Mike Maples Jr.

“A startup isn't a company because it starts out dead and has to prove it's alive. And so I like to say there's a sequence of breakthroughs. There's the insight breakthrough, and then there's the value proposition breakthrough, and then the growth breakthrough.”

“I like to assert it should be a minimum three years.”

“I generally believe that most great startups are born of these exponential improvement curves that are beneath them. They're like gathering waves in an ocean that you surf back to the beach. And I think it's really hard without a gathering wave to really be gr…”

“Brian Chesky at Airbnb at the time is called Airbed and Breakfast pitched me And I passed, and I had an opportunity to invest 250,000 dollars that would now be worth close to a billion.”

“And so I think if I'm a founder, if I cannot answer clearly what technology inflections are happening that can be calibrated that I'm taking advantage of, I should either evaluate whether my insights powerful enough in the first place, or if I've just thought …”

“And so I think fundamentally in venture, you can do more with scale or you can do less, but better. And you just have to decide.”

“And then I came up to California to see what was happening in California this about 2004, and I decided if I was going to be in venture, I needed to do it in California. So I came up here without a job, and my kids were in school, so I'd fly up every Sunday ni…”

“Being non-consensus and right is not about living in the present and just saying, hey, the world is going right, so I'm going to go left. Being non-consensus and right is discovering something in the future that others don't see yet and making the bet that wha…”

“I believe that you can't really skip a step. You got to have an insight before you do customer development, and you got to do customer development before you do smart growth. And so to the extent that raising too much too soon Causes people to skip those steps…”

“But I think that most startups right now wildly underestimate how much runway they need and have for quite some time.”

“If they want to be in every part of it, if they want to be in seed, if they want to be in series A in growth, and someday maybe be hedge funds, that's up to them, and I wish them well, but usually I tend to believe that the best long-term strategy is to be mor…”

“If customer development is about getting out of the building, insight development is about getting out of the present, and it's about trying to put yourself into situations where you can live in the future and notice what's missing before other people notice”

“But I think that the people that have played the momentum game are going to struggle.”

“I don't look at people like that as a competitor. I look at people like that as a fact, and I just like to embrace the change wherever it's going. And so all things being equal, I'd like to help them and hope they'll make the ecosystem better, and it'll be mor…”

“It's gotten a little bit Too self-promotional, I think. So I think that a lot of people now are overly focusing on their personal platforms, and I can understand why some do, but there's an awful lot of noise out there now.”

“My favorite book of recent times is Super Forecasters by Tetlock. So the reason I like it is it provides a lot of frameworks for how to deal with uncertainty. And I think that that's what founders need right now.”

“It's easy in this business when there's so many competitors around you To get kind of caught in the herd noise traffic of what's happening today all around you, and how do you just stay out of that? How do you stay out of that noise? How do you turn off that n…”

“If you have a customer engagement problem, acquiring more customers is counterproductive because then you just have more unhappy customers.”

“And I think that the other extreme would be what I call the joy of finding greatness. And in the joy of finding greatness, you say, look, I'm going to be comfortable with the fact that I'm not going to see every great deal. I'm going to be comfortable with the…”

“If somebody's telling you they know where things are going, they don't know what they're talking about. You know, anybody who's telling you they have any degree of certainty about what's gonna happen is confused.”

“Yeah, and I think probably more often than not, an insight will be wrong.”

“And so the best founders, what we saw, they were doing scenario planning. They, and with the scenario planning, what you try to do is you try to map the choices that you have, you know, the different options against the different uncertain outcomes.”

“You want to be very sober, very matter of fact, very clear about what the options are. None of this, oh, woe is me. How did this happen? This isn't fair because you don't have the luxury to think those thoughts. You don't have the luxury to worry about who's t…”

“So I have a 120 K for two years. I go in, I think one of my earliest investments, I was like, I'm putting in 50 K. And Mike was like, you sure you want to do that? And I was like, oh man, yeah. Yeah. This is really incredible. No, I just, I see the upside pote…”