#77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future

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.

I think startups are so impossible that if you're not 100% committed, you just almost have no chance.

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.' 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?'

Sometimes, people will ask me, 'How do you get a good startup idea?' And the counter-intuitive answer to that question is: Don't try to think of a startup.

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 abandon their logic.

What I find in the great startups that I've seen is the great leaders are, very often, willing to be disagreeable, and they're not motivated as much by approval ... They don't seek approval as much as they seek the actualization of their vision.

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.

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 can persuade the world to join their movement, and then create a value proposition that's super compelling...

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? Why is right now the time?' A good founder, regardless of the market they're in, will usually have a good answer to that.

The best founders... 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...

People tend to mimic the behaviors and seek the approval of others way more than most people realize—it's literally baked into our operating system as humans.

Great startups are people who are living in the future and they notice something that's missing ... Then, their job is to come back to the present and bring early, true believers with them into the future.

When I'm talking to [a founder], very early in the discussion, I try to ask them, 'What motivated you to do this? ... Why did you decide to start this?' You can learn a lot about whether it's a really insight by why they decided to do this.

In startups, you're living in the future, so on some level, there is no market yet. There was no market for browsers in 1993, and there was no market for ridesharing in 2009 ... Markets in the startup world are movements, and so trying to quantify the total available market—it's wrongheaded; it's more about quantifying the potential energy of the insights.

Discovering undiscovered talent is a key superpower of great startup teams.

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 a breakthrough insight, and then they have to have a breakthrough value proposition, and then they have to have a breakthrough killer predictable growth strategy.

You want to have a value proposition that is so strong that the customers in your target audience would be irrational not to buy if they knew the truth.

I look at mental models as frameworks for making decisions that maximize the probability of the best outcome.

What entrepreneurs who tell stories well succeed at is they realize they're not the hero in the story; the audience of their message is the hero of the story. And what they're doing is helping that person go on a hero's journey to co-create a better future.

Great startups find people who are, one day, going to be great before the world knows they're great.

I think a lot of startups get very bad advice. They get advice that is sort of exhaustively correct, but what they don't realize is that, when you're a startup, you can't do everything well; you got to do the small number of very important things A-plus well.

When you think about it, the problem with living in the present is your ideas actually sounds plausible because you're talking about present issues in the world or opportunities in the world. But, the problem with living in the present is, usually, the disruptive power of the idea isn't big enough.

Most desires that humans have are not innate desires; but they're desires that rise because they see other people caring about it.

We like to say, at Floodgate, that ego is about who's right and truth is about what's right.