Mike Maples, Jr. - A Playbook for Startups - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 48]

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Founder's Field Guide. Founder's Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs, and operators building great businesses. I believe we are all builders in our own way, and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types.
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**SPEAKER_2** (1:52)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions, and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:17)
My guest today is Mike Maples, co-founder and partner of Floodgate. As a child of the computer revolution, Mike was deconstructing calculators in grade school, writing video games in high school, and inevitably found himself building businesses in Silicon Valley after college. After his success as an operator, Mike eventually transitioned to become a full-time venture investor in the 2000s, and has since built a track record that includes Twitter, Twitch, Lyft, Octa, and a long list of successful tech businesses.
I'm not sure I've recorded the conversation with more applicable ideas and advice for company builders. We discussed early insights and secrets, value hypothesis testing, customer development, growth, team orchestration, and a lot more. This is a master class from somebody who has seen it all. Also, do not miss his answer to the kindest thing question at the end of the conversation. I hope you enjoyed this great talk with Mike Maples.
So Mike, I've been really looking forward to this one since our first conversation. I like to dive right in. We'll get to your fascinating history and all the things you've done, but I like to start with ideas. One of the ideas that really struck me when we talked last was this notion of forcing a choice and the power of forcing a choice in business. Can you explain in detail what you mean by this and why it's so powerful?

**Mike Maples** (3:29)
I like to say that there's two fundamental fields of business that are animating the economy. There are scalable corporations and then there are scalable startups.
A scalable startup only has one opportunity to succeed, and that is if they offer a choice in the direction towards a different future. People don't want something incrementally better from a startup because human beings are conditioned to like things. If you're too much like what they already know, there's not room in their head to believe that you can credibly do a better job than a very large incumbent as a startup. What a startup needs to do is offer a choice of a different future. So if everybody in the world is selling bananas, you don't come in and say 10 times better banana, you say, I'm the world's first apple. You may not want my apple, that's okay, but you can't reconcile an apple and banana. The set of people who value the advantage of apples, 100 percent of them should flock to your apple. To me, a startup that creates a breakthrough has to force that choice because they're trying to create a movement. They're trying to move people to a different future of their design.