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Mike Maples

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2020-03-03
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2020-03-03
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  1. “That's a really good question. And I don't want to play too many favorites. One of the guys that I think deserves a lot of credit would be Todd McKinnon from Okta because he's, you know, now it's a company with more than 2,000 employees and he's gone from the very beginning when it was called Sasher and they weren't sure what it was to now a market cap of over 12 billion and a very successful proprietary position in cloud. And so I give, I think that if a CEO goes that far the distance, it's axiomatic they've done a lot of things right in terms of building the culture.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Yeah, I would agree with that. And I think in a day's world, a reality-based culture is particularly important. You know, egoist, reality-based is a big deal because the data exists more than ever to get to the truth of things. And so you want to have a truth-seeking culture.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Yeah, so it's funny, you know, if you think about the continuum of startup to a company, it starts out with an insider or a knowledge advantage, and then it slowly over time migrates to having an execution advantage.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Yeah, so earlier we talked about how startup teams kind of like a jazz band. So startup teams have artistry and startup teams make something that's never been made before and delight people with what they made, that's a very different skill set than operating these gears scale. And so I like to say that, you know, founders are kind of like MacGyver in the value phase or the insight phase, but they migrate to being VP of nothing in the And on the job training doesn't work in the growth mode of a startup. Because if we have to 10x 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.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Right. And so we might say an acquisition, okay, we want our lifetime value, over our acquisition cost to be 5x, and we want our acquisition payback period to be six months. Well, then the question becomes, what would we need to do to guarantee that would happen as a business? And then we ask the same for engagement. We asked the same for monetization, the same for enlistment. All of those things, when they're achieved, cause the gears to operate in harmony. And when those things aren't achieved, if any gear is not going fast enough, we need a process that alerts us immediately when we're off track. Because if we don't fix that broken gear before you know it, you start rapidly consuming capital because you're growing inefficiently.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “They turn as a set of flywheels that are integrated together, and all the gears can rotate only at the speed of the slowest gear. And so you're not only trying to make the gears go faster, but you're trying to make the slowest gear no longer be the slowest. And when you're in the growth mode, you want to do that in as predictable of a fashion as you can. So in the value phase, it could take years to get a value proposition because you're running experiments and seeking the truth. In the growth phase, you've decided to shift gears. You've said, I know what works now. I'm going from zero to one to one to X mode. And so what I have to do is I have to copy the thing that works in a predictable pattern. And what we do is we create these growth gears that operate in harmony to produce a growth output machine.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Tell cross referenceable other people this product rocks. And it's the most efficient way to grow because you have your zealot advocates syndicating the truth of your value. And so this goes back a little bit to Herbie again as well, Shane. So, you know, Jeffrey Moore would probably say these four gears, they operate at different speeds. And what you want at the limit is them to be all operating at the same speed. So, like, if a company maybe they want to grow their recurring revenue and they want to grow it with a certain amount of time and a certain amount of burn, that's what the machine produces. And then each of these four gears, acquisition, engagement, modernization, and enlistment.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Am I going to keep using it or am I going to stop using it? And engagement involves things like onboarding the user. It involves making sure they have a guaranteed positive experience within a certain amount of time, making sure that they don't lose interest or enthusiasm about the product. And then monetization is how to make money from an engaged customer. That was pretty straightforward, although there's a whole lot of different ways you can, right? There's freemium, there's subscriptions, there's ads, there's application downloads, there's digital virtual goods, a bunch of different ways. And then enlistment is how do I get those people to tell other people? So, you know, one of the great churches of true product market fit is exponential organic growth. And exponential organic growth happens because you're enlisted customers”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Yeah, so the way I think about it is you got four gears in a machine that need to operate in harmony. And so acquisition is, it's literally acquiring customers, whether it's consumer end users for a mobile app or customers for SAS app or even an enterprise app. But like in acquisition, you're always asking a set of economics oriented questions about how efficiently can you acquire customer. What is the lifetime value of a customer divided by the acquisition cost? What is the payback time of an acquired customer? What are the channels that are working best for acquiring customer? What are the ones that are not working so well? You've got the economic outputs that you care about, but then you've also got the leading activities of the types of programs that you're going to run to produce those outputs. And then engagement is, okay, I'm a user now.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Yeah, yeah. And it's like knowing what the strong founder would want. And strong is important. Like weak founder might say, I want you to tell me what my strategy is. And I'm like, well, if I have to do that, I've already made a decision that's too late.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “So I think that this is a mistake, actually, that a lot of VCs make. I try to always ask myself, what would I want from my VC if I were a strong founder? And if the person isn't a strong founder, I'm probably doomed anyway. And if the person is a strong founder, the last thing they need is me to tell them how to run their business.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “I try very hard to acknowledge, first of all, this was a failure on my part because I picked either the wrong team or the wrong opportunity, which is my job on a very fundamental level, right? That's a very core part to how I create value in my business. But what I found is that when you replace a CEO involuntarily, He almost always make the company worse. So if a CEO says, look, I'm kind of in over my head and I need your help recruiting somebody, that can work. But if you have a fundamental difference of opinion with the founding team or the CEO, usually my default is that's a shame, it's your company, I'm not going to try to run it for you because I think that if I tried to run it for you, it'd be even worse off. And so, I mean, who am I to think that I could spend two hours a week running somebody's company? You can't.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “That's mostly how I think I help. And then I try to help them think big. I try to help raise money. I try to help with the roller coaster when the chips are down and people feel bummed out when there's bad news. I think we've also been able to help a lot in terms of our brand and our networks. But that's different from the meetings. That's a different set of things we do.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “But it's your company, you decide. But you can help founders a lot by helping them avoid avoidable mistakes, right? That's where the mental models come in. And you're saying to the founder, look, I'm not coming down from the mountain saying I have the answers. I'm not telling you how to run your company. I'm saying that there's a bunch of counterintuitive. Your mileage may vary, and you can listen to it, you could decide not to. But I'd sure hate for you to fail because of something that you could have known about to avoid because we just didn't talk about it.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “It really depends. I can't turn somebody into an artist and I can't, I can never know their business as well as they know it or what it takes to succeed as well as they know it. And if I can, then I back the wrong founder. So the way I do it is I try to help them. Find issues that they maybe haven't seen before because they haven't seen as many startups as I have. And then I just say, hey, you might want to look at this. But I'm not attached to whether they take my advice, right? It's more like, hmm, I've seen something that looks like that before and it looks like quicksand to me. Here's why.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Yeah, and to me, it's a much better way to interact with a founder because if we get together every two weeks, there's plenty of stuff that we could talk about. But we always start by saying, okay, is it still the same herbie? Whereas I'm doing the founder disservice if I say a bunch of clever sounding stuff, but it's always different and it's defocusing.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Instead, I just ask, okay, well, why don't we start by just talking about what's our herbie? 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 stuff about us. And so product market fit can be thought of as progressively eliminating all herbies until there are no more herbes. And then you're in a mode where you can invest in growth because it's frictionless.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “If we're hiking at this speed. And if the answer is you can't, you really got three choices. You could kick Herbie out of the patrol. You can make Herbie go faster, or you can just accept that you're not going to make the goal. That's the pace you can go. And the way they make Herbie go faster in the book is they start taking stuff out of his backpack and distributing it to other people until he's no longer the slowest person. 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've got to do the small number of very important things A plus well. And so I like to use the metaphor of Herbie when I interact with startups. So when I talk to a founder rather than give him advice about all the things they could be doing.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “So the Herbie model I like, it comes from a book called The Goal that I'm a huge fan of. And there's a chapter in the goal where there's a bunch of scouts on a hike. And they're all screwed up. There's people way out in front of everybody. There's people clumped in the middle. There's people way in the back. And so the scout master goes to the patrol leader and says, your patrol's a mess. You got to fix this. So it turns out that the solution is to figure out who's the slowest hiker. And it turns out that the slowest hiker is Herbie. And so what you do is you put Herbie in the front of the line because the only way you can have a smooth, organized hike is everybody hikes at the same pace as Herbie. If people are in front of Herbie, they're going to hike way out front of him. And if they're behind him, they're going to be bunched up, but nobody can get strung out, right? Nobody's going to be way behind. So then you ask, can we meet the goal?”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Yeah, totally. And right, like in a startup, you have this advantage because you could say it's not me that's bad or me that's wrong. We ran an experiment and the hypothesis was invalidated. That simple, right? And it's like the good news is we learned something. Even if the worst thing is an experiment that 100% 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.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Yeah, and it's funny because what I've learned is that facts are stubborn. And if the facts of your idea don't turn out to be true, you're out of business someday. Like the facts aren't going to suddenly be repudiated, whereas unfortunately at big companies, some people get ahead by having an egocentric approach, whether it's trying to command a room in meetings or trying to amass political capital and reorg or things like that. And before you know it, people get caught up in that stuff.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “Yeah, we like to say at Floodgate that ego is about who's right and truth is about what's right. And if insight development is about posing a great theory or question or insight, the value phase and those mental models are about discovering the truth of that insight.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “Then you come away saying, I just had a great meeting with that customer. They think what we're doing is awesome. And it's like they were just saying, they're just being nice because it's easier to be agreeable than not.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “Some of what I was describing was needs experiments, which is the first five and then validation is the next set. And then assumptions are, wouldn't it be good if and solutions are more, hey, would this product be interesting to you? I'm just kind of thinking out loud here, but like just tell me your reaction to this. In all these experiments, you'll notice that you're You're trying to avoid letting your ego be in the mix. This is like a detective work exercise where people get hung up as they feel pride in what they want to build. And so they think their job is to convince somebody that what they're building is awesome Would it be awesome if I built you this product? And the problem with that is a lot of times customers will lie to you because they want to make you feel good. They say, oh, yeah, that's kind of cool.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “They've actually done something to try to fix it, and they failed at fixing it. So now if I could show you that I can do it, now all of a sudden I've got their tension. And then the next five interviews are, hey, you know what? This is super early. I'm just thinking out loud. But I'm kind of thinking about doing a system that does this. And I've noticed from some of the folks that I've talked to so far that they're having these problems. And like, am I just am I smoking something here or like, and you know that you're kind of on the right track if the person steals the whiteboard marker out of your hand. Starts drawing your solution for you. Saying, I've been thinking about this for years, and I can't get management to do this, and when are you going to come back and show me your product? So, sorry, that's a long-winded answer, Shane.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “Similar. But then you say, like, where do those questions come from? And, like, do you get different types of problems or you ask different questions? And like, is there, is that documented? Like, what's, how does that work? And they show you all that stuff. And then the next set of questions are, hey, I'm curious. I've noticed you're taking all these calls. Wouldn't it be better if just like you could just get that digitally without asking? Because isn't all that stuff you asked, you know. open this file, run this command, tell me this version, tell me this date, that's knowable. That's objective facts. It's not subjective. 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.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “And I was like, huh, that's interesting. So I look over this guy's cubicle and there's hundreds of people asking the same five questions. Now what entrepreneurs would normally do would say, hey, wouldn't it be cool if I could have those questions be asked digitally and sent to you by telemetry every time and like flag the differences of what you expect to see? But you don't want to do that in the needs phase because you want to get out of the mode of talking about yourself. You want to experience life as they live it. So first five interviews were exactly like that. Just an hour watching people asking questions whenever they did something. Why did you do that? And then the next five interviews or more around the solution experiments. It's like, hey, I've noticed the last three calls you took, you asked the same five questions. What's up with that? And then they say, usually they say something.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “Cubicle. And the guy gets on the phone. He gets a call. He starts talking on the phone. I was like, how did you know to ask those questions? And he says, Oh, Joe told me. And I said, Who's Joe? And he said, Joe is the guy, and this was at Netscape. Joe's the guy that knows Netscape sweet spot server the best. And so I'm like, where did you get those questions? He goes, oh, right there. He points to a cork board. And there's the five questions And then another call comes in. He asked the exact same five questions again.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “Yeah, well, the main thing when you're trying to find somebody's needs, you're trying to not sell and you're trying to not talk about yourself. And so, for example, when I was an entrepreneur, we used to have this rule of 20. And maybe I could even go through all three of these by doing this. So 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 about how they do their job and you say nothing about what you do, nothing at all. And so when I was at Motive, we had this product that would do tech support over the internet. So when you add a problem rather than get on the phone and call support, you could send telemetry to the support organization securely over the internet, which saves a whole lot of time. So I was sitting there and a guy's...”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “And like it's happening all the time, we should look into that. And somebody's just following the rules isn't going to notice that. But somebody who has some level of jazz artistry in addition to just the CEO is more likely to notice that. You know, like artistry, when you're in a startup, it's about asking the customer, hey, what's the logo on that coffee mug? What company is that? Why do you have that coffee mug there? You talk to these other companies. Who do you like at these companies? Because someday you're going to try to hire that sales guy. Or someday you might partner with the company that's logos on the coffee mug. And so it's like part of being an entrepreneurial artist is seeing, you know, seeing the emergent signals that you weren't necessarily looking for explicitly, but that reveal themselves.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Totally, right? And it's like if you're a marching band, you're not necessarily looking for contrarians. And so whereas if you're a startup, You want people who say, hey, wait a minute, David Sachs says to Peter Thiel, hey, wait a second here, beaming money on Palm Pilots and emailing payments isn't working as well as what we're seeing customers look like putting the PayPal logo in these eBay auctions.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “Why are they going to join your startup for less money and more risk and less status? Most people won't. But if I'm Keith Raboy and I'm in a law firm, and I'm like, eh, this job's okay, but it's kind of soul crushing. And then Peter Teal says, hey, we're going to go on this adventure. We're going to change how money happens. We're going to get to work together again. That's a pretty good story. And so 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 established entrepreneur. You know, if like Jim Clark who found a Netscape, started a company, he could recruit established talent, or Reed Hoffman started a new company, he could do that. But if you're dropping out of college to start a company, the first set of people you go after, I think, are genius.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “I think that that helps a lot. The way I like to say it is most startups don't realize that you have to have contrarian insights as well as contrarian recruiting strategies. So for example, if you look at the PayPal mafia, none of them were established in tech before they joined PayPal. So you had Peter Thial, he's a law school guy. You had Max Levchin, who's a young engineer. They recruit Reed Hoffman, who'd been at EWL at Apple, which was a failed initiative, and then he had done Social Net, which is a failed startup. He recruited Keith Raboy from a law firm. David Sachs. Were people that he knew in his Stanford network and people that Max knew in his University of Illinois network. But discovering undiscovered talent is a key superpower of great startup teams. Because like if somebody's making a ton of money at Google or Facebook,”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “So, to me, like a great metaphor for an awesome entrepreneur is kind of like Yoda. So like Yoda is a mentor with special tools, right? Like in this case, the Force or a lightsaber that allows the protagonist, you know, in this case Luke to get to the outcome he wants and change the world. And where what the entrepreneur has to realize is they're not Luke. They're Yoda. And the set of people in the world that they want to move to their vision are Luke. The way you get them to move to your vision is you help them understand how they get to be the hero of the story that you're helping them co-create.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “Me to take on the Empire. Looks like I can. I'm supposed to stay here. And then his aunt and uncle get killed. And he's like, okay, I'm going to go. And then they get captured. And then it's like, so like most great stories follow this arc. What entrepreneurs who tell stories well 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 better future. And that's true whether you're pitching a customer, future employee, venture capitalist. And so the great startups are kind of a crazy journey that a bunch of people embark on. Where everybody's in on a secret together. And so in order to make that happen, you got to be a good storyteller.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “It's interesting. You know, I'm friends with Nancy Duarte, who'd worked with Al Gore on this movie in Convenient Truth. And she studied a whole bunch of great storytellers. Everything from the Gettysburg address to Steve Jobs' iPhone announcement to Martin Luther King's, I have a dream speech. And she found that there was a pattern to all of them. And without getting down too much the rabbit hole, there's a few things that are interesting. One is there's a beginning, a middle, and an end. And the beginning describes the big idea that represents a future better world that I'm exhorting you to join me to go find this better future world. And then the middle is a sequence of tension. So it's this is bad, but it could be better. This is bad, but it could be better. This is bad, but it could be better. And if you look at like, say, Star Wars, right? Obi-Wan's like, hey, come with.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “At some level, because they have to cause a whole bunch of people to abandon their logic and join a new cause that most people disagree with. And then the builder is the person who is living in the future and understands the technical trade-offs and how to build and co-create the future with other people better than anybody else does yet.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “Yeah, so I think that the most obvious example in history would be jobs in Wozniak. And so Waz was the builder, and Jobs was the persuader. And that's not saying that Jobs isn't a product guy and Jobs as a technical, but I think we can agree that Jobs had incredible persuasive skills and that jobs could get people to, you know, they even called it literally a reality distortion field, which by definition is getting someone to abandon their logic. Whereas like Wozniak, his original design for the Apple II was just poetry and electronics, particularly when you compare it with what was there in the day. But very often we've seen teams that have someone persuasive. And, you know, Elon Musk and Steve Jobs are kind of at the radical extreme awesomeness of it. But, you know, usually somebody, usually the leader is a good storyteller.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “So you get into those situations where you just call up your talent at will and just come up with some crazy kooky solution where you get out of the trap.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “Million dollars in the corridor. And there's no book you can read about business that's going to tell you how to do that. You just have to completely improvise and be anti-fragile. And it's a little bit like James Bond, right? Like when James Bond is about to get killed by the evil villain, like that's when he does his best work.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “Yeah, so this term, I think, was coined by Nassim Taleb. The basic idea is that some things get stronger when they're stressed rather than weaker. And so, for example, if you lift weights, you're damaging your muscles in the short term, but the fibers grow back bigger in the long term. And so some founders, when they're under pressure, actually get better, whereas most people get stressed out and freak out, they're more likely to panic under pressure. And so these anti-fragile people sort of have what I call the MacGyver gene. I don't know if you ever saw that 80s show MacGyver, but he was this guy who could escape from any prison and he could, you know, use chocolate to like fix a radiator, you know, crazy stuff, right? And a lot of the great founders that I've known, they face these situations where they've got one hour left to find.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “That's right. And, you know, history has many allegories of the person with a contrarian idea attracts followers and then gets sacrificed. So that was kind of another part of Gerard's thinking, right? It goes all the way back to Christianity when Jesus was a heretic. And I don't want to get too far down the rabbit hole. But Gerard's genius was understanding the patterns that flow from memetic behavior as a core trait in society.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “Yes, exactly, exactly. Most of the great startup founders, particularly the leaders, not necessarily the people. Been willing to be disagreeable if particularly of being agreeable is approval seeking not in the service of advancing the cause. And, you know, a lot of people in capitalism, and particularly startups, they get a bad rap in the press. And it's because they're largely disagreeable in some ways. They do things that are, you know, most of us wouldn't have the courage to be that disagreeable. But on some level, I think that if you change that about them, it's kind of like if you change too many properties of carbon, the diamond will no longer cut glass.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “On truth seeking. And, you know, all great inventions, you know, and it's not just in business, it's Euclidean geometry, Galileo understanding the sun's at the center, not the Earth. All these things came from people who are heretics in their time. And they were able to put forth those theories because they were more preoccupied with their vision of the future and the truth than they were in getting everyone to agree with them right then and there.”

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  45. “Exactly. So the idea of memetic behavior is that people tend to mimic the behaviors and seek the approval of others way more than most people realize. And that it's literally baked into our operating system as humans. And so if you think about what does it mean to have a non-consensus and right insight, you are not engaging in mimetic behavior. And so what you're doing instead is you're saying, I think I've come up with a novelty and a heresy. And I'm going to go prove it. And in order to be a heretic, you've got to be willing to deal with the disapproval of the crowds. And you've got to be willing to say, I don't really give a damn what the crowds think. I'm right, they're wrong. And so you're no longer defining your decision or your objective function based on approval seeking. You're defining it based on...”

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  46. “Oh, so you, oh man, this, I think your listeners will like this. So Renee Girard was this French philosopher, and he had this theory that he called mimesis. And his basic idea is powerful. He basically said that most desires that humans have are not innate desires, but they're desires that rise because they see other people caring about it. So why do we want to have go to the best school? And why do we want to have the best car, the best job, and the most money and live in the best country club and have designer kids and live in a fancy house? It's because we think everybody else wants that.”

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  47. “Yeah, so it's funny if you think about the 20th century, the archetype worker was sort of like the organization man and kind of the cog in the business, the person that stayed at a company for a long time and kind of part of the reason they got ahead is because they were well liked. And they had good political skills and they're just likable. 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. I think it comes from this idea of a lack of memetic behavior. Have you ever talked about Renee Girard on your podcast?”

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  48. “I'm a little bit more optimistic. I actually think that 3D printing is going to be a bigger deal than some people realize. And so I think that, you know, I like to say that 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. And so I believe that 3D printing will be the way that we get network manufacturing. And like Lyft is an example of a network capitalist ride surface, whereas a taxi is a corporate hierarchical ride service. And so I think in market after market, we're going to see that the software-defined network approach wins.”

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  49. “That's right. The problem with not having a compelling insight, and so these insight models that we're talking about is when the incumbent sees you, the notion of your attack will be too obvious and their ability to respond to the attack will be too powerful. And so part of the value of being in non-consensus and right is not just that you find desperate customers who value what only you can deliver for them. The incumbents are disoriented by how you go to market because the insight around your idea is novel, not just in the technology, but in how you deliver the technology.”

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  50. “Absolutely, right? And the pattern's always the same. It's the incumbent says, oh, you're going after a market or you're charging with a pricing model or you're doing something that I don't really care about. It's not really a threat to me. And so they give the upstart time to satisfy the early desperate customers who are unsatisfied. And then over time as they build their skills and their capabilities, they become more effective attackers in the core markets of the incumbents.”

    2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT