Too many people mistakenly believe that being a good entrepreneur comes from simply talking to customers and solving their pain. But the most impactful companies are built for aesthetic reasons - think of Twitter, Lyft, Apple, and Medium - and those companies serve as expressions of what their founders thought the world needed. In this lesson of greatness, Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE discusses the success of Pandora’s visionary founder Tim Westergren, and offers three tips for founders looking ...
Feb 28, 2022•8 min•Ep 68•Transcript available on Metacast Tim Westergren maxed out 11 credit cards, racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and was rejected 348 times for a second round of funding for his revolutionary idea for a music streaming platform. But like any true artist, Westergren remained committed to his vision of creating an aesthetically more beautiful future with Pandora, and now the company boasts more than 6 million monthly subscribers. Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE interviews Westergren to discuss the company’s humble begi...
Feb 28, 2022•42 min•Ep 67•Transcript available on Metacast Lots of people think about design from the perspective of how a product should look and function. But design can be applied to greatness on many more levels than most realize. In this lesson of greatness, Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE discusses how you can design your opportunity, your team, your market, your category, your culture, and even your own life. "Big D" design is about understanding that you have the chance to be more intentional in more areas that contribute to success than most reali...
Dec 20, 2021•8 min•Ep 66•Transcript available on Metacast Qasar Younis and Peter Ludwig both grew up in the backyard of American automotive giant General Motors in Detroit, but didn’t cross paths until their days as product managers at Google. Since then they’ve pooled their affinity for cars and technology as the co-founders of Applied Intuition, a fast-moving startup that has already achieved greatness with their advanced simulation software for autonomous vehicles. Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE interviews Younis and Ludwig to discuss how the company ...
Dec 20, 2021•37 min•Ep 65•Transcript available on Metacast Your startup will face multiple WFIO moments on the path to greatness...COUNT ON IT. But that doesn’t mean you should let these moments get inside your head. In this lesson of greatness, Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE discusses how every startup team MUST be prepared to take the initiative in the crucible of the WFIO moments they will inevitably face. The bright side? You can use these horrible situations as defining moments to show everyone that your startup is destined to defeat the impossible.C...
Nov 15, 2021•13 min•Ep 64•Transcript available on Metacast Startups are romanticized AFTER they win. But it takes extraordinary grit to have what it TAKES to win. Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of Andreessen-Horowitz, is the perfect guest to tell it like it is, as he has for many years in his books "the Hard Thing About Hard Things" and "What You Do Is Who You Are." Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE interviews Ben to discuss the ups and downs of dealing with "the struggle," and why the best startup leaders are often the ones who simply refused to quit.Check ou...
Nov 15, 2021•44 min•Ep 63•Transcript available on Metacast Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel understands that the task of a revolutionary startup is to manifest a radically different future, and not merely settle for a marginal improvement. But how did he make that future a reality with messenger RNA Therapeutics, and how can you do it with your startup? In this lesson of greatness, Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE goes in-depth on the three strategies to designing a future where your startup achieves greatness: Play offense with risk, use the Backcasting method,...
Nov 01, 2021•13 min•Ep 62•Transcript available on Metacast What’s it like to run a startup that has achieved its goal of impacting humanity at a time of desperate need? Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel joins Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE to discuss the power of taking offensive risks to seize unlikely futures with massive upside, sometimes with the result of changing the odds of life itself. For founders seeking greatness, the conversation also teases out many of the enduring lessons of how we can increase the odds of creating massive breakthroughs.Check out ...
Nov 01, 2021•45 min•Ep 61•Transcript available on Metacast Rahul Vohra shows us how game design can be used to make business products far more engaging and contribute to a state of flow. Since future success in business software and services is increasingly driven by product-led growth and bottoms-up adoption driven by end-users, mastering game design is vital for startups seeking greatness. In this lesson of greatness, Mike Maples, Jr talks about the specific and actionable steps you can take to harness the power of game design in your products.Check o...
Sep 21, 2021•10 min•Ep 60•Transcript available on Metacast Rahul Vohra of Superhuman has adopted some of the most cutting-edge approaches to making a business product people *want* to use, rather than have to use. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE talks to Rahul about how any startup founder can apply the principles of game design to their products, and why this is becoming increasingly important in a world where users (rather than IT) increasingly decide which products win.Check out the Pattern Breakers Blog at patternbreakers.substack.com ...
Sep 21, 2021•37 min•Ep 59•Transcript available on Metacast The conventional thinking is that a big total available market (TAM) is one of the most important factors in startup success. But Julia Hartz's success at Eventbrite shows the limits of this thinking. In this Lesson of Greatness, Mike Maples Jr of Floodgate talks about the difference between available markets and potential markets and offers heuristics for determining the potential market for future breakthroughs.Check out the Pattern Breakers Blog at patternbreakers.substack.com for even more P...
Aug 23, 2021•10 min•Ep 58•Transcript available on Metacast Eventbrite CEO Julia Hartz didn't start out life thinking she would be a tech founder, but she has achieved a feat that's very rare: Starting a great startup and going the distance, even past IPO. She also navigated one of the toughest setbacks in recent tech history when the COVID-19 pandemic jeopardized Eventbrite's entire business. In this episode, Mike Maples Jr interviews Julia Hartz to discuss what founders seeking greatness can learn from her varied experiences and choices along the way.C...
Aug 23, 2021•44 min•Ep 57•Transcript available on Metacast Most startups postpone pricing decisions until after the product is developed. They HOPE they can make money rather than KNOW they will at the outset. In this Lesson of Greatness, pricing guru Madhavan Ramanujam shows us that without a price, you literally don't have a product. Therefore, we should follow some of the best practices aligned with having the willingness to pay discussion early and in the most effective ways.Check out the Pattern Breakers Blog at patternbreakers.substack.com for eve...
Aug 02, 2021•11 min•Ep 56•Transcript available on Metacast New startups fail for many reasons. Perhaps the most obvious is they can't get people to pay the necessary price for their products. Madhavan Ramanujam's book Monetizing Innovation, is the foremost guide in the industry for startups who want to make pricing a core part of their success rather than an afterthought. In this interview, Mike Maples Jr of Floodgate talks to Madhavan about the key success factors as well as mistakes to avoid.Check out the Pattern Breakers Blog at patternbreakers.subst...
Aug 02, 2021•36 min•Ep 55•Transcript available on Metacast The best startups almost always ride a wave that represents a sea change. Such waves give the founders the power to show up with a radically different idea that changes the subject -- and the future. In this lesson of greatness, Mike Maples Jr talks about how the example of Jerry Yang and David Filo at Yahoo illustrates this perfectly and how you can leverage this insight as a founder seeking your own path to greatness for your startup.Check out the Pattern Breakers Blog at patternbreakers.subst...
Jul 19, 2021•13 min•Ep 54•Transcript available on Metacast Before Google or Facebook; prior to the days of snapping, tweeting, and texting....Yahoo was the original King of the Internet. But in the early days, Jerry Yang and David Filo weren't sure if it was even a valid business. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr of Floodgate interviews Jerry Yang about what it was like to learn that what started out as a hobby was destined for business greatness.Check out the Pattern Breakers Blog at patternbreakers.substack.com for even more Pattern Breaking content f...
Jul 19, 2021•37 min•Ep 53•Transcript available on Metacast Many startup founders would agree that team building is the most important part of startup success. But very few startups actually live it. The founders of Cloudflare offer key lessons in how to start with the right founding team, how to collaborate more effectively, how to design a company culture....and most importantly, how to make hiring the very best your top priority...for real.Check out the Pattern Breakers Blog at patternbreakers.substack.com for even more Pattern Breaking content from M...
Jun 28, 2021•12 min•Ep 52•Transcript available on Metacast It takes a lot of effort to build a breakthrough product. It's perhaps even rarer to design a company that endures. In this interview, Mike Maples Jr of Floodgate interviews Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn of Cloudflare to highlight what we can learn about how to get a startup's foundation right, along with recruiting, hiring, and company design.Check out the Pattern Breakers Blog at patternbreakers.substack.com for even more Pattern Breaking content from Mike. Mike's book Pattern Breakers is...
Jun 28, 2021•45 min•Ep 51•Transcript available on Metacast Most people think that risk should be avoided. But Vinod Khosla teaches us otherwise...Risk is something people *take* when they create breakthroughs. This lesson of greatness talks about the key frameworks for why this is the case as well as how to take risks intelligently to tilt the odds in your favor.Check out the Pattern Breakers Blog at patternbreakers.substack.com for even more Pattern Breaking content from Mike. Mike's book Pattern Breakers is available now wherever you buy books.
Jun 01, 2021•10 min•Ep 50•Transcript available on Metacast Vinod Khosla is a Silicon Valley legend, having achieved greatness as a founder with Sun Microsystems and as one of the best venture capitalists of all time. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr of Floodgate talks to Vinod about why it's wrong for breakthrough builders to play it safe and how to turn the odds in your favor when setting out to build a massive breakthrough.Check out the Pattern Breakers Blog at patternbreakers.substack.com for even more Pattern Breaking content from Mike. Mike's book ...
Jun 01, 2021•33 min•Ep 49•Transcript available on Metacast Startups change the future so they MUST be different, rather than better. Christopher Lochhead shows us how category designers realize that different is believable from a startup, but better is not. Any powerful startup idea pre-supposes an exponentially different future, which means your startup MUST change the way the people think about the future rather than incrementally improve on the products they already use. Different forces a choice rather than a comparison. And different sticks, while ...
May 17, 2021•13 min•Ep 48•Transcript available on Metacast Christopher Lochhead is a bestselling author, #1-rated podcaster, and one of the best marketing minds of our time. As one of the co-inventors of category design, Christopher offers valuable insights for startups wanting to stand out in an ever noisier world. In this episode, Mike Maples Jr talks to Christopher Lochhead to clarify what category design is and why it’s vital for founders determined to create something legendary that changes the future. Check out the Pattern Breakers Blog at pattern...
May 17, 2021•38 min•Ep 47•Transcript available on Metacast Many founders claim their startups contain network effects, but many of these claims only scratch the surface. Networks that achieve greatness are designed, with many trade-offs and factors in mind regarding the "nodes," how interactions take place, what causes people to stay engaged, and the types of relationships that get created. Anu Hariharan shows us the specific decisions and trade-offs we can weigh that startups often overlook.Check out the Pattern Breakers Blog at patternbreakers.substac...
May 03, 2021•12 min•Ep 46•Transcript available on Metacast Anu Hariharan from YCombinator's Continuity fund is one of Silicon Valley's top experts on network effects and how they can be applied to all types of different businesses. In this interview, Mike Maples of Floodgate talks to Anu about how a raw startup can design network effects into its business as a core strategy from the very beginning.Check out the Pattern Breakers Blog at patternbreakers.substack.com for even more Pattern Breaking content from Mike. Mike's book Pattern Breakers is availabl...
May 03, 2021•37 min•Ep 45•Transcript available on Metacast David Sacks demonstrates how the best startup founders talk about causes much bigger than themselves or the companies they're building. Google was about organizing the world's information. Tesla was about moving the world to sustainability, not just selling cars. These startup leaders saw a world that they wanted to create and built a movement around their visions. Sacks shows us how great startup products aren't just selling a product that solves an immediate problem; they are selling a vision ...
Apr 19, 2021•8 min•Ep 44•Transcript available on Metacast David Sacks, known as one of the best startup product strategists and operators of the last 20 years, discusses key lessons learned from his tenure in the PayPal Mafia, where he was head of product, along with key takeaways as founding CEO of Yammer and what he learned from working directly with industry greats like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.Check out the Pattern Breakers Blog at patternbreakers.substack.com for even more Pattern Breaking content from Mike. Mike's book Pattern Breakers is availa...
Apr 19, 2021•36 min•Ep 43•Transcript available on Metacast Maybe you've struggled with needing to seem in charge or on top of a challenging situation, even when you're unsure of what to do. If so, you've likely heard the siren song that tempts you to be a know-it-all. But Matt Mullenweg shows us how the learn-it-all is most likely to achieve greatness. Check out Mike’s interview with Bob Metcalfe (of Metcalfe’s Law) where he also discusses leadership lessons. Check out the Pattern Breakers Blog at patternbreakers.substack.com for even more Pattern Break...
Apr 05, 2021•9 min•Ep 42•Transcript available on Metacast Wordpress CEO Matt Mullenweg talks with Mike Maples Jr of Floodgate about his early successes, setbacks, and what founders can learn from his continued growth as a manager and leader. Check out the Pattern Breakers Blog at patternbreakers.substack.com for even more Pattern Breaking content from Mike. Mike's book Pattern Breakers is available now wherever you buy books.
Apr 05, 2021•40 min•Ep 41•Transcript available on Metacast Mark Cuban shows us that it's not enough to play by the rules as they are defined. If you are going to achieve greatness as a startup, you need to find your EDGE...which means you have to outmaneuver your competition before they even engage with you on the competitive battlefield. You have to change the rules to your advantage and not just play by the rules as they are given to you. Never fall into the trap of not anticipating how a giant competitor will try to run you out of business someday......
Mar 22, 2021•12 min•Ep 40•Transcript available on Metacast Mike Maples of Floodgate talks to Mark Cuban about a wide range of topics with a common theme...you have to go after opportunities where the stakes are high enough that when you win, you can win BIG. And as a corollary, you have to anticipate that giant competitors will try to stop you because otherwise, you are thinking too small.Check out the Pattern Breakers Blog at patternbreakers.substack.com for even more Pattern Breaking content from Mike. Mike's book Pattern Breakers is available now whe...
Mar 22, 2021•45 min•Ep 39•Transcript available on Metacast 
