The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Maples: Searching for market white space causes startup failure
“Insights are the bedrock of a great startup. And the failure mode in insight development is to live in the present and to look for market white space. Because if you're looking for gaps in today's markets, chances are lots of people have tried that. And if you…”
Maples: Startups should charge customers even when products are half-done
“We'd be better off charging a price when the product's half done, because, you know, then we're going to find out how visceral is the pain and how compelling is the value that we're here to deliver for them.”
Maples: Software-defined networks will replace traditional corporate hierarchies across every sector
“Every sector of the economy Is going to get reimagined from a traditional hierarchical corporation to a software defined network that has machine platform and crowd intelligence.”
Maples: Customers failing previous solution attempts validates startup market need
“And you know, you're on the right scent when they say, oh yeah, we tried that already before, but it didn't work. And most people think that's bad, but it's good. And the reason it's good is because they know they have the problem. And they've actually done so…”
Maples: Product-Market Fit Means Eliminating Every Bottleneck Before Scaling
“Product market fit can be thought of as progressively eliminating all Herbie's until there are no more Herbie's. And then you're in a mode where you can invest in growth because it's frictionless.”
Maples: Involuntarily replacing a startup CEO almost always worsens the company
“What I found is that when you replace the CEO involuntarily, you almost always make the company worse.”
Maples: Conventional investing mental models fail when applied to startups
“There seemed to be a lot of mental models for investing or operating companies, but they didn't seem to apply to startups.”
Maples: 10 out of 10,000 startups create 95% of annual venture value
“First of all, this is why 10 companies out of 10,000 every year create 95% of the value in the startup business.”
Maples: Floodgate avoids funding founders who have not quit their day jobs
“So, so for example, I don't react super well to we're all still working at our jobs and we can't wait to leave as soon as we get funded.
So I I'm like, look, if you're not passionate enough to leave your job and do this full time, why would I be passionate en…”
Maples: Defining characteristic of startup leaders is artistry, not business expertise
“There is a, I believe a big element of startups where a business function is not the right way to describe an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs aren't experts in business functions as you and I would think about them. Yes, very often they're technical, but the defin…”
Maples: Compelling vision matters far more than personal charisma for founders
“I think charisma helps, but I think it's more about the power of the vision. So, you know, Steve Jobs, super charismatic, obviously, but Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, I wouldn't say are, you know, a standard deviation, more charismatic than most people. But …”
Mike Maples Jr.: Sizing TAM for Early-Stage Startups Is Wrongheaded
“And so trying to quantify the total available market, it's wrongheaded. It's more about quantifying the potential energy of the insight.”
Maples: Startups Defeat Incumbents Using 'Sword and Shield' Asymmetry
“The shield is, your go-to-market strategy is so different, and the customer context that you're targeting is so different, that the incumbent doesn't feel an incentive to attack you. They just say, ah, you can have that market. That's stupid product, stupid id…”
Maples: Great startup leaders prioritize vision actualization over crowd approval
“What I find in the great startups that I've seen is the great leaders are very often willing to be disagreeable. And they're not motivated as much by approval seekers, or they don't seek approval as much as they seek the actualization of their vision.”
Maples: Effective founders make their audience the hero of their story
“And what entrepreneurs who tell stories will succeed at, is they realize they're not the hero in the story. The audience of their message is the hero in the story. And what they're doing is they're helping that person go on a hero's journey. To co-create a bet…”
Maples: Early Customer Discovery Requires 20 Non-Pitch Target Market Interviews
“The rule of 20 was, you talk to 20 people that don't really know you, but that are in your target market segment. But they're not talking to you just because they're your buddies. The first five discussions you have, you just sit there, and you just ask them a…”
Maples: 100% confirming experiments waste time compared to negative data
“The worst thing is an experiment that a hundred percent confirms everything you believed, because then you just wasted time teaching yourself what you already knew. Even negative data is good in the sense that you now know more.”
Maples: Marketing Before Retention Is Worse Than Useless
“Let's say that our Herbie is that when customers try our product, they're not sticking with it. Well, then investing more money in sales and marketing is useless. In fact, it's worse than useless. We're just going to get more unhappy customers that say bad stu…”
Maples: Exponential organic growth driven by customer enlistment indicates product-market fit
“One of the great heuristics of true product market fit is exponential organic growth. And exponential organic growth happens because your enlisted customers tell cross-referenceable other people, this product rocks. And it's the most efficient way to grow beca…”
Maples: On-the-job training fails during startup growth phase
“On the job training doesn't work in the growth mode of a startup, because if we have to TEDx our revenue in 18 months, we can't learn that on the job. We have to have people in those roles that know the job and can be trusted to execute.”
Maples: A $250K seed check in Airbnb would be worth $1B
“Had I invested 250,000 dollars in Airbnb at the time, it'd now be worth a billion dollars.”
Mike Maples Jr.: Startups Are Not Companies, but Founders With Future Insights
“What we've come to realize is that a startup isn't really a company at all. A startup is a set of founders with hopefully a set of proprietary insights that are a result of them living in the future.”
Maples: Startups Must Achieve Three Crucial Breakthroughs to Become Real Companies
“What a startup has to do to become a company someday is they have to achieve three or four crucial breakthroughs. One is they have to have a breakthrough insight. And then they have to have a breakthrough value proposition. And then they have to have a breakth…”
Mike Maples Jr.: Startup Teams Must Operate Like Improv Jazz Bands, Not Marching Bands
“Teams are different in startups than they are from companies because I like to say that in a company, it's more like a marching band. People need their sheet music and they need to dance in formation and play their instruments in exact terms. Whereas I don't k…”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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,…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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…”