Insight
Maples: Startups must prove value hypothesis before testing growth hypothesis
“And then and only then do you start to, you know, only when you've proven your value hypothesis do you start to test your growth hypothesis.”
Insight
Maples: Compelling value propositions turn growth into education, not persuasion
“And so if the truth of your value proposition is super compelling, then growth becomes the exercise of syndicating the truth. And if the truth of your value proposition is not present, you have to grow by throwing money at the problem of growth. You have to sp…”
Disclosure
Maples: Floodgate passed on investing in Airbnb, Pinterest, and PagerDuty
“And I looked at all the companies that we had passed on that we should have invested in, Airbnb, Pinterest who else, PagerDuty, Anaplan.”
Insight
Maples: Non-consensus right insights give startups time to build without competition
“And so, you know, great insights avoid the trap, you know, the best competitive strategies to not compete with anybody.
And if you find a non-consensus and right insight, then you've got much more time to develop the idea without the threat of competition.”
Insight
Maples: Consumer Mobile Apps Must Prioritize Distribution Over Early Monetization
“If you're a consumer mobile app, you might iterate twice a week or even more often. And if that's the case, I care very little about how you're a monetize. I care more about are you coming up with clever ways to get distribution to spread your idea very quickl…”
Insight
Maples: An earned secret is a counterintuitive insight discovered through direct work
“So it's basically
Some work that you did to discover something that most people would think is non-intuitive.”
What-if
Maples: Cheap drones would not exist without iPhone and Android scale
“So you wouldn't have drones as cheap as they are if it wasn't for the iPhone and for Android. Because now you have cameras and sensors and chips that never would have been built just for drones, but now are mass producing to be harnessed by drones and by other…”
Insight
Maples: Claiming superior team intelligence is a weak startup justification
“What a lot of people tend to do, which is an answer I don't love is my team is awesome. That's why now the other teams haven't been as awesome as my team. So we're going to win when they haven't, because they weren't as smart as we are. That, that may be true,…”
Insight
Maples: Startups need a differentiated business model, not just a different product
“You don't want to just have a product that's different, that's the what. You want to have a business model that's different, which is the how.”
Insight
Maples: Antifragile Founders Improve and Perform Better Under Extreme Pressure
“Some founders, when they're under pressure, actually get better, whereas most people get stressed out and freak out, and they're more likely to panic under pressure.”
Assertion Contradicted
Maples: PayPal mafia members were not established in tech before PayPal
“So, for example, if you look at the PayPal mafia, none of them were established in tech before they joined PayPal.”
Insight
Maples: Great startups recruit undiscovered talent before the world recognizes them
“And so like, I like to say that the great startups find people who are one day going to be great before the world knows they're great. And going after people that the world already knows is great, it can work for you, but usually you have to be a very establis…”
Insight
Maples: Startups Must Master a Few Priorities Rather Than Everything
“And so the reason I love the Herbie metaphor for startups is I think a lot of startups get very bad advice. They get advice that is sort of exhaustively correct, but what they don't realize is that when you're a startup, you can't do everything well. You got t…”
Insight
Maples: Startups shift from insight advantages to execution advantages
“If you think about the continuum of startup to a company, it starts out with an insight or a knowledge advantage. And then it slowly over time migrates to having an execution advantage.”
Disclosure
Maples: Floodgate invested early in Zimride (Lyft), Twitter, Twitch, and Okta
“So, for example, we invested in Lyft when it was Zimride back in 2010, and it would be very easy for us to believe we knew more than we knew at the time we made that investment. Same with Twitter, same with Twitch, same with Okta.”
Insight
Maples: Founders lying about non-business trivia is an investment red flag
“When somebody lies about something that is in no way germane to their business, I'm like, that's a red flag for me, right? Like, that's somebody who has a difficult relationship with the truth and facts and reality.”
Insight
Maples: Best founders confront their existential boogeyman risks early
“The best founders I know, know what are the most important risks that stand between themselves and success. And they tackle those risks early, because if you eliminate those risks, you massively improve the probabilities of winning, as well as you make the com…”
What-if
Maples: Lyft could not have succeeded in 2006 without smartphone adoption
“So back in 2006, when the smartest phone was a Blackberry, Lyft couldn't have worked no matter how good the idea was.”
Insight
Maples: Idea maze requires analyzing why past category attempts failed
“What you want to do when you go through an idea maze is you want to look at every previous attempt At the boundary of your idea. Oh, am I going to charge for my software? Okay, great. Has it ever been built in open source? Am I going to charge for it by the co…”
