Mike Maples Jr
Mike Maples, Jr. is a legendary early-stage startup investor and a co-founder and partner at Floodgate. He’s made early bets on transformative companies like Twitter, Lyft, Twitch, Okta, Rappi, and Applied Intuition and is one of the pioneers of seed-stage investing as a category. He’s been on the Forbes Midas List eight times and enjoys sharing the lessons he’s learned from his years studying iconic companies. In his new book, Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future, co-authored with Peter Ziebelman, he discusses what he’s found separates startups and founders that break through and change the world from those that don’t. After spending years reviewing the notes and decks from the thousands of startups he’s known over the past two decades, he’s uncovered three ways that breakthrough founders think and act differently.
Communication Skills
A high-impact pitch deck should lead with a simple description of the product followed immediately by a non-obvious insight.
"Slide one, you say what you do as if I literally know nothing... the second thing that I say to people is, I think your second slide ought to be, here's the thing we know that's not obvious... then sl..."
Growth Skills
Product-market fit is found at the intersection of a unique offering and extreme customer desperation.
"In the early days of product market fit, I like to say we want to answer a very simple but profound question. What can we uniquely offer that people are desperate for?"
Use pricing experiments to discover the demand curve and uncover non-obvious truths about customer value.
"Rather than just test whether people would rent a $100 dollar textbook for $35, they tested an arbitrary set of prices, all the way up to $75... the surprise was that they would rent them for more tha..."
Leadership Skills
Breakthrough success requires a willingness to be non-consensus and potentially wrong.
"Any coin that says can't lose bad on one side of it might as well say, can't win big on the other side. It's your willingness to fail that lets you have breakthrough success."
Marketing Skills
Effective positioning forces the customer to make a choice between the old way and a new category, rather than comparing features.
"The way startups win is by being radically different. A startup wins by avoiding the comparison trap entirely... that's what we mean by forcing a choice and not a comparison."
Position against incumbents by identifying the 'weakness in their strength'—the inherent trade-offs of their successful business model.
"The great startups, they create movements not so much by criticizing the incumbent, but by showing the weakness in the strength of the incumbent. And then just saying to the customer, 'Hey, look, you..."
In startup storytelling, the customer is the hero (Luke Skywalker) and the founder is the mentor (Obi-Wan) providing the tools to reach a better future.
"The storytelling primitive ends up working spectacularly well for startups, right? We need to describe the world that is, we need to describe the world that could be... your job as the founder is to b..."
Storytelling should appeal to aesthetic and belief-based reasons for change, not just pragmatic ones.
"A movement is a way to crystallize the choice... The people who followed Martin Luther King bought into the aesthetically better future that his movement promised."
Product Management Skills
Breakthrough vision is created through 'backcasting'—starting with a radically different future and working backward—rather than forecasting from the present.
"Great founders, pattern breakers back cast, they say, it's a given that the future has to be radically different for me to be a big winner, and so, I'm going to look for radically different futures an..."
A successful product vision should disorient incumbents by proposing a future they are not prepared for.
"The way startups win is because it proposes a radically different future. Disorients the incumbent and chaotically moves people to that different future."
Analyze incumbents to find where their greatest strength becomes a liability in a new context.
"The great startups, they create movements not so much by criticizing the incumbent, but by showing the weakness in the strength of the incumbent."
Startups should define problems through the lens of customer desperation, where no viable alternative exists.
"We want to solve problems for desperate people... if a customer has the ability to do something other than what you do to solve their problem, they won't be crazy enough to do business with a startup."