#191 with Mike Maples - 4 Big Trends and $0 to $1 Billion Startup Idea Frameworks

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, there's this amazing book called Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got. I read it a few years ago and it changed my life.
And the reason I loved it was because it basically talks about how to get and make more money using things that you already have.
Coincidentally, today's podcast is brought to you by Business Made Simple. It's a podcast by Donald Miller, who I'm gonna tell you about in a second, but he has this amazing episode that's all related to this book and the things that I learned in this book. It's called How to Make Money with What You Already Have. It's an incredible episode. It talks about all the stuff that I learned in this book. The host is Donald Miller. I didn't know who Donald Miller was up until recently, but over the last 12 months, this is totally by coincidence. It was all separate people. They said, you have to check out Donald Miller. He's amazing. So I'm happy that he's part of HubSpot's Podcast Network. You can check it out, Business Made Simple Podcast. It's where he coaches you on how to build your business like an airplane, where the cockpit is your leadership, the body is your overhead, the right engine is your marketing, the left engine is your sales.
You have to check it out. This guy's amazing. It's called Business Made Simple with Donald Miller.

**Mike Maples** (1:02)
Let's say everybody's selling a banana. You can't say, I'm a 5X better banana. Instead, you should come out and say, I'm an apple.
And not everybody's gonna want your apple, but 100% of the people who prefer.

**Sam Parr** (1:29)
Apples are gonna want what you have. Yeah, Shawn, I was playing this podcast. Pretty good.
How do you feel?

**Shaan Puri** (1:38)
It was good. It was like we showed up, no context. It's like, what are we gonna talk about? Do I need to talk about Bitcoin? Do I need to have something smart to say about Bitcoin because I kind of just, you know, I believe I buy, I hold, right? I'm like a monkey in this space.
I'm not like, you know, one of these experts.
But we talked about solo, being a solo capitalist slash solopreneur and some of the different kind of like things around that. So I thought it was actually pretty good conversation. Ben was there and he goes like, I liked this one because I feel like everything you said in this was something new that I had never heard you say before. He's like, whereas, you know, once you listen to somebody for like hundreds of hours, you kind of hear the same greatest hits over and over again. He's like, this felt like new stuff.

**Sam Parr** (2:17)
Speaking of listening to us for hundreds of hours or listening to you, at least we had a good episode. We just interviewed this guy named Mike Maples.
Mike was pretty cool. So Mike is a little under the radar, but he started this thing called Floodgate, which is a really big venture capital firm, but really fascinating guy. What all have they done?

**Shaan Puri** (2:36)
They've done Lyft, Twitch, Twitter, Cruise, Okta, which is like a giant enterprise company that's public. So yeah, a bunch of big winners that he was an investor in pretty early.

**Sam Parr** (2:48)
Considered one of the best venture capital firms there is. So real insightful guy. He kind of had a hint of biology a little bit. I mean, he was like real high IQ. I've been using the word high functioning.
He's like a real high functioning guy.

**Shaan Puri** (3:04)
He was a high functioning Southerner. He had this disarming way of talking because he's got this kind of like, I don't know, it was a Southern or Midwestern accent and very relatable, likable guy. But then the things he was saying, each one was like a bullet of an idea, of an insight. He definitely had a few refined ideas of where he thinks the puck is going.
I appreciate that. I like that. He gave us basically these four waves. He's like, I believe these four inflections are happening right now, and that's going to create a bunch of opportunity. That's what I look for is like, how is the world changing?
And then what's going to be new because of these inflection points?

**Sam Parr** (3:41)
Yeah, I was taking notes. The four things are blockchain, cloud office, AmericanX, the cloud culture for consumers. So those are like the four things. And we went into like, we didn't actually go into each one entirely, but he talked a little bit about each one, and we went deep into cloud office. He talked about the opportunities there. I thought it was great. What do you think?