Mike Maples, Jr. — How To Become a Pattern-Breaking Founder (EP.233)

Infinite Loops

Mike Maples, Jr., co-founding partner of the VC firm Floodgate, is the veteran seed investor behind some of the 21st-century’s great success stories, including Twitter, Twitch, and Applied Intuition.

His book, Pattern Breakers (co-authored with Peter Ziebelman), articulates a new model of foundership, one built on the simple premise that transformative startups upend rather than improve current practices.

My company, OSV, is built around my belief that the collapse of the old models presents enormous opportunities to those savvy enough to seize them, so I had a blast quizzing Mike on the nuts and bolts of pattern-breaking foundership, from finding true believers to waging asymmetric war on the status quo.

If Mike’s theory sounds as interesting to you as it did to me, check out our Substack, where we’ve distilled some pattern-breaking insights and shared the episode transcript. I also encourage you to buy Mike’s excellent book.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did!

Important Links:

• Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future; by Mike Maples, Jr & Peter Ziebelman
• Twitter
• Substack (Starting Greatness)
• Floodgate
• LinkedIn

Show Notes:

• Seagull mode: an unexpected founder paradigm
• How to wage asymmetric war on the present
• Evading the comparison trap
• Finding your people: how to build a movement
• Why we should continually seek the truth
• The customer isn’t always right, but the ones living in the future are
• Why disagreeableness is undervalued
• How to fix a pitch Franckendeck
• Don’t use jargon as a substitute for clear thinking
• How to find the true believers
• How to live in the future
• How founders are like trainspotters
• Why wanting to be a founder is a bad reason to start a company
• Reading habits of a pattern-breaker
• The unreliability of memory
• Mike as emperor of the world
• MORE!

Books Mentioned:

• Jonathan Livingston Seagull: A story; by Richard Bach
• The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism; by Howard Bloom
• The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World; by David Deutsch
• What Works in Wall Street; by Jim O’Shaughnessy
• Poor Charlie’s Almanac: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger; by Charles T. Munger