-found Living
Breakthrough Lessons: Founder-Future Fit
Check out the Pattern Breakers Blog at patternbreakers.substack.com for even more Pattern Breaking content from Mike. Mike's book Pattern Breakers is available now wherever you buy books.Follow Mike on X!
Justin Kan: Pattern Breaker Personified
If pattern breaker was a term in the dictionary, you just might find an image of Justin Kan. From his attempts as a teenager to send a camera to outer space, to selling his first company on Ebay, to strapping a camera to his head to play the starring role on Justin.tv, Kan has always been a man with uncommon ideas and the ability to convince people to follow his lead. On this episode, Mike Maples,
Breakthrough Lessons: The Value of a Superbuilder
In the early days of a start-up, the superbuilder can be as important to greatness as the start-up leader, and they’re often not the same person. But what are the traits of a great superbuilder, and why do they play such a crucial role in the zero to one phase of a company? In this Breakthrough Lesson, Mike Maples, Jr of Floodgate discusses the success of superbuilder Kyle Vogt and how his ingenui
Kyle Vogt: A Problem Solver With A Purpose
Kyle Vogt has always been fascinated with designing robots and machines. From his youngest days, he retrofitted his father's car to drive itself along the highways of his home state of Kansas. Later, he dropped out of MIT and became a wildly successful startup founder, playing a crucial role in the development of Justin.tv and Twitch. With Cruise Automation, he returned to his roots, making robota
Breakthrough Lessons: Learning to Savor Surprises
The ability to notice and savor surprises is a key overlooked skill of the greatest founders. It allows you to narrow in on the types of capabilities that will lead to breakthroughs. In this Breakthrough Lesson, Mike Maples, Jr of Floodgate calls on the lessons learned by Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear to discuss why founders should seek surprises instead of validation, and how positive surprises
Emmett Shear: How Twitch Changed Media by Merging it with Gaming
Emmett Shear was a gamer long before he helped define one of the most important new media companies at the intersection of gaming, media, and the creator economy. What can we learn from his success as a founder? (hint: it has something to do with truly listening to users.)
Check out the Pattern Breakers Blog at patternbreakers.substack.com for
even more Pattern Breaking content from Mike.
Mi
Breakthrough Lessons: The One Thing That Matters Most…
In the early days of a startup, finding product-market fit is paramount. Once you have it, failure is almost impossible. Without it, you can do everything else right, and still fail. In this Breakthrough Lesson, Mike Maples, Jr of Floodgate discusses three heuristics for maximizing the odds of success: Find the right North Star, offer a Delta 4 experience, and don’t fool yourself.
Check out the
Michael Seibel: “The Godfounder” Discusses Justin.tv, Twitch, and Y Combinator
Michael Seibel didn’t set out to become a legendary startup founder. As a young man, his sights were set on politics, dreaming of a future on the Supreme Court. But his friendship with fellow Yale classmate Justin Kan led to a fortuitous cross-country trip to California that changed everything. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr. of Floodgate talks with Seibel about the creation of Justin.tv and Twi
Welcome to Pattern Breakers
Mike Maples, Jr. of Floodgate is back with a new season of his podcast, once called Starting Greatness, now renamed Pattern Breakers. The focus remains, but with increased ambitions. In this season intro, Mike explains his reasons for expanding the podcast's scope, what listeners can anticipate going forward, and details about a forthcoming book set to release this summer. Subscribe now so you don
Breakthrough Lessons: Nail Your Niche
Founders are naturally drawn to the tantalizing potential of their product reaching a vast market, but the route to victory starts with nailing a niche before going for the broader opportunity. In this lesson of greatness, Mike Maples, Jr of Floodgate calls on the lessons of Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek to examine how this is done: Identify a stronghold where you can dominate, deliver a Delta 4 e
Daniel Ek: How Spotify Revolutionized The Music Business
When he was a little boy growing up in Sweden, Daniel Ek was obsessed with two things: the binary realm of computers and the artistry of music. As a young adult, he combined his love for both by co-founding Spotify, which became the global standard-bearer for streaming, Spotify now has more than 500 million users per month. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr of Floodgate interviews Daniel Ek to brea
Breakthrough Lessons: Crisis Reveals Greatness
Startup founders dealt with uncertainty, stress and trauma in the wake of the run on Silicon Valley Bank, but the most important lessons from this crisis never showed up in social media. In this lesson of greatness, Mike Maples, Jr of Floodgate calls on the actions of a variety of founders who showed incredible courage and competence to showcase three crucial lessons for founders for how to deal
Untold lessons from the SVB bank run
The recent run on Silicon Valley Bank led to a variety of accusations, recriminations and finger-pointing on social media, but how can FOUNDERS actually learn from the crisis? And what lessons can we learn from the founders who crushed it under tough circumstances? In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr welcomes Floodgate co-founder Ann Miura-Ko on the show to discuss these topics. Mike and Ann also spe
Breakthrough Lessons: Refuse Mediocrity
When we REFUSE to accept mediocrity, we can start building greatness. But how can you avoid the pitfalls of learned helplessness and help your company break through the arbitrary limits that impede progress? In this lesson of greatness, Mike Maples, Jr of Floodgate calls on the lessons of Boom Supersonic founder Blake Scholl to examine three tips to help founders develop startups that change the f
Blake Scholl: How Boom Supersonic Took Flight
More than fifty years after the first Concorde took flight, consumer air travel is actually SLOWER. Blake Scholl and his team at Boom Supersonic are out to reverse this stagnation and change how we think about commercial aviation. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE interviews Scholl to learn more about the history of American aviation, the origins of Boom Supersonic and the challenges
Breakthrough Lessons: Leslie’s Compass
When a startup product goes to market, the two key muscles it can flex are marketing and sales. In nearly every facet of a startup product, marketing or sales takes the natural lead in getting the product to customers. But startups often pour resources into these two areas in unfocused ways, and the results can be disastrous. In this lesson of greatness, Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE discusses the
Mark Leslie: Silicon Valley Go-to-Market Legend (Part 2)
Mike Maples, Jr of Floodgate welcomes back go-to-market expert and Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer Mark Leslie for the second of their two-part interview, this time focusing on the role and responsibilities of a CEO and a deep dive into Leslie’s Compass, an essential set of heuristics for every startup founder. Leslie also discusses the value of founders focusing on a five-year plan
Breakthrough Lessons: The Sales Learning Curve
When a startup launches a new product, it's tempting to ramp its sales force too quickly. Often, this leads to a crash-and-burn scenario for companies that failed to learn what it took for the *entire organization* to achieve product-market-fit. In this lesson of greatness, Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE discusses how Mark Leslie's Sales Learning Curve framework helps startups keep themselves honest
Mark Leslie: Silicon Valley Go-to-Market Legend (Part 1)
During the 1990s, Mark co-founded Veritas Systems, which he piloted from nothing to 6,000 employees and $1.5B in revenue in a decade. Now a lecturer in management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Leslie is one of the foremost experts in go-to-market strategy in Silicon Valley, and in the first of this two-part series with Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE, Leslie discusses what strategies h
Breakthrough Lessons: The Infinite Game
We’re taught from a young age about *finite* sporting games like baseball, basketball, and soccer. Or board games like checkers or chess. Or academic games like grades and test scores. Or status games like credentials and university degrees. In these games, we know the rules and how to determine who scored the highest, according to rules set by someone else. But what about *infinite* games, where
Tobi Lutke: A Startup Founder Arming The Rebels Against Amazon
Growing up in Germany, Shopify co-founder and CEO Tobi Lutke was never quite comfortable with people telling him to do things because that's the way they're done. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE interviews Lutke to discuss the origins of Shopify, the difference between finite games and infinite games, and the reason it's important for startups and companies to always question assumpt
Breakthrough Lessons: The Artistry of Startup Breakthroughs
Too many people mistakenly believe that being a good entrepreneur comes from simply talking to customers and solving their pain. But the most impactful companies are built for aesthetic reasons - think of Twitter, Lyft, Apple, and Medium - and those companies serve as expressions of what their founders thought the world needed. In this lesson of greatness, Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE discusses th
Tim Westergren: How The Band Kept Playing At Pandora
Tim Westergren maxed out 11 credit cards, racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and was rejected 348 times for a second round of funding for his revolutionary idea for a music streaming platform. But like any true artist, Westergren remained committed to his vision of creating an aesthetically more beautiful future with Pandora, and now the company boasts more than 6 million monthly
Breakthrough Lessons: “BIG D" Design
Lots of people think about design from the perspective of how a product should look and function. But design can be applied to greatness on many more levels than most realize. In this lesson of greatness, Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE discusses how you can design your opportunity, your team, your market, your category, your culture, and even your own life. "Big D" design is about understanding that
Qasar Younis and Peter Ludwig of Applied Intuition: A Startup Designed to Win
Qasar Younis and Peter Ludwig both grew up in the backyard of American automotive giant General Motors in Detroit, but didn’t cross paths until their days as product managers at Google. Since then they’ve pooled their affinity for cars and technology as the co-founders of Applied Intuition, a fast-moving startup that has already achieved greatness with their advanced simulation software for autono
Breakthrough Lessons: How to Defeat "We're F*cked, It's Over" (WFIO) Moments
Your startup will face multiple WFIO moments on the path to greatness...COUNT ON IT. But that doesn’t mean you should let these moments get inside your head. In this lesson of greatness, Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE discusses how every startup team MUST be prepared to take the initiative in the crucible of the WFIO moments they will inevitably face. The bright side? You can use these horrible situ
Ben Horowitz: “The IPO From Hell” and Other REAL Lessons from the Startup Crucible
Startups are romanticized AFTER they win. But it takes extraordinary grit to have what it TAKES to win. Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of Andreessen-Horowitz, is the perfect guest to tell it like it is, as he has for many years in his books "the Hard Thing About Hard Things" and "What You Do Is Who You Are." Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE interviews Ben to discuss the ups and downs of dealing with "t
Breakthrough Lessons: The future is DESIGNED, not predicted
Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel understands that the task of a revolutionary startup is to manifest a radically different future, and not merely settle for a marginal improvement. But how did he make that future a reality with messenger RNA Therapeutics, and how can you do it with your startup? In this lesson of greatness, Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE goes in-depth on the three strategies to designing
Stephane Bancel of Moderna: $5B and 10 years on the path to changing humanity
What’s it like to run a startup that has achieved its goal of impacting humanity at a time of desperate need? Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel joins Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE to discuss the power of taking offensive risks to seize unlikely futures with massive upside, sometimes with the result of changing the odds of life itself. For founders seeking greatness, the conversation also teases out many
Breakthrough Lessons: Apply Game Design to Business Software
Rahul Vohra shows us how game design can be used to make business products far more engaging and contribute to a state of flow. Since future success in business software and services is increasingly driven by product-led growth and bottoms-up adoption driven by end-users, mastering game design is vital for startups seeking greatness. In this lesson of greatness, Mike Maples, Jr talks about the spe
Rahul Vohra of Superhuman: How to create business products people *enjoy* using
Rahul Vohra of Superhuman has adopted some of the most cutting-edge approaches to making a business product people *want* to use, rather than have to use. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE talks to Rahul about how any startup founder can apply the principles of game design to their products, and why this is becoming increasingly important in a world where users (rather than IT) increas
Breakthrough Lessons: The Myth of TAM
The conventional thinking is that a big total available market (TAM) is one of the most important factors in startup success. But Julia Hartz's success at Eventbrite shows the limits of this thinking. In this Lesson of Greatness, Mike Maples Jr of Floodgate talks about the difference between available markets and potential markets and offers heuristics for determining the potential market for futu
Julia Hartz: From Zero to One to IPO and Beyond
Eventbrite CEO Julia Hartz didn't start out life thinking she would be a tech founder, but she has achieved a feat that's very rare: Starting a great startup and going the distance, even past IPO. She also navigated one of the toughest setbacks in recent tech history when the COVID-19 pandemic jeopardized Eventbrite's entire business. In this episode, Mike Maples Jr interviews Julia Hartz to discu
Breakthrough Lessons: Price Before You Build
Most startups postpone pricing decisions until after the product is developed. They HOPE they can make money rather than KNOW they will at the outset. In this Lesson of Greatness, pricing guru Madhavan Ramanujam shows us that without a price, you literally don't have a product. Therefore, we should follow some of the best practices aligned with having the willingness to pay discussion early and in
Pricing Guru Madhavan Ramanujam: How Smart Startups Design Their Products Around the Price
New startups fail for many reasons. Perhaps the most obvious is they can't get people to pay the necessary price for their products. Madhavan Ramanujam's book Monetizing Innovation, is the foremost guide in the industry for startups who want to make pricing a core part of their success rather than an afterthought. In this interview, Mike Maples Jr of Floodgate talks to Madhavan about the key succe
Breakthrough Lessons: Find your wave before your market
The best startups almost always ride a wave that represents a sea change. Such waves give the founders the power to show up with a radically different idea that changes the subject -- and the future. In this lesson of greatness, Mike Maples Jr talks about how the example of Jerry Yang and David Filo at Yahoo illustrates this perfectly and how you can leverage this insight as a founder seeking your
Jerry Yang: How Yahoo went from a hobby to the early King of the Internet
Before Google or Facebook; prior to the days of snapping, tweeting, and texting....Yahoo was the original King of the Internet. But in the early days, Jerry Yang and David Filo weren't sure if it was even a valid business. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr of Floodgate interviews Jerry Yang about what it was like to learn that what started out as a hobby was destined for business greatness.
Chec
Breakthrough Lessons: Hire like your life depends on it
Many startup founders would agree that team building is the most important part of startup success. But very few startups actually live it. The founders of Cloudflare offer key lessons in how to start with the right founding team, how to collaborate more effectively, how to design a company culture....and most importantly, how to make hiring the very best your top priority...for real.
Check out
Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn of Cloudflare: How to build a better Company as well as a better Internet
It takes a lot of effort to build a breakthrough product. It's perhaps even rarer to design a company that endures. In this interview, Mike Maples Jr of Floodgate interviews Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn of Cloudflare to highlight what we can learn about how to get a startup's foundation right, along with recruiting, hiring, and company design.
Check out the Pattern Breakers Blog at patter
Breakthrough Lessons: Why you must master risk-taking to seize greatness
Most people think that risk should be avoided. But Vinod Khosla teaches us otherwise...Risk is something people *take* when they create breakthroughs. This lesson of greatness talks about the key frameworks for why this is the case as well as how to take risks intelligently to tilt the odds in your favor.
Check out the Pattern Breakers Blog at patternbreakers.substack.com for
even more Pattern
Vinod Khosla: Your willingness to fail is what will let you succeed
Vinod Khosla is a Silicon Valley legend, having achieved greatness as a founder with Sun Microsystems and as one of the best venture capitalists of all time. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr of Floodgate talks to Vinod about why it's wrong for breakthrough builders to play it safe and how to turn the odds in your favor when setting out to build a massive breakthrough.
Check out the Pattern Brea
Breakthrough Lessons: Design your category
Startups change the future so they MUST be different, rather than better. Christopher Lochhead shows us how category designers realize that different is believable from a startup, but better is not. Any powerful startup idea pre-supposes an exponentially different future, which means your startup MUST change the way the people think about the future rather than incrementally improve on the product
Christopher Lochhead: Why Legendary Startups create Categories
Christopher Lochhead is a bestselling author, #1-rated podcaster, and one of the best marketing minds of our time. As one of the co-inventors of category design, Christopher offers valuable insights for startups wanting to stand out in an ever noisier world. In this episode, Mike Maples Jr talks to Christopher Lochhead to clarify what category design is and why it’s vital for founders determined t
Breakthrough Lessons: DESIGN for network effects
Many founders claim their startups contain network effects, but many of these claims only scratch the surface. Networks that achieve greatness are designed, with many trade-offs and factors in mind regarding the "nodes," how interactions take place, what causes people to stay engaged, and the types of relationships that get created. Anu Hariharan shows us the specific decisions and trade-offs we c
Anu Hariharan: How to think about network effects for your startup, from the beginning
Anu Hariharan from YCombinator's Continuity fund is one of Silicon Valley's top experts on network effects and how they can be applied to all types of different businesses. In this interview, Mike Maples of Floodgate talks to Anu about how a raw startup can design network effects into its business as a core strategy from the very beginning.
Check out the Pattern Breakers Blog at patternbreakers
Breakthrough Lessons: Start a Movement; not just a business
David Sacks demonstrates how the best startup founders talk about causes much bigger than themselves or the companies they're building. Google was about organizing the world's information. Tesla was about moving the world to sustainability, not just selling cars. These startup leaders saw a world that they wanted to create and built a movement around their visions. Sacks shows us how great startup
David Sacks: Legendary Startup Product Expert
David Sacks, known as one of the best startup product strategists and operators of the last 20 years, discusses key lessons learned from his tenure in the PayPal Mafia, where he was head of product, along with key takeaways as founding CEO of Yammer and what he learned from working directly with industry greats like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.
Check out the Pattern Breakers Blog at patternbreake
Breakthrough Lessons: Be a Learn-it-All; not a Know-it-All
Maybe you've struggled with needing to seem in charge or on top of a challenging situation, even when you're unsure of what to do. If so, you've likely heard the siren song that tempts you to be a know-it-all. But Matt Mullenweg shows us how the learn-it-all is most likely to achieve greatness. Check out Mike’s interview with Bob Metcalfe (of Metcalfe’s Law) where he also discusses leadership less
Matt Mullenweg: How a modest empire builder powered a huge chunk of the web
Wordpress CEO Matt Mullenweg talks with Mike Maples Jr of Floodgate about his early successes, setbacks, and what founders can learn from his continued growth as a manager and leader.
Check out the Pattern Breakers Blog at patternbreakers.substack.com for
even more Pattern Breaking content from Mike.
Mike's book Pattern Breakers is available now wherever you buy books.
Follow Mike on X!
Breakthrough Lessons: ALWAYS know your competitive edge
Mark Cuban shows us that it's not enough to play by the rules as they are defined. If you are going to achieve greatness as a startup, you need to find your EDGE...which means you have to outmaneuver your competition before they even engage with you on the competitive battlefield. You have to change the rules to your advantage and not just play by the rules as they are given to you. Never fall int
Mark Cuban: You only have to be right once...if you take big enough swings along the way
Mike Maples of Floodgate talks to Mark Cuban about a wide range of topics with a common theme...you have to go after opportunities where the stakes are high enough that when you win, you can win BIG. And as a corollary, you have to anticipate that giant competitors will try to stop you because otherwise, you are thinking too small.
Check out the Pattern Breakers Blog at patternbreakers.substack
Breakthrough Lessons: Thinking in Bets
Annie Duke shows us that making high-quality decisions is one of the most important skills we can build for improving our odds of success in startups and in life. It's also a skill that can be sharpened and improved over time, regardless of how uncertain the circumstances. By adopting scientifically-proven frameworks from her books "Thinking in Bets" and "How to Decide," we can make better predict
Annie Duke: Decision-making Secrets from a World Series of Poker Champion
(04:51) - Explaining what makes a decision good or bad (6:36) - On how memory creep impacts our view of Hilary Clinton’s 2016 campaign (11:30) - On the use of a knowledge tree to inform decision making (16:59) - Looking at Pete Carrol’s controversial decision in the Super Bowl (26:16) - On founders falling into a trap around pricing their product (38:08) - When to make informed decisions and fol
Breakthrough Lessons: Get REAL
Tim Ferriss' success shows the value of building real things for real people rather than creating abstract approximations that represent what's real. The lessons of getting real apply directly to startups who want to avoid the trap of unshaped work and indirect understanding of what customers are truly desperate for.
Check out Mike’s interviews with Steve Blank for more learnings on product-marke
How Tim Ferriss found product-market fit for “The Four Hour Workweek”
(2:47) - Tim looks back at the origins of the 4-Hour Workweek and early incarnations of the book (9:30) - Mike and Tim discuss the idea of talking to real customers and of “getting real” to increase the chances of your startup’s success (12:41) - Tim offers his thoughts on category design and the importance of creating a category, as well as working in categories where there were few competitors
Welcome to Season 2!
In this opener for Season 2, Floodgate Co-Founder Mike Maples, Jr talks sets the agenda for a new season of Starting Greatness and plans for taking the show and content to the next level.
Check out the Pattern Breakers Blog at patternbreakers.substack.com for
even more Pattern Breaking content from Mike.
Mike's book Pattern Breakers is available now wherever you buy books.
Follow Mike on X!
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