Mike Maples
17 statements across 3 episodes · 4 bullish · 5 bearish · 3 people on the record · first statement Jul 17, 2025 by Mike Maples · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Mike Maples's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Everything said about Mike Maples, oldest first
Jul 17, 2025 negative
Jul 17, 2025
Maples: A startup's only advantage is turning incumbents' strengths into weaknesses
“When you're a startup, the only advantage you have is your ability to change the subject. And so you want to have something that disorients the incumbents that turns, you know, Airbnb, they didn't try to have a better hotel. They turned the strengths of hotels…”
Jul 17, 2025 negative
Jul 17, 2025 positive
Maples: Startups Create Value by Changing the Subject, Not Compounding Moats
“A startup capitalist is a different type of capitalist that they don't They don't create value through persistent compounding or competitive moats. They create value by changing the subject. And they break the pattern of how people do things. And only by doing…”
Jul 17, 2025 negative
Maples: Radically Successful Startups Often Ignore Standard Business Playbooks
“I found that a lot of the companies that I worked with that had massive success didn't do the stuff you're supposed to do. They didn't do the business model canvas. They didn't do the kind of experiments you're supposed to run. They didn't hire the people the …”
Jul 17, 2025
Maples: The Best Startup Ideas Are Polarizing, Not Consensus-Driven
“And so the best startup ideas tend to be the polarizing ideas, you know, ideas that probably most people don't like because they're not ready to live in the future, but a tiny subset of people say,
oh my gosh, where have you been all my life?
I can't unsee thi…”
Jul 17, 2025 bearish
Maples: Avoided many AI investments due to competitor and OpenAI risks
“For that reason, I haven't made a lot of AI investments. And so I've seen a lot of AI ideas where I'm like, I totally see the inflection. I can totally see why people are going to love this product. I just don't know why there won't be 10 just like it, or I do…”
Jul 17, 2025
Jul 17, 2025 positive
Jul 17, 2025
Maples: Seed rounds should only raise enough to de-risk the core hypothesis
“So let's figure out what the biggest risk is and let's raise the minimum amount of money we can raise to take out that risk as soon as possible. If we can't take out that risk, we're not going to succeed, but at least we get our time back. If we take out that …”
Jul 17, 2025
Maples: B2B PMF requires a salesperson to cover company-wide burdened costs
“So if you have product market fit, a salesperson should be able to pay for their entire burdened cost across the entire company. Because if you have that, then you can hire new salespeople at will, because every incremental salesperson will be a breakeven new …”
Jul 17, 2025 negative
Jul 17, 2025
Maples: Great Startups Force a Choice Rather Than a Comparison
“A great startup
Forces a choice and not a comparison, right? Like a great startup.
If a customer says after seeing your startup idea, how does that compare to X?
You either explained it wrong or you don't have a big enough idea by definition.”
Jul 17, 2025
Jul 17, 2025 positive
Great Ideas Come From Living in the Future, Not Formal Research
“Most startup ideas I find come from not having a formal assessment process, but rather by living in the correct future and tinkering with what's happening in the future. And by tinkering with the future, you learn what's new about it, but you also learn what's…”
Sep 15, 2025 neutral
Srugo: Scaling from $1M to $10M ARR matters far more than reaching $1M
“The thing that matters, you know, in his view, and I would tend to agree is not how fast you get to a million, but how fast you can get to 10. Like that one to 10 is really the thing that'll set you on this kind of different trajectory.”
Mar 19, 2026 positive
Haroun: Eudia raised a $6M seed round from Mike Maples at ideation
“Yeah, we raised a small, like, well, not small by all standards, but like a six million dollar seed round. That was Mike Maples, who's a longtime mentor, and back to my last company, you know, he basically not only funded this when it was like an idea on a nap…”