Floodgate

“80 to 85% of our exit profits had come from pivots.”

“A great startup founder needs to say, it's by definition bad for me to compete that way. What I need to do is assume that the future must be radically different and work backwards from those radically different futures. I back cast rather than forecast. And th…”

“I'm really enthusiastic about it, but we've only made two or three investments in the blockchain arena.”

“What I found was that people who find these secrets, they almost feel guilty about it. They weren't being contrarian in the traditional sense. Contrarian means you're against something. They were just looking in an area they were interested in, an area where m…”

“But if you're a hundred and fifty million dollar fund, you don't have to be in all 20 of the top 20 startups. In fact, if you're in one of the top 20 every couple of years, you could be really good.”

“What I've come to realize is I'm not interested in the total available market. I'm interested in the total future market. I want the product to define future market and be the category king of that future market.”

“The inflection is the thing that allows the startup founder to wage asymmetric warfare on the present. The inflection provides the force multiplier that allows the startup to show up out of left field and not compete by being better, but by changing the subjec…”

“People who think all the time about a domain and are intensely curious about it for its own sake and pursue understanding it beyond what seems even reasonable Tend to attract luck. They tend to be visited by the muse before it visits other people, and especial…”

“People tend to operate according to the current patterns of how they're used to doing things, and that the way that an entrepreneur wins is they impose a new pattern in place of the old pattern, rather than being a pattern match or their pattern break.”

“So startups never win by being better. Better isn't enough. Better doesn't matter. Only by being radically different can a startup make a radical difference.”

“The way I like to say it is you need at least a Delta IV experience, and so if taxis in San Francisco were three out of 10 good, ride sharing needed to be at least seven out of 10 good. Because if it's seven out of 10 good, then they think you can't compare th…”

“The original hypothesis, if I had to say it in a pithy way, would be that 500,000 is the new five million.”

“And so to me, a great startup is pursuing a highly risky, but underpriced future that has wildly asymmetric upside.”