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Mike Maples

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114
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2020-03-03
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2020-03-03
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  1. “Right. So once you have a non consensus and right insight and you have a team of people who have the stuff, then you go into this mode of the value phase or what I sometimes call value hacking. And what you're trying to do in value hacking is figure out what you can build that is unique, that people are desperate for. And if your insight is truly powerful, it will connect with somebody desperate because you'll be solving problem in a novel way that's never been solved that way before. And it's an order of magnitude noticeably better for those people. And so the trick and value hacking is to say, okay, and the insight phase, I posed a truth. Now in the value hacking phase, I need to discover the truth. I need to validate.”

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

  2. “Direction the rest of the band just kind of goes with them. And so that tune is never going to play it exactly that same way ever again. And startups are a lot like that. There are these close-knit teams of people who enjoy the craziness of the ambiguity. And they enjoy improvising and they understand that startups are ambiguous and that you're trying to improvise your way to success rather than have objectives and key results and a lot of the basic management frameworks that a larger company needs.”

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

  3. “Right. So the insight is a necessary prerequisite because it really contains the potential energy of the idea, right? And I have an insight that's so powerful that if you're right, you change the rules in markets and you create this massive movement with massive asymmetric upside. But to your point, you also have a team and 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 know if you've ever been to New Orleans and seen improv jazz, but it's with improv jazz, you have a tune, but you're kind of going in a direction. And usually the lead performer starts to do a riff and goes in a different direction.”

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

  4. “You're not realizing that sometimes the insight defines the market and that, you know, markets in startups aren't about mapping the territory or geography. Markets with startups are about finding something valuable about the future and then starting a movement of people who believe what you believe until everybody believes.”

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

  5. “A play on William Gibson's quote. And what you find is that most of the really great startups are people who are living in the future and they notice something that's missing. And then their job, it's almost like if the metaphor of customer development is experimenting, which we'll get to, right, the metaphor of insights are the time traveler. And somebody's living in the future and they notice something important, and then their job is to come back to the present and bring early true believers with them into the future and eventually it accelerates to a whole lot of people. So, you know, insights are the bedrock of a great startup. And the failure mode and 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're looking for gaps in today's markets,”

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

  6. “Sometimes people will ask me, how do you get a good startup idea? And the counterintuitive answer to that question is don't try to think of a startup. And people are like, what are you talking about? That's a crazy answer. Well, it turns out that most of the great startups come from a great insight. And a great insight usually occurs when someone is living in the future and they notice something that's missing. So if you take somebody like Mark Andreessen, he didn't try to think of a startup. He was in a computer lab at the University of Illinois, and they were trying to experiment with the internet and share notes and documents and collaborate. And the Internet wasn't useful to him. And so he built mosaic, both the browser and the web server to make the internet immediately more useful for him. And so insights are kind of a...”

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

  7. “breakthrough insight. And then they have to have a breakthrough value proposition. And then they have to have a breakthrough killer predictable growth strategy. And all of those things require capabilities that don't really exist in normal companies in terms of the team and how they operate and what success looks like.”

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

  8. “I think that's a really insightful question because I've concluded that one of the fundamental insights is that it's not. And so when you think about a company, a company has a brand, they have products, they have supply chains, they have, or value chains, if it's a software company. But they have resources, processes, and values and capabilities that give them a market position. A startup has none of those things. And so 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. And so, you know, 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”

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

  9. “And then there's other companies that we did decide to invest in Twitter, Twitch, Okta, Lyft. Well, Okta was called Sasher. Twitter didn't know what to call itself. Twitch was justin.tv. And so Lyft was ZimRide. And so I started to realize that we didn't really have mental models for startups. And so I got really interested in the question of how would you come up with mental models for startups or is it just purely random? And so I spent a couple, three years trying to dig into that question.”

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

  10. “Well, without flattering the interview host too much, I have been a big reader of Farnham Street for a while and have liked a lot of your podcast episodes. I'm friends with Naval and just got into the notion of mental models. And then I went down the rabbit hole and I read books about and buy Charlotte Munger. I read this book that I'm sure you've heard of, Thinking Fast and Slow by Kahneman. And so I got interested in the following question. There seemed to be a lot of mental models for investing or operating companies, but they didn't seem to apply to startups. So I looked at companies that we should have invested in, like Airbnb, and we passed on it. And none of those mental models would have been helpful. And that's a problem because had I invested $250,000 in Airbnb at the time, it'd now be worth a billion dollars.”

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

  11. “It's hard, right? And I'm probably too nice about it. I probably say yes too often. And, you know, in the end, you only have so many hours of the day and you got to decide how you want to spend it and who you want to spend it with. And I also think it's good to just have some serendipity and not be too dogmatic about who you're going to meet and who you're not going to meet. And so you just try as hard as you can to meet with as many people as you can. The other hard part about it is the more people that you meet with, the more follow-ups you have. This has always been hard for me. You want to help everybody. You want to make intros for everybody. And if you take more meetings, you're going to have to do more of those. And you have, it's more likely you can't get it all done.”

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

  12. “Oh, a friend from high school says, Oh, I have a buddy who started a company and can you meet with him? I think you're going to think it's amazing. Family friend says, hey, can you connect me to Mike Jr.? I'd like to pitch his startup lawyer buddy will send me something from his client. We meet with his startup. I think it's really exciting. And so you have people that you've known through your whole life that you respect and you value the relationship, but they don't always necessarily have a grounding in the types of startups that you're looking for. And so those are tricky.”

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

  13. “It's funny the typical day when I'm winning is I get to meet with the folks and the opportunities that I'm excited about and the days where I'm doing not so well is where I'm just reacting to crazy inbound. And, you know, you kind of learn over time that you got to be the best you can at spending time with the folks that you think are living in the future and are going to make a difference in bringing it forward for us all. So most of my day is spent trying to spend time with people who are living in the future.”

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

  14. “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.”

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