Floodgate co-founder Mike Maples Jr. breaks down the hidden risks of building startups around regulatory changes rather than technological breakthroughs.
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“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 have a reason that they want to exploit those laws. Ok, if you're going to exploit this regulatory inflection, Why do you have an advantage over the person that was lobbying the legislators to pass that law? Because I bet you they got an angle on this thing. Because living in the future in the sense of a legal inflection would mean that you were involved in writing that legislation somehow. Otherwise, someone else has an advantage in pursuing that future over you.”
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