Mike Maples
Founding Partner, Floodgate. On 6 shows, 7 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorfounderoperatorexecutiveauthor@m2jr ↗LinkedIn ↗floodgate.com ↗
Mike Maples Jr. is a prominent early-stage investor who backed foundational technology companies including Twitter, Twitch, Lyft, and Okta at the seed stage. Prior to co-founding Floodgate, he was an operating executive at Tivoli Systems and Motive, and he co-authored the 2024 book Pattern Breakers.
6shows
7appearances
157statements
21resolved
15supported
2contradicted
71%fully supported
13said about them ↓ Everything Mike Maples said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Founders Must Be Able to Get Out of the Present
“A lot of people say to me, Hey, well, I don't have a natural way to get out of the present. And I'm like, okay, then maybe you shouldn't be thinking of starting a startup.”
Maples: VC follow-on returns are so bad LPs would revolt
“If the LPs knew, like if they tracked, what's the return on follow-on checks versus first checks, there'd be pitchforks and like, Revolts in the street. It's so bad.”
Maples: The federal $40B broadband initiative has created zero broadband connections
“We've passed some, what was it? Forty billion dollar build broadband, better bullshit bill that nobody's built any broadband connections I'm aware of.”
Maples: Raising $4M seed rounds just to sell 20% equity is stupid
“People are raising four million bucks because that's what it takes to dilute 20%. And that's just stupid. It's not a good way to get started, and it hurts the founders even more than it hurts the VCs because the one thing you never get back as a founder is you…”
Maples: High-Priced Seed Deals Like Character.ai Won't Return 100x
“Expensive, high-priced investment, and hopefully it works, but you're not going to make a thousand times your money on that deal. You're probably not going to make a hundred times your money, even in the best of circumstances.”
Maples: Venture outliers usually start at low seed valuations
“I believe that the outliers usually start out at a low price, because they're outliers. Because they're non-consensus and right. People tend to believe that the world is divided between low price deals with low upside and high price deals with high upside. I d…”
Maples: US Dollar Will Lose Reserve Status Without Fiscal Responsibility
“It's inevitable that the dollar will not be the reserve currency that If we are not more responsible with the stewardship of our money.”
Maples: Clubhouse had 'COVID market fit', not true product-market fit
“I don't think so. I think it had COVID market fit. I think it had a bunch of people staying home, bored out of their minds, trying to figure out what to do, and it became, it was kind of this meme-worthy thing”
Maples: Decentralized cloud societies will eventually function like future nation-states
“What I think happens at the limit is that all of these different cloud cultures are like their own societies.
And so right now the main, main organizing principle of society is the nation state, which is also an economies of scale centric model.
Right.
But if …”
Maples: Most VC Funds Have at Most One Great Investor
“The problem with most firms is that they have less than or equal to one really good investor, and then they force the, what's called the limited partners or the LPs to buy the bundle of everybody else who's not a good investor.”
Maples: Startups Create Value by Changing the Subject, Not Compounding Moats
“A startup capitalist is a different type of capitalist that they don't They don't create value through persistent compounding or competitive moats. They create value by changing the subject. And they break the pattern of how people do things. And only by doing…”
Maples: A startup's only advantage is turning incumbents' strengths into weaknesses
“When you're a startup, the only advantage you have is your ability to change the subject. And so you want to have something that disorients the incumbents that turns, you know, Airbnb, they didn't try to have a better hotel. They turned the strengths of hotels…”
A Founder's True Failure is Wasting Years on the Wrong Idea
“In my view, the only way to really fail as a founder is to lose your time. And it's to, you know, be three years in on an idea that you now realize wasn't good enough, wasn't worthy of your time.”
Maples: Seed rounds should only raise enough to de-risk the core hypothesis
“So let's figure out what the biggest risk is and let's raise the minimum amount of money we can raise to take out that risk as soon as possible. If we can't take out that risk, we're not going to succeed, but at least we get our time back. If we take out that …”
Validated Learning Enables Scaling $1M to $10M ARR in Two Years
“Validated learning about customers, if it's truly valid, should allow you to go from one to ten million in two years or less.”
Maples: Startups reaching PMF first win regardless of capital raised
“It's not first mover advantage. It's first to product market fit that wins regardless how much they raise. And if you can get to product market fit without much money, You're gonna win even if the other guy raises more.”
Maples: Avoided many AI investments due to competitor and OpenAI risks
“For that reason, I haven't made a lot of AI investments. And so I've seen a lot of AI ideas where I'm like, I totally see the inflection. I can totally see why people are going to love this product. I just don't know why there won't be 10 just like it, or I do…”
Maples: B2B PMF requires a salesperson to cover company-wide burdened costs
“So if you have product market fit, a salesperson should be able to pay for their entire burdened cost across the entire company. Because if you have that, then you can hire new salespeople at will, because every incremental salesperson will be a breakeven new …”
Maples: Fund size dictates VC strategy due to power law math
“Your fund size is your strategy, and I guess I'm kind of famous for saying that for a long time. I don't know if I've ever really expressed why that is, so here's why. The power law is real, and so people don't realize that Pareto is not just eighty-twenty, it…”
Maples: 3x and 10x VC funds have nearly identical loss ratios
“And so the loss ratio is about the same between a three X fund and a 10 X plus fund. What matters is the magnitude of your big winners”
Maples: Floodgate's best startup deals have historically been their cheapest, not most expensive
“No. Actually the reverse is true, but I don't know if that would still be the case.”
Maples: Seed funds are better positioned for secondary sales than multi-stage funds
“You can make money on the buy, and you can make money on the sell. And what most people don't understand is that the seed funds are actually better positioned to make money on the sell than anybody. Better, better positioned than the multi-stage by a wide marg…”
Maples: Most overfunded startups without PMF won't clear preference stacks
“I think most of them won't clear their preference stack.”
The other half of the tape: Mike Maples's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 2 episodes across the shows. 11 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 1Chris Douvos 1
Statements about Mike Maples, by other people (11)
Kupor: Most startup bridge rounds are simply bridges to nowhere
“I would agree with Mike that unfortunately a lot of them are bridges to nowhere. You know, most of the time, in my experience, it's pretty clear, though, whether that's the case or whether you are bridging to something.”
Neil Young: Mike Maples provides pragmatic 'lizard brain' clarity on boards
“If Bing is the wizard brain, Mike is the lizard brain, or as probably he would like to be the thunder lizard brain, but the lizard brain in that Mike very expertly states the obvious. His instincts about what you should do at any given point in time are not pa…”
Ferriss treated his initial $120K angel investing budget as non-refundable tuition
“Why don't I take what I would have spent on tuition, a 120 K for two years, something like that. And that would have been sunk cost. I pay out of pocket. And what's the hope with business school, what you learn and the connections you make, make it worth it th…”
Srugo: Scaling from $1M to $10M ARR matters far more than reaching $1M
“The thing that matters, you know, in his view, and I would tend to agree is not how fast you get to a million, but how fast you can get to 10. Like that one to 10 is really the thing that'll set you on this kind of different trajectory.”
Walk: Venture fund size dictates investment strategy
“People attribute this to Mike Maple's affiliate and it's a hundred percent true. Like your fund size is your strategy, right?”
The largest venture outcomes require pivots and extra discovery time
“And so the more we looked, the more we found that the biggest outcomes of the vintage were companies that had either pivoted once or on their second or third business model, or took a little bit more Time and that learning and discovery phrase to use Mike Mapl…”
Liemandt: Ballmer, Gates, and Maples Called Shared Job Candidates
“Whether it was Balmer Gates or Mike Maple, the other third in the office of the president. Those three would call all our candidates, and we would just continue to fight, and it would escalate, right?”
Parr: Regulatory and Political Inflections Spark Massive New Businesses
“This is a perfect example of a regulation slash political inflection. And that, that big businesses are built in times like this.”
Gordon: Mike Maples provides game-changing insights in every board meeting
“So I love Mike Maples from Floodgate. He's been, I've been on a couple boards with him. What he does is so well, he has high empathy for CEOs. It seems in every board meeting, he says at least one thing that's game changing.”
Haroun: Eudia raised a $6M seed round from Mike Maples at ideation
“Yeah, we raised a small, like, well, not small by all standards, but like a six million dollar seed round. That was Mike Maples, who's a longtime mentor, and back to my last company, you know, he basically not only funded this when it was like an idea on a nap…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 1
Capital Allocators 1
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Mike's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Founding Partner, Floodgate | 5 | 116 | 62% 8/13 | full record on 20VC → |
| CAPITAL ALLOCATORSLEDGER | Founding Partner, Floodgate | 0 | 0 | 100% 1/1 | full record on Capital Allocators → |
 LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Founding Partner, Floodgate | 0 | 0 | 100% 3/3 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
 MASTERS OF SCALELEDGER | Founding Partner, Floodgate | 0 | 0 | 0% 0/1 | full record on Masters of Scale → |
 MY FIRST MILLIONLEDGER | Founding Partner, Floodgate | 1 | 22 | 100% 1/1 | full record on My First Million → |
 PRODUCT MARKET FITLEDGER | Founding Partner, Floodgate | 1 | 19 | 100% 2/2 | full record on A Product Market Fit Show → |