The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 116 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Maples: VCs must accept missing deals to focus on essential partnerships
“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…”
Maples: VC firms must choose between scale or doing less but better
“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.”
Maples: Early-stage startups operate like jazz bands, not marching bands
“The zero to one phase of a startup is just different. You know, you have a jazz band instead of a marching band”
Maples: Developing original VC ideas is harder now due to market noise
“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…”
Maples: 2007 Silicon Valley Founders Couldn't Raise $1M Seed Rounds
“When I would talk to entrepreneurs, they literally couldn't raise a million dollars in Silicon Valley. They could either raise a tiny amount of money from angels and friends and family, or They had to go straight to a five million dollar series a round with a …”
Maples: Top Seed Investments Look Irrationally Crazy at the Start
“We've observed that the best companies that we've invested in have been pretty crazy at the time you had to decide, right?”
Maples: Invested in Twitch When Justin Kan Wore Camera Cap
“Twitch.tv started out as justin.tv and literally I invested when Justin Kahn walked into a coffee shop with a camera on his baseball cap with wires going into a backpack.”
Maples: Floodgate Assigns Individual Checkbooks to Partners at Fund Start
“We start out saying, okay with the beginning of a fund, everybody's going to roughly have a certain size checkbook. And the reason that we do that is we want everyone to understand that when they make an investment, that we all have to be accountable for our d…”
Maples: Founders Fail by Rushing Opportunity Selection to Build Product
“A lot of times that the founders, when they're picking their opportunity to go start a company around, they rush the pick and get straight to doing the product, and a lot of founders would be better off if they didn't rush the picking part of it, just like a l…”
Maples: Category Kings Build Movements Beyond Employees and Customers
“Category kings are trying to create not just a company, but they're trying to create a movement. And they're trying to enlist people to their cause outside of even the employees of the company, and outside of even necessarily just the customers of the company.”
Maples: Applied Intuition's Qasar Younis is one of the best founders ever
“Because I think Kasser is one of the best founders I've ever worked with.”
Maples: Floodgate limits investments to 40 shots on goal per fund
“My fund, I only get 40 shots on goal.”
Maples: Best founders map choices against uncertain outcomes using scenario planning
“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.”
Maples: Founders must be shapers who take initiative during crises
“Whenever you're in a crisis, you have to take the initiative, right? You, you're a shaper and not a reactor, and that's what I mean by that.”
Maples commits to daily LP updates during future financial crises
“If this ever happens again, what I will do is I'll say, we're gonna have a designated time each day where we say everything we know at the time.”
Maples: 85% of Floodgate founders stayed focused during SVB collapse
“85% of the founders that we worked with, and I feel really lucky, we made good choices of who we decided to go into business with, but 85% of the founders were just like on it, and we were just like taking care of business, right, and not wasting time on the s…”
Maples: Kevin Rose launched Digg for $1,500 over a weekend
“Kevin Rose had started Digg for 1500 dollars over a weekend, and so there's no technical risk there.”
Maples: Marc Andreessen's Mosaic browser created the market from scratch
“When Marc Andreessen invented the Mosaic browser, there was no market for browsers. The product defined the market.”
Maples: Tetlock's Superforecasters is essential reading for startup founders
“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.”
Maples commuted to California for 18 months before founding Floodgate
“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…”