Mike Maples Jr.
also referred to as: mike maples, jr.
34 statements across 1 episodes · 12 bullish · 4 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Sep 16, 2024 by Mike Maples, Jr. · said 1 times in 1 episodes since 2020 · across every show →
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Everything said about Mike Maples Jr., oldest first
Sep 16, 2024 positive
Sep 16, 2024
Maples: Product-market fit failures stem from audience, implementation, or lack of insight
“If we're not getting product market fit, it's like, okay, what is it that's not working about the audience? What is it that's not working about the implementation? Or do we just not have fundamental insight in the first place? But one of those three things has…”
Sep 16, 2024 positive
Sep 16, 2024 positive
Maples: Great founders must backcast from the future rather than forecast
“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…”
Sep 16, 2024
Startup Pivots Must Keep Insight Fixed While Varying Implementation or Audience
“If you have an insight, you have a first mover advantage into the future. And even if your initial implementation is wrong, it's a reference implementation of your insight. You can pivot the implementation by changing the implementation itself or by focusing o…”
Sep 16, 2024
Maples: Breakthrough founders find secrets through focused attention, not deliberate contrarianism
“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…”
Sep 16, 2024 neutral
Sep 16, 2024 positive
Seed Investing Is the Exact Opposite of Buffett's Margin of Safety
“It's like Buffett and Munger talk about your margin of safety when you buy a stock. It was the intrinsic value of the stock higher than the price of the stock. My business is the opposite. My business is margin of asymmetric upside if it works.”
Sep 16, 2024 positive
Sep 16, 2024 negative
Regulatory Startups Are Disadvantaged Unless They Helped Write the Law
“If you're harnessing a regulatory inflection, I hope you were involved in helping that law get written, because very few laws get passed just out of the goodness of people's heart. Usually there's a set of people who are lobbying for those laws. Usually they h…”
Sep 16, 2024 neutral
Zoom Succeeded by Brute Force Rather Than Harnessing Technological Inflections
“So I looked at Zoom, and I was like, I can't convince myself that this thing harnessed inflections. I think Eric just had a bunch of guys in China and throughout the world, and anytime there was something that didn't work or wasn't efficient, he just put that …”
Sep 16, 2024
Sep 16, 2024
Okta Originally Pitched Problem Resolution Software Before Pivoting to Identity
“So Okta had an insight that cloud customers were starting to adopt a lot of cloud apps, and that they were going to have trouble managing that stuff. Their initial implementation was problem resolution, and so they went to a bunch of the early Salesforce custo…”
Sep 16, 2024 positive
Maples: Startups win asymmetric warfare via inflections that change the subject
“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…”
Sep 16, 2024
Maples: Deep curiosity and open-mindedness attract luck and early breakthrough insights
“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…”
Sep 16, 2024 positive
Sep 16, 2024 positive
Maples: Startups with true product-market fit only need to teach, not persuade
“The more powerful my insight is, the more likely it is that I can have strong product market fit because I have something highly unique and highly empowering. And by definition, something that's highly unique and highly empowering should have someone desperate…”
Sep 16, 2024 positive
Maples: Entrepreneurs win by imposing new patterns rather than pattern-matching
“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.”
Sep 16, 2024 positive
Maples: Hands-on tinkering makes startup founders' product instincts far more accurate
“When you live in the future that way, you're more likely to notice what's new about it. These founders are obsessed with this tinkering of new technology that they're with, and so their instincts about what to build are far more likely to be right, because the…”
Sep 16, 2024 negative
Sep 16, 2024
Sep 16, 2024 neutral
Sep 16, 2024 neutral
Customers Only Care About a Problem if They Have Tried Solving It
“If they've tried to solve the problem before, I know one thing for sure, and that is that they believe the problem exists. If they haven't tried to solve the problem before, on what basis can I assume that they believe the problem exists? If they were desperat…”
Sep 16, 2024 neutral
Maples: Inflection Theory Explains Winners but Is Hard to Apply Pre-Investment
“I think that it has been remarkably robust in explaining why a lot of these startups happen, but it's still very vexing and hard to apply the tenets of the theory at the time that you have to decide. There's still a lot of uncertainty.”
Sep 16, 2024
Sep 16, 2024
Maples: Startups that invite direct comparison to incumbents are failing
“So if the answer to your product idea as a startup is, how does that compare to X? You're doing something wrong. You're either not different enough, or you're not leaning into the difference enough. You're being not courageous enough in communicating the diffe…”
Sep 16, 2024
Maples: Early startups are movements, not markets, requiring focus on believers
“That's why it's more correct, in my view, to think of it as a movement rather than a market at first. It's a movement where a set of people move at first, and at first they're your early believers who believe what you believe about the future. It's a subset of…”
Sep 16, 2024
Startups Need a 'Delta 4' UX Jump to Drive Organic Growth
“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…”
Sep 16, 2024 positive
Maples: Amplify Known Strengths Rather Than Trying to Fix Weaknesses
“One of the things I tend to believe about Business and life is that it's better to amplify your known strengths and bolster your weaknesses rather than try to turn your weaknesses into strengths out of some source of false misplaced pride.”
Sep 16, 2024 negative
Maples: Startups Without Inflections Cannot Build Radically Transformative Businesses
“Either it embodies an inflection. You just haven't thought about it enough, or it doesn't embody an inflection, which probably means you're solving present pain for present customers for present unmet needs. And you might build a reasonable business doing that…”
Sep 16, 2024 neutral
Sep 16, 2024
Sep 16, 2024 positive