YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike Maples

lines on the record: 114
first: 2020-03-03
most recent: 2020-03-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Perfect the technology, the sword is the skills that you build through time that the incumbent lacks. And as you build the skills, the skills come up with momentum by the time the incumbent realizes that you're a threat, the asymmetry of your skills compared to theirs is too overwhelming for them to respond effectively.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so Alexander Graham Bell is like, yeah, I guess you're right. Well, what he did was he over time improved the voice coils, the amplifiers, all the technology for making the calls progressively longer. And by the time Alexander Graham Bell's phone could make a call across the entire country, the telegraph guys are screwed, right? Because the telegraph guys have no idea how to make telephones or how to perfect the technologies. And so Clay Christensen used to call this the sword and the shield, like 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 a stupid product, a stupid idea. So that's the shield that gives you time to.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably my favorite example in history is the telephone versus the telegraph. So the telegraph company was the biggest company for communication. They could do transcontinental telegraphs. And Alexander Graham Bell shows up with a telephone. And they say, what could you do with his telephone? Well, I can make calls 250 feet, but you can talk to the And they say, Well, what good is being able to hear somebody from 250 feet away? That's useless, right? We can communicate with people across the entire country.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Assets as a company were available to them to attack Google. And in fact, quite the opposite. Google was able to grow very rapidly and Microsoft when they did Bing, they just didn't have the internal skill to be an effective competitor with Google on Google's playing field.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're quote unquote thinking wrong. There's something about their business that is so fundamentally orthogonal, right? Which is kind of like, you know, the opposite direction, if you will, that even if the incumbent decides to counterattack, they would have to change their business model to do so. And they don't have the skills or the values or the capabilities internally to do that very well. So here's a great example. Google. You know, when Google comes into business, everybody's saying it's over. Microsoft's one. Nobody can build Windows apps without being co-opted. It's over. Well, Google did a flippanting of all of Microsoft's value chain. First of all, you didn't have to have it installed on PC. You could just get it on the internet. And they didn't make money by selling per seat software. They made it by running ads. And so none of Microsoft”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Southwest has it right because their airports that love field rather than Dallas Fort Worth. Jet Blue started out faster than southwest, but they run their planes through the same airports as American Airlines and all these other guys. The reason that Southwest has a better business model in the long term is they're not hostage to the incumbent's value networks. So if you're running your planes out Dallas-Fort Worth, the big airlines will lobby the local government to give you the worst gates and to do other things to handicap your business. Well, similarly, if I see a consumer startup and their strategy is to get big by having a business model that resembles Facebook, I get worried about that because Facebook can co-op their business really easily. Whereas the ideas I like the best are ones where”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sometimes, but, and it goes back a little bit to thinking wrong. So Clay Christensen's taught us that you don't want to operate in an incumbent, what he calls value networks. So for example, let's say I want to start a new airline.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's wrong headed, it's more about quantifying the potential energy of the insight. So like I like to say in physics you have potential energy and you have mechanical energy. And when you're holding an object in the air and it's all potential energy, when you drop it, it hits the floor and makes a bang, it's converted to mechanical energy. And markets and companies are more like the mechanical energy of an available mappable market. And markets in a startup are movements yet to be created of innovators in on a secret together. And the market happens as a function of more people joining the movement until someday everybody's in the movement. It's a big market.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so in a company, markets can be mapped. You can say, okay, I'm coming out with Windows for college students or I'm coming out with smart water rather than fancy packaged gourmet water. It turns out that in startups, I don't think markets can be segmented that way. So like a market in a traditional company, the way people think about markets is I'm Lewis and Clark and I'm trying to map the territory and understand where are their opportunities and where's the market real estate I want to capture. But in startups, you're living in the future. So on some level, there is no market yet, right? There was no market for browsers in 1993. And there was no market for ridesharing in 2009. And so trying to quantify the total available market”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the seat upgrading the chunk of code by the seat and monetizing it by the seat. And so that would be one example would be pricing. But thinking wrong is all about saying, I'm going to take the way the incumbent does something and do a flipping of it. And by the way, charging by the transaction may not work, but it's think wrong is like it's more of a thought experiment. It says let's imagine I do the opposite of what the convention is and follow the thread all the way through. And if by following that thread all the way through, you actually get to a good answer. You're like, wait a minute, this isn't crazy. That's the right kind of crazy. Because 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.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let's imagine that I want to sell a product and 90% of the people who are going to use the product are going to be people who also use SAP. SAP charges by the seat. It would be better for me if I can charge by the transaction or some other way. Because if I charge by the seat, SAP can say, oh, yeah, well, we're going to put that in our product someday. We'll just give it away or we'll charge an extra $2 a seat for this. And, you know, this startup's charging $10 a seat. And then it freezes you in the sales cycle. Whereas if you're charging in a totally different way, it's disorienting to the incumbent, right? Because their entire value delivery system is around pricing by the seat, delivering chunks of code by the seat, supporting the chunk of code.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so incumbents have a harder time retaliating against a startup that has a orthogonal asymmetric attack. So let's suppose that you want to get”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 copy, by a subscription, or by the download? Oh, has that ever been tried before by somebody? And so the idea What have been the prior attempts in my category of idea that have worked or haven't worked? And if they have been tried, why is it going to work this time when it hasn't worked before? 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 may be true, but that's not a very insightful answer. You know, it's kind of a hand-waving answer.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the idea maze sort of brings them all together. This term was coined by a friend of mine named Balaji Srinivasan. And so the basic idea of an idea maze is it's not enough just to have an idea to say, hey, I have this idea. Let's do ride sharing. What you want to say is, okay, who's tried that before? Well, Uber's tried that before, but they're doing it with black cars and not people sharing rides. Okay, has anybody ever tried it before with people sharing rides? And, you know, at the time, there weren't many. I think Sidecar might have been one. But then Lyft had a few differences to their implementation than what Sidecar had. And then they also had just some clever things in terms of how they marketed it and how they got distribution. But what you want to do when you go through an idea maze is you want to...”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In order to make the phones perform the functions that they want to perform, these chips can now be repurposed to other devices. 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 produced. It could be harnessed by drones and by other devices.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And that would be a technology inflection. And so a technology inflection is usually an enabling technology that's never existed before, such as super accurate GPS location. Or it could be an exponentially improving technology curve. It could be how much might does it take to sequence a genome or how fast does it take to print something in 3D or that kind of thing. Moore's law has been kind of the fundamental driver that's animated technology inflections, you know, this idea that chips get twice as fast every 18 months. But technology inflections produce these kind of exponential improvements in a whole lot of different areas in data analysis and disk storage and GPS accuracy. And what's interesting now, Shane, is that in a world where there's so many of these phones, you”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I like to say that why now has two components, technology inflection and adoption inflection. So like in the case of Lyft, for example, you had to believe that enough people would have smartphones so that enough people who wanted to be riders would have a smartphone and enough people who had who wanted to be drivers who would have a smartphone. Because if not enough people had smartphones, it doesn't matter how good the service is. So back in 2006 when the smartest phone was a Blackberry, Lyft couldn't have worked no matter how good the idea was. So to me an adoption inflection is a bunch of people either are using or about to use a technology or product that no longer was the case. And so smartphone penetration was a great adoption inflection, for example.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The town was out at hotel rooms. Why was the town out of hotel rooms? There was a conference. I wonder if that happens a lot when there's conferences. And by the way, what's up with a hotel business anyway? What's their business model? How long have they been in business? Why do people go to hotels? And he started to realize that the main reason people go to hotels is because of trust. And he started to realize, well, if you could have a trust rating, perhaps you could have all the benefits of a hotel business without having to own a hotel. So, you know, by the time he starts Airbnb, he has a lot of earned secrets that are counterintuitive but have been sort of validated by the fact that he was willing to do the work to discover whether they were true or not.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so a great example of the earned secret is Brian Chesky at Airbnb. So it's basically some work that you did to discover something that most people would think is non-intuitive. So the case of Brian Chesky, he didn't have any money. He wanted to go to a design conference. He'd just come out of Rhode Island School of Design, and he couldn't afford a ticket. So he put his apartment in an air mattress up on Craigslist, and he got four to five hundred people saying they wanted to rent his room. And, you know, keep in mind how counterintuitive that must have been in 2007. A year later, there was the Craig Lis killings. And, you know, who's going to want to stay in a stranger's apartment? And who's going to want to invite a stranger into their apartment? That's crazy. But he had hundreds of people wanting to do this. But Brian took it a step further. He said, huh, that's interesting. Why did that happen?”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the way I look at a metal model is it's a way to think better. And so, you know, and I got a lot of this from your site, Shane, back in the day, right? Was that lots of people tend to go through life? Taking one problem at a time, deciding one problem at a time. And I think it's helpful in living a better life to kind of acknowledge that there are better ways to decide things. And sometimes you know there's a better way through experience or reading books or whatnot. And sometimes you don't know what the better way is. So I look at mental models as frameworks for making decisions that maximize the probability of the best outcome.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I need to be pretty convinced that they can make money selling that software because if you're selling like say autonomous vehicle simulation software to General Motors, you don't get many chances at the plate. You can't deliver half a loaf or you can't just say, hey, So you've got to deliver something they really care about that they're desperate for, and you got to get paid for delivering that. And so I think monetization is a function of the iteration tempo that's innate to the idea, but also just the field that the idea is going to be in. If it's consumer mobile, how I think about monetization is really different from B2B enterprise or even somewhere in between like a SMB SaaS or things like that.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In general It depends. So I think different companies have different iteration tempos. And so 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 monetized. I care more about are you coming up with clever ways to get distribution to spread your idea very quickly. And if they can iterate a lot, I may not even care that much if they have distribution yet because they have a whole lot of iterations left in front of them before they run out of money. But if it's a company that's selling business to business enterprise software for more than a million dollars, a customer”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Completely, completely. And so it's not like they're like, oh, I wonder if this is going to work or not. It's like they're not even really thinking about it through that lens. Like when I talk to the Instagram guys, they're like, I never remember wondering if it would succeed. I always just remember loving the project and enjoying working on Instagram because I love photos and I couldn't think of anything I'd rather work on than this cool photo app.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, 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 a standard deviation more charismatic than most people. But I think that both of them Believe they were working on something important and that they were doing kick ass exceptional work and they attracted people who believed their vision and wanted to work hard on a great project with them. And so I think that that's really the defining characteristic is they have a vision that compels a set of like-minded people. And they all feel like they're in on a secret together. And they believe that they're going to convert everybody else to their point of view until one day everybody has their point”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things that most people don't have. They can feel something emotional or compelling or powerful in something that other people would just not even see. But then they have that added skill of being able to render it or deliver it in such a way where you're moved beyond your logic. And startup teams are a lot like that, the founders in particular the leader, they have to convince a bunch of people to do something that most people in the world think is crazy. And, you know, you're not going to use just logic to convince people to do that. You're going to have to get people to join a movement that they believe in that they're literally moved by the same way that that statue moved me and St. Peter's Cathedral.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so if you think about it, like, I don't know one time I went on this, when I graduated from college, I got a URL pass and I went all around Europe and I went down to Rome and Vatican City, they had St. Peter's Cathedral. And the letters on top of the dome are like six feet tall, and you could barely see them. And then I walk up and there's this statue by Michelangelo called Pietas, which he did what he was 21 years old. It just, I don't know if you've ever had this happen to you, Shane with a piece of art, but you just like, you can't even describe what you're feeling when you see it. And it's like, it's elation and confusion and excitement, all at the same time. And you're just like, how in the world did this guy do this? And I just stood there kind of transfixed by it. And to me, that's like artists, they have a sensitivity to.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so there's no music theory class Beethoven takes to become Beethoven. And so there's an element of, and it kind of goes back to the jazz band notion, but 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 defining characteristic, usually of the leader, is that they're an artist in the sense that they notice things that other normal people don't notice and they present their ideas in ways that move people to act in ways where they're abandoned their logic.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think some of it, particularly in startups, is a level of artistry. So I think that when I'm working with a startup founder, there are things that I can do to help them avoid avoidable mistakes. I can help them have a better hiring process. I can help them think about what kind of meetings they want to have or how they think about sequencing the risk that they take out or how they think about iterations or that kind of thing. But all of that on some level is science. And the only reason that I possess it is that I have a database of companies that have been really successful. So it's not that I'm smarter than the founder. It's just that in that very rare case, I have a database of great examples that they don't have yet that they haven't seen before. But, you know, Beethoven composed his symphony when he was deaf.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But they don't have a good strategic reason to give it away. And really what you learn is they're giving it away because they don't have enough confidence in a value proposition to charge a price for it. It's like, okay, well, we'd be better off charging a price when the products half done because 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.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most of the lies that we tell ourselves relate to not facing reality, right? So startups are impossible, and usually there's kind of this big boogeyman risk that if we don't overcome this risk, we're going to fail. And so I'm a big fan of like getting that boogeyman right front and center and punching into the face and like going dead at it. And so the best founders I 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 company more valuable, you learn more faster, you know, a whole bunch of good things go your way. Whereas the reverse of it could be the company wants to give its product away.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We looked around for more things, wasn't in there. And so then we called and said, hey, I know this is kind of crazy, but we're doing our diligence. And, you know, what year were you in the Guinness Book Oral Records for Tetris? And they said, I'll get back to you. And, you know, kind of didn't call us. And then they said it was the challenge book of World Records, which I've never heard of. I don't even know if it exists. And then next thing, you know, like Kaigo Radio Silent, they're like, eh, we raised the money somewhere else. But like, I find that when somebody lies about something that is in no wage 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. Elon Musk, right, will sometimes say, well, this car is going to be ready before it's ready.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, sometimes it could be a surprise. So one time we were pitched by somebody who said that they were in the Guinness Book of World Records for Tetris. And we had this great meeting, a bunch of other stuff, and we were going to have a second meeting. And just on the side, we were like, huh, I wonder if he really does have the Guinness Book of World Records and Tetris. Let's just check that out. So we looked at the Guinness Book of World Records. The guy wasn't in there.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, what I find is that great startups, and I experienced this myself when I helped start motive or when I helped start Floodgate or venture firm, I found that my regret for not having tried it felt much stronger than my fear of failing. I had this feeling of if I don't do this, somebody's going to do it and I'm going to watch them do it and I knew all along it should be done. And so when you get that feeling, not starting is not an option. And so you have to stop doing what you're doing immediately and go full time 100% into it. And so when it's not all team members all in, I think that's a real problem. I think startups are so impossible that if you're not 100% committed, you just almost have no chance.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I try to find out how committed the team is. 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'm like, look, if you're not passionate enough to leave your job and do this full time, why would I be passionate enough to write a check? And so I like people who say, I'm doing this. And they would do it even if they couldn't raise the money because they know they'd find a way. And it's like, I'm doing this. I'd love to have you on board, but this is happening. Are you in or you're not in? And so teams that are tentative, teams that are sort of, I'll do it when I get validation of the funding, not my tempo.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And so, you know, great insights avoid the best competitive strategies to not compete with anybody. And if you find a non-consensus and write insight, then you've got much more time to develop the idea without the threat of competition.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you notice something that's missing Mark Andreessen noticed that you couldn't make the internet useful. Todd McKinnon, when he was at OCTA, understood what was happening in the cloud and understood the problems that the early adopters of the cloud were having. When you notice problems that people are having when they're living in the future, your intuition is far more likely to be right because you're solving a problem in the future that is going to one day be obvious to more people. Whereas if you're solving a problem that's a gap in the present, the odds that lots of people have thought similar thoughts and already tried it is super high.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it kind of goes back to the insight notion. So, I like to say don't think of a startup, right? So the problem with thinking of a startup is you immediately put yourself in the present. So one of the examples that I like to use on our podcast is fan base. So Saralyria and Neroftolia, who are great entrepreneurs, now they're the founders of Nextdoor. They started this thing called fanbase. It was a social network for sports fans. And the venture people that they pitched to said, I think that this will be the biggest company we've ever funded. And when you think about it, the problem with living in the present is your ideas actually sound plausible because you're talking about present issues in the world or present opportunities in the world. But the problem with living in the present is usually the disruptive power, the ideas are big enough. Whereas when you're living in the future,”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so first of all, I should say when it comes to pitching VCs, your mileage will vary dramatically, right? So VCs very often can't even agree with themselves about what they're looking for week to week. So I am sympathetic to founders trying to figure out how to do it. But when I'm talking to somebody very early in the discussion, I try to ask them just like, what motivated you to do this? Just like, tell me, what's up with that? Why did you decide to start this? And you can learn a lot about whether it's a real insight by why they decided to do this. And so answers that I don't love are, I think that real estate technology is going to be huge. So I studied real estate technology for nine months and I found this area of white space in the market. That may be a valid opportunity, but I'm more skeptical of those.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ladder. So, this is the other thing that's true about startup investing. So if you look at Buffett and Monker, they're investing in big companies with understandable businesses. And so when you invest that way, your metal models are oriented towards avoiding avoidable risk and not, you know, they look at risk almost as not knowing what you're doing. In our business, you have to look at risk differently because 10 companies a year are going to produce 95% of the value in the business. And so what you realize is that you're making a bet on a low probability of a huge outcome. And when that's what you're doing, what you're really trying to do is... And the risks that are worth taking in a startup have less to do with the business for what it is and more to do with the power of the insight and the capability of the team.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I find that these mental models are good. It's kind of like the Timothy Geithner stress test. No one single metal model tells you whether to invest or not, but it helps you notice things that you might have missed if all you did is spend time looking at the presentation.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Usually, the questions that I ask now are about teasing out the insight and the capabilities of the founders. It helps me because I can look at a wide variety of markets. So you could imagine we get deals for ad tech. We get deals for agriculture, for cryptocurrency, for marketing technology, for bottoms-up B2B SaaS offerings, I mean, almost anything you could imagine. And it's very difficult to be an expert in all those markets at the same time. But when you ask a founder questions like, okay, why do you think now is the time for this to happen? Why hasn't it happened before? Why isn't it going to happen sometime in the future from now? Like why right now is the time? A good founder regardless of the market they're in will usually have a good answer to that and it won't be a bunch of gobbledygook. It'll be something clear where you're like, man, you know, that guy just changed my point of view on something.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Shouldn't criticize his pitch too much because his company's worth over $10 billion. Who's the dummy? I'm the dummy, right? Like I have to, as an investor, I have to have the humility to say, well, maybe the pitch didn't matter that much. Maybe there's another question I needed to get to the bottom of rather than evaluate the pitch for what it was.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Twilio, I should have understood the why now. And with Lyft we did understand the why now. And with Twitch we did understand the why now. But it was kind of a combination of where we should have said yes and a combination of where we did say yes and then try to understand what questions reveal the answers that would cause you to say yes. And by extension, what should you not pay attention to? So for example, when Airbnb presented to us the presentation didn't work because they had it on the server they could load it. When Lawson at Twilio presented to me, it was a clumsy conference call where we could barely connect. And even he acknowledges an ink magazine. It was a terrible pitch. And he realized it was terrible from our discussion. But then he changed it and it was an awesome pitch. And then the rest is history. And so what should I think about that?”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reason this is so important, Shane, is that startups are so random that you can literally forget how it happened. 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. And so in the ones that we did say yes, and it was a big win, we try to not breathe our own fumes too much and we similarly try to go back in time and say what went right and what did we get right? And did we get it right on purpose or by accident? The mental models then emerged from understanding what it was that we should have noticed about that startup. So for example, Brian Cesky, I should have noticed the notion of an earned secret. And with”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wish I could say it was by being smart, but it was as much as by being dumb. So like if you look at what Charlie Munger talks about is Great investors, they read a lot. They're genuinely curious and they try not to repeat avoidable mistakes. And so I went back in time and I looked at all the companies that we had passed on that we should have invested in, Airbnb, Pinterest, who else paid your duty, Anna Plan. I did a forensic analysis of it. I found the initial intro email on who the source of that intro was. I looked at all the notes we took. I looked at the pitch deck at the time we saw it. And I even looked at the notes between us and the pass email I sent. And then I studied what happened in that round, what price did it get done at, were all the future rounds, who said yes and why? And then when I get a chance, I actually interview the founder a few years later.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it's funny that you mention that because we have all these different types of mental models for startups, right? And we've alluded to some of them. We have insight models and team models and value models and growth models. And one of the team models is you want to have a leader in particular who's a learn it all. And so the thing I think you would have noticed about Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates is if you'd met with them once a year, it would have been like you're meeting with a different person. And these people just have this ability to just absorb new ideas like a sponge and they're incredibly mentally flexible in their ability to acknowledge when they might be wrong about something or when they don't know how to do something. And so they kind of have this combination of determination, but sort of a lack of ego around what they don't know and sort of a willingness to go fill the gaps and what they know.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, this is why 10 companies out of 10,000 every year create 95% of the value in the startup business. It's just incredibly rare to have a combination of an awesome insight, an incredible startup team that's like a jazz band with a composer running it who could persuade the And the founding team, and particularly the leader, has to be willing to upgrade the skills of the team as value gets created differently through time. And that's why people like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are so rare is that they were learn it all at every phase of the company were able to shift gears and focus on how value had to get created at that particular point in time.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is they go read on a blog somewhere that says, if I want to raise money in the future, I have to do $200,000 of revenue a month. And so pretty soon they're trying to get their revenue 15% a month. Well, that's just artificial numbers in a spreadsheet. And what people need to think about is how do I have a value proposition that is awesome, that is resulting in customers literally pulling product out of me desperately. And then I could start to think about growth because I have a value proposition that's true. And now I only have to teach people to buy rather than to persuade people to buy. But you want to have a value proposition that is so strong that the customers and your target audience would be irrational not to buy if they knew the truth. And then you scale in terms of the market's readiness to adopt your solution.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the way I see it is that the value phase or value hacking is really about seeking the truth rather than selling. 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 spend money on marketing programs and you have to persuade people to buy rather than teach people to buy. And so value hacking is this phase where you get this scar tissue and muscle memory, but it's incredibly valuable because now all of a sudden you know how to deliver value in a way that nobody else knows. And so what happens in too many startups is, and I think venture capitalists are at least as guilty of this as anybody.”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That my idea was true. And the way that I do that is I find the people out there who believe what I believe and who are desperate for the product that I'm going to deliver. 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?”
2020-03-03 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT