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

Episode Date: June 16, 2021

Shaan (@ShaanVP) and Sam (@TheSamParr) talk with seed VC Mike Maples (@m2jr). Mike is a co-founding Partner at Floodgate. He has been on the Forbes Midas List eight times in the last decade due to notable investments like Twitter, Twitch, Lyft, and Okta. In this episode he talks about the four big trends he is excited about, the types of companies he likes to invest in, and why a startup isn’t a company. He shares a few of the mental models he uses at Floodgate to evaluate startups and shares the thoughts behind some of his unique turns of phrase. --------- * Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ * Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: https://refer.fm/million * Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas. --------- Show notes: * (1:02) – Debrief of the episode * (6:37) - Intro to Mike Maples * (9:02) - How Mike thinks about the next big thing * (11:00) – The 4 inflections Mike is excited about * (13:51) – Cloud Offices * (19:33) – A brief history of centralization & decentralization * (22:48) – Examples of software defined companies * (26:14) – A practical way to prepare for the future * (30:23) – How Mike thinks about investing in startups * (33:07) – Startup investing mental models * (37:39) – Mike’s take on "1 to n" businesses * (42:36) – Mike on Balaji * (47:11) – Mike on media companies  * (49:49) – Force a choice, not a comparison * (54:46) – Mike’s information diet * (57:40) – Contact info & future topics

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 going to want your apple, but 100% of the people who prefer apples are going to want what you have. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off.

On the road, let's travel, never looking back. All right. Yeah, Sean, this, I'm, I was playing this Pomp podcast. Pretty good. How'd you feel? It was good. It was like we showed up no context.

Like, what are we going to 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. I'm like a monkey in this space. I'm not like, you know, one of these experts.

But we talked about being a solo capitalist slash solopreneur. And some of the different kind of like things around that. So I thought it was actually a pretty good conversation. Ben was there and he was 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. 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 Flood's. which is a really big venture capital firm but really fascinating guy what what all have they done they've done lift twitch um twitter cruise um octa which is like a giant enterprise company that's public so yeah a bunch of bunch of big winners that he was an investor in pretty early considered um one of the best venture capital firms there is so real insightful guy he kind of had a hint obology 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. He was a high functioning Southerner. He had this disarming

way of talking because he's got this, you know, kind of like, I don't know, it was a southern or Midwestern accent. Yeah. And, you know, very, very relatable, likable guy. But then the things he was saying, each one was like, you know, like sort of a bullet into, you know, of an idea, of an insight. And he definitely had like a few refined ideas of where he thinks the puck is going. And 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. And that's what I look for is like, how is the world changing? And then what's, what's going to be new because of these inflection points? Yeah, I was taking notes.

The four things are blockchain, cloud office, America Next, 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 dealt, we went deep into cloud office. He talked about the opportunities there. I thought it was great. What did you think? I loved it.

I loved the way he had some phrases for things. I thought at the beginning, he was like a little bit too intellectual for me. I was like, okay, wait, where do I go with this? But it was interesting, but I didn't know how to attach it to like a concrete idea. And then I thought about, you know, that was maybe the first 25%. And then the next 75% I thought were fantastic, where, yeah, came down to Earth. and also he has these, this kind of amazing way of talking.

I'm kind of jealous. Dude, you are like that. I know, but I, because I try to be like that, when I see somebody who's really good at it, I'm like, oh, shit, you're good at this thing. Most people don't even care about this thing. He had these little phrases coined terms for either himself or his fund or his philosophy or his mental models.

And he'd be like, you know, startup is like a jazz band, not a marching band. And then he was explaining the analogy. And then he was like, yeah, he was like, I want people to choose, not compare, which is hard to understand, but once he explains it, then it's like, oh, that's actually a wonderful mental framework. It's like that Kanye song where it's like, what does it mean? It's like, I don't know what it means, but it sounds provocative. And that's how I felt with a lot of his things was like, at first, I was like,

immediately interested. I leaned in when he would say one of those phrases, even though my brain hadn't figured out exactly what it means yet, and then he would explain it. So anyways, I thought it was really good and super nice dude. I really thought he came, you know, he's so humble and very likable. So I don't know, great episode. I liked him a lot. I agree.

And he offered to come back. I couldn't tell if like when guys are being nice, I'm like, well, if you have time, let's just keep going. But I couldn't tell if he was being kind. We'll have to have him back on. He was awesome. Right. How did you feel about when you hit him up for some intros there? Was that smooth?

I thought it's pretty smooth. Yeah, you gave him the opportunity to be a hero. And if not, it was totally okay. Yeah. I asked him. I'm going to start asking him. I never guess that. The question I'm going to start asking is,

who do you think would be an awesome guest? Like, who would be good for those podcasts? And then what do you think is the best way to get in touch with them? Right. And then they have that opportunity to be like, yeah, reach out. He's a nice guy. Or, yeah, let me just shoot a note right now. I'll tell them, I'll intrigue you guys.

I thought that it was a great angle. I know. I wanted to call it up because people listening, they get this sort of behind the seeds of, as I heard you say it, I was like, oh, smooth. Smooth guy Sam going for the intro. Well, we didn't get the kill on this time. But I feel as though we've built enough rapport with him.

I can out email Mike and maybe he'll hook it up. Yeah. He did a good job. There we go. So Mike, I was connected to you because my good friend Noah Kagan was like, you got to holler at this guy. He's pretty interesting. And I had known about you as well because Tim Ferriss lived near me

and was a friend of mine. and he told me that he's like, there's like two people or three people who's advice I listen to when it comes to investing. One is Naval, the founder of Angelus. Two is Scott Belski who started The Hans and is now probably going to be the CEO of Adobe.

And three was you. And I was like, that's kind of interesting. You know, I have not really heard of Mike too much. You know, you're kind of, you kind of keep a low profile. And I looked it up. And so you started Floodgate, eventually you guys have messed in like Twitter, Twitch, Lyft, all types of amazing stuff. But we, so we have this podcast show tonight.

It's pretty popular. You know, millions of people listen. And all we do is just brainstorm interesting ideas. And so we thought, you know, we got to get you on to come and talk about some stuff. And so here we are. Let's give it a shot. Why not? Thanks for having me.

And by the way, I've listened to your podcast a bunch of times. I remember the episode with Kevin Sistram from Instagram is one of my favorite ones. So I forgot what's the exact name? Starting greatness or starting greatness? Starting greatness, yeah. Starting greatness. And it's kind of a labor of love. You know, some of the people that work at Floodgate, occasionally we'd have some hallway

conversation or in a meeting. They're like, dude, I wish we could have recorded that. Right. So in many ways, the guests not only help with the content, but we're trying to help some of the key ideas of starting greatness come alive through the voices of the guests. Because I think there are some counterintuitive lessons of starting a great startup that are not obvious to people. Right. And you have a, you have a, A, a good voice and then B, your intros are great on the pod. It always has like, I don't know how much time you spend on that, but the intros are great.

Compared to us, we put, we're sort of famous for, we barely do an intro. Like, you'll be 10 minutes in and be like, who the hell is this guest? And then, you know, sometimes at the end, we do the sort of Irish goodbye where we're like, okay, that's it. We end it. We go about our day. And so people have started making fun of us, making shirts about the Irish goodbye. Because they're like, dude, I also hate saying goodbyes. It's, you know, they hate the unwined of a conversation.

I like how you guys just leave. And so that's kind of our thing. But what we want to, I guess we want to start with, we could talk about kind of like all the great stuff you've invested in. But I guess I'm more curious about what's got you excited now. What spaces? What trends are you seeing where you're like, I don't fully know what's there,

but there's enough there for me to be interested. Yeah, and it might be kind of a good segue into how I think about what the next big thing will be, because there's this thing that I say to founders, which is very counterintuitive. I say, if you want to start a great startup, don't try to think of a startup. And the reason for that is that great startup founders

are like time travelers. and they get out of the present, and they visualize different futures that are a breakthrough, that break free from the present. And when you try to think of a startup right now, you tend to orient yourself in the world of the present. And so you tend to come up with incremental, conventional ideas rather than breakthrough ideas that sort of change the arc of the present to a different future. And that gets to the areas that I'm interested in.

And so what I encourage founders to think about are what are the inflections, what are the waves of change? They're going to be so massive that it's going to allow an entrepreneur to change the subject about the future. Because on some level, these waves are the gathering power. It's like all the power of the ocean when you surf. You've got to catch the right wave to have a chance to do great things. and it's these waves or these inflections, they allow the entrepreneur to wage asymmetric warfare on present. Only with big inflections does an entrepreneur go from being disadvantaged to incumbents

to having a fundamental advantage vis-à-vis incumbents. And so then in terms of the areas that I'm interested in, I tend to go with the inflections. And so one inflection I'm interested in, obviously, is the blockchains with crypto. I think that if I was starting a startup today, that's probably where I would spend most of my time. Another area of interest for me is the transition

from what I like to call office culture to cloud culture. And so in the past, the cloud was sort of more of a delivery mechanism and a business model for application software. But now what we see happening is that Microsoft Office literally is a metaphor of the office, and it's files and memos and file drawers, and that's what our desktop looks like. But now people, you know,

it's not the editor that matters as much anymore as the comment system and the versioning. It's kind of more like GitHub meets knowledge work. And so, you know, when you have cloud culture rather than office culture, you can take advantage of a lot of arbitrage, time arbitrage, talent arbitrage, geography arbitrage. You know, very Tim Ferriss. You know, we talked about him a little bit earlier.

And then the other thing that I'm interested in is what I loosely refer to as America Next. And so on some level, I think that 2020 was the first real year of the 20th century, or 21st century. And why is that? I think that there were a lot of issues that people were paying lip service to. a lot of stagnation that people were paying lip service to. And I think that 2020 helped people understand our military needs to become more agile and more tech forward, that our research and drugs and drug discovery, that our ability to get life-saving remedies to market faster, we need to take seriously.

There's just, you know, China as a geopolitical challenger. And so as a result, I think that there, and you know, now people talk about build back better, but I just believe fundamentally the United States, the Western world are going to decide they need to invest for real in tech forward infrastructure. And then on the flip side of that, they're going to realize our infrastructure is vulnerable to cyber hackers and ransomware and things like that, whether it's organized by rogue gangs or nation states. So those are, I'd say those three areas plus also, I'd say, cloudbred. culture applied to consumer, which some call the Metaverse. But those are the main things that I'm chasing right now. And, you know, obviously I have a lot of colleagues as well at Floodgate. So we, you know, we go after cybersecurity and cloud infrastructure and other things. But the areas that I

described are the ones that I'm most accurate, most actively going after. For that cloud office one, what, what products are you looking at that excite you? Yeah. So I'll kind of give you an example. So one company I'm involved with, with is called Almanac. And it allows teams of people to create documents. But like, if you think about it, this has already happened in code and in design. So in code, you had GitHub. And in the past, you just had code snippets that you shipped around and had some version control. But GitHub made code social. And you could branch and fork and, you know, collaborate as a team at the center rather than as an afterthought. And then Figma did the same thing with design, right? So Figma,

And so what we believe is that in a world where talent can live anywhere in the world, it's going to matter more that you write things down and get consensus. And part of how you get consensus is you have a paradigm that's not office-centric in documentation, but it's cloud-centric. And so, you know, why shouldn't you, just like GitHub, be able to branch and merge and fork documents and be able to within that one document know every version of that document that every, ever existed and everybody's and you know if somebody forks it and uses it let's say it's an employee handbook if somebody uses it for their next company why not want to know that as well and so but but that's just one of many examples of where I believe that in the future you're going to have all these different products that presuppose that people will collaborate you know what else do I think will happen I think people will say if it can go in the cloud it should if it can be

asynchronous it should, because if I put things in the cloud and make them asynchronous, I can take advantage of all those different forms of arbitrage to run my company better. Whereas if I'm a meeting-centric culture, I have to be in the room where it happened when a decision got made. And I just think that that's an outmoded way of thinking about things in today's world. So Sean and I are similar or almost the same age. We are the same age. We like when we started work, I mean, we use Google Docs right away, but you're a little bit older than us, and like that was,

you probably didn't, I mean, that was kind of interesting to you, right, when that first came around. So when you say like, what needs to be in the cloud, in my head,

I'm like, wait, are you kidding me? Isn't everything already like that? What specifically are you heard? For example, there's startups that are doing like virtual office. So they're like,

great, everybody's remote. You have all these advantages is remote. What do you miss out on? You miss out on being able to socialize and get to know each other and build trust outside of the water cooler, the conversations that used to happen in the break room. So there's these crazy startups that are saying basically like online town and stuff

like that that are like, here's a virtual office. You can literally walk around. You can bump into people. I don't know if any of these work, right, but they're like taking stabs at trying to move the like physical office into the cloud too, Sam. So it's not just docs are in the cloud, but hanging out is in the cloud, right? But what the end of coworkers in the hallways in the cloud?

Yeah. And the problem with most cloud offerings today is that they're basically re-hosted office culture. Right. So like Zoom, Zoom is a meeting, but it's a meeting online. It's not like it's asynchronous in any way. It's not, you're just rehosting the meeting rather than redefining how work happens. Now, with Zoom, you can take advantage of geography arbitrage, I suppose. So that is a good thing.

But you're not able to take advantage of time and talent arbitrage as easily. But like, like, what I believe ends. up happening at the limit is in office culture, everybody has a job description. And what I think in cloud culture, you know, people have already talked about this, but this idea of jobs to be done theory. And so, like, when you think about it, all of us don't just have one job. All of us do a whole bunch of jobs. Like, if you take even a very simple example, let's say that I work at a flower shop. I might type things into the computer to manage customer records. I might take reservations. in orders, I might some parts of the day arrange the flowers. Well, when you really think about it,

the principle of comparative advantage would suggest that any parts of that, any of those jobs to be done that could be done asynchronously or in the cloud, you should try to do that if you can. Because then you could take advantage of labor arbitrage, time arbitrage, and geography arbitrage. And then if I'm a great flower arranger, that's what I should be spending my time on is the thing that I'm really good at. And so what I think cloud culture is, lets people do at the limit is broadcast their comparative advantage to the world and get paid by the network for giving the network what it wants. So I think that it'll, you know, the reason I call it cloud culture as well is who says everybody has to work at a company, right? Like people said

that robots are going to eat the jobs, but I think that's precisely the opposite of what's true. I think that software is going to reduce the need for people to think they need. to work at companies because it's going to all the things I would have had to possess to have a job, I'm not going to need those things anymore by working at a company. I'm going to be able to have all those things in software on my own. And so I think more and more people are going to realize that really there is a aggregate of jobs that people do and all of them could be thought of as almost like a derivative that can be assembled in different ways and then move to the cloud or, you know,

let you specialize. And I think that that'll over time change the fundamental culture of how teams work. And tell me if I'm misunderstanding this. But I think one thing that you just said in there is that this idea that one person belongs to one firm is potentially now an outdated and suboptimal idea. That instead you said like a user basically contributes to the network and gets paid for that contribution to the network. And so one person might belong to multiple firms.

and, you know, a firm might change. So, so what does that look like? You're the time traveler. Let's say we fast forward 10 years. Smart guy like me. How does my, like today, you know, my company got acquired by Twitch. I got a day job at Twitch. You know, great.

That's, you know, something I do. And I, you know, before COVID. Thanks for your efforts there, by the way. I mean, we monetize that a little while ago, but thanks for your efforts. Of course. Anything I can do for you. By the way, a VC saying we monetized that is a one. wonder that that's a really cool flex i'm gonna feel that one okay so then what 10 years from now so

like maybe maybe i should start from the beginning there so what do i think is really happening right that that underlies all my investing i basically believe that starting around 1850 uh we had centralized means of production mass distribution mass production and what that allowed us to do is to create the modern corporation. But in 1870, there was no accounting. There were no org charts. None of the stuff that we take for granted as a company really existed. But mass production and mass distribution had a tendency to centralize things because you got supply-side economies of scale and mass distribution allows you to get things out to people. I think what started to happen probably in the late 70s, early 80s with the microprocessor is now the economy is animated by

mass computation and mass connectivity. And those two attributes tend to decentralize the means of production. And so, you know, I think we've moved from River Rouge plant for Ford Model T's to personal 3D printers in the future. And I think we've moved from peak centralization of three TV networks in the late 50s, early 60s to now anybody can be their own publisher or media company that goes direct. And so there's a lot of very basic assumptions we have about companies that are just 150-year artifacts of time. Like somebody in 1820 wouldn't recognize a normal company of today. There weren't any companies more than 20 people in the U.S., you know, in 1820, hardly. Maybe a few spinning looms with 100 people. But so what I believe is now, the idea is the social contract between a person

and a big company, people assume that it's not going to, that it's going to persist. I think it's going to be radically different. So in the 1900s, you know, you had people wanting to be at a company for very long time, and you had large companies because the coordination advantages of having a large organization at scale with supply-side economics was valid and created abundance. Then the same happened with the military. then the same thing happened with the government, media, all of our major institutions. But now I think the pendulum is swinging in the other direction towards a worldwide network

where everybody on the network, every individual is a note on that network, and every individual has a note on that network has a comparative advantage. And they get paid by the network when they give the network what it wants. And that's true for money. It's true for jobs. It's true for everything, in my view. Are there examples of startups now that are executing this? Yeah, so in the early days, our investments were in these pure play networks, Twitter, Twitch, companies like that.

What do you mean pure play? A pure play network would be you're not really reimagining a part of the economy. So like Twitch was a whole new thing that you could argue that Twitter's had a big impact on the media. But that wasn't the thesis when we invested. But then we started to get interested in this idea of, well, perhaps every sector of the economy is going to be reimagined around sort of the micro means of production. And so rather than economies of scale, it's going to be local economies of algorithmic computation and networks that span the globe. And so why did we invest in Lyft?

Lyft was a more modern way to think about getting a ride than taxis. Taxis are a centralized command and control, tops down, dispatch-driven technology, Lyft says, hey, riders and drivers can advertise their presence in real-time on a network, and algorithms will form an ad hoc connection. So it's kind of like this return of the invisible hand. And now all of a sudden, the invisible hand is done by algorithms rather than, you know, kind of in the good old days of people trading fur for a musket or something like that. But like it's, you know, that's what we see happening time and again. You know, OM Connect is another board I'm on.

They're trying to create incentives for people to use less electricity, but they're basically applying the ideas of software-defined networks to subtracting energy that homes use during certain times of the day. And so I believe that every, you know, what is Tesla really? Tesla is a car company that's animated by network capitalism, not industrial capitalism. right? It's a software-defined car that's updated over the air. It leverages machine learning. It leverages network effects with all the sensors in the network to help it self-drive better. Apple was a network capitalist-centric phone compared to like Nokia, which thought we need to sell

the best widget. And so in sector after sector of our economy, the companies that are software-defined at their core, I believe, software-defined network-centric companies at their core are going to keep winning. and they're going to keep displacing the companies that think of computers as the thing that you did to make your industrial thing go faster. So Burger King isn't a software-defined network, even though it has computers. It uses computers to say, how many hamburgers did I sell today? But it doesn't use computers to reinvent food in any fundamental way. And the companies that we're investing in are companies that leverage network capitalism

to reimagine, reinvent markets from the beginning. Damn. Big idea. I hope that wasn't. That may be a little bit out there, but that's kind of... It's such a big idea that it's hard to... How can I make this more practical for myself and the listeners of someone interested in this field? Yeah, and so the way I would say to make it more practical if you're a listener is the tendency is to say,

what's my career path going to be, but through the lens of the 20th century. You know, I'm going to make a progressive set of steps, and I'm going to... you know, I'm going to get rewarded as I do the things that I seem to need to do in society. But I would argue that it's more important in today's world to figure out, A, what am I awesome at? Or maybe not even what am I the best in the world at, but what am I best at? Among all other things I'm good at, what am I best at? And then what does the world value? And then what am I passionate about?

And it's like the intersection of that set of things is where you want to develop. your talents because over time, that's where your comparative advantage will be the highest. And that is where the network will pay you the most for contributing to the network. But I think sometimes it's useful to not think of not just what company do I want to join or what set of companies should I join my career. Instead, you should say, the entire world is a network, everybody is a node in that network. How can I be the best version of myself as a note on that network? How can I create the most possible value for that network so that I'll get, you know,

recognized by it and paid paid for the value that I'd deliver. So how do you do that? So let's take you, for example. So let's say you look at the world this way as it's a giant network and you're trying to have your comparative advantage. So what's your comparative advantage? Yeah, I would say that my job is to be the very best partner for a super ambitious founder in the zero to one phase.

So right, like if you look at my podcast, people say, hey, why don't you have this guest, why don't you have that guest? but starting greatness is all about zero to one, awesome startup, super ambitious, what was it like before they succeeded? And there's power, there's addition and subtraction. You know, like sometimes by saying what you're not for, but like niching down, you're very powerful to the people who care about your niche because people say, where have you been on my life? And so what you're trying to do is find that set of like-minded co-conspirators for the niche that you've really chosen to be great at and not get preoccupied with the fact that you can't do it all, right? You're way better off

understanding what you can just stick the landing at and develop your talent so you can do it even better and better through time. And today, Floodgate is more like a traditional firm, right? It's like a company, kind of like, let's say, current world slash old world, right? You have a brand, you have multiple employees, you have a central fund, you have your LP base, it's sort of static, And then you're investing in a specific, let's say, set or criteria of companies. Whereas the way you're describing things, it sort of feels like, correct me if I'm wrong, it sort of sounded like in a future, what you, 20 years from now, what you might have done, instead of set up floodgate is you would have set up, I don't know, a one person investing fund

yourself or like a Dow or something like that, basically a trust that's going to invest in a whole bunch of things on the network and you wouldn't need the structure of a fund with employees and with all these different things. So would you, if you didn't have this already set up and you're setting it up for the next 20 years, would you have set up your investing differently than you did with a kind of traditional VC fund? Well, I like the way we're set up because I think that when you're investing in these crazy risky startups too early, way too early or legally, ambiguously too early, it's good to have friends and it's good to have people to run ideas. ideas by, but we have a very, I'm not sure our point of view works for everybody. So I don't even

think a startup is a company, right? So I think a startup is the capabilities and talents of the founders and their insight about the future. And what you're betting is on two things. One is that their insights right. And two is they're good enough to navigate the idea to a great product someday. But like Lyft started a Zimride and Twitter. They couldn't decide whether to call it voicemail 2.0 or TWTTR. Twitch started as Justin.tv. Octa started as Sacher. And so, like, what do you do with the fact that 90% of your profits come from things that started out different? And so my theory on that is the way to succeed is to realize that a startup isn't a company at all and that it's the insights and the founders. And you make fun of your

ability to predict what they're going to come up with. It's false precision to even try. But instead, where you should be precise is, can these people do the job? And is this powerful enough breakthrough insight? You, I believe it's your partner. I looked up who the top venture capitalists were. I think it was your partner. What's her name? Anne Muraco. Yeah. Yes. And is, I looked at like CB Insights, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2018, 17. I think she was in the top 10, sometimes number two or three in many, many, many of the years consistently. You just showed me a sign or a thing of dollar bills with Steve Blank, you know, who's like godfather of Silicon Valley saying everything Mike does turns into money.

I wish. What makes you guys great? What makes you able to spot these interesting opportunities? I think that, you know, it's funny. If you had, say, Warren Buffett on your show. You've had Stan Drunken Miller before on your show, right? And when they talk about investments, you'll probably notice they talk about a few things. What's the operating history of the organization? What is their competitive moat? You know, they have a set of factors that cause them to think that a company is a good investment or not.

What's interesting is in our world, none of those mental models apply. And so because the startup's not a company, there is no operating history. There's no moat. They don't even have a product yet. They got no customers. And so what I think we're better at than most is, A, understanding that's true and B, then asking, okay, so what should the mental models be? Right.

If Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have 90 mental models and they don't apply to startup investing, well, what are the mental models for startup investing then? And so we've spent years, right, just being students of that question. And, you know, we probably got about 30 or so that we've developed. But we try to evaluate the startup through the lens of those mental models rather than make the mistake of thinking that a startup is a re-hosted company. And it's one or two of those mental models that we wouldn't expect, right? Like, you know, I might expect somebody to say, you know, we want to be in a big market

with customers really love your product. It's like, okay, yeah, great. We want to be growing, you know, extremely fast, exponential growth. Well, yeah, it's obvious at that point. I also enjoy checkmate. So what's a mental model that's not so obvious where 100 people in a room would nod their heads and immediately say, yeah, I already do that. I already think that way when it comes to investing for me. Yeah, so I'll just give a few examples. You know, so I'd say at a meta level, we have a set of mental models about founding teams, and then we have a set of mental models about insights. And founding team, a good example, would be jazz band and not a marching band. So in companies, you have org charts, you have people who want sheet music and dance steps.

And if you don't give that to them, the organization is going to be a chaotic mess and all screwed up and discombobulated. In a startup, it's more like when you go to the French corridor and you watch a jazz band there, the lead goes on a riff and everybody else just goes with it. And you'll never hear that tune the same way ever again, but everybody knows that that's what they're in it for. And nobody's saying, hey, that's not on my sheet music. You didn't say that was going to happen. That's the way they like to offer their art to the world. And so I like to say when a startup starts, it goes through this breakthrough sequence.

It has to have a great insight, which is something about the future that's not obvious that most people don't know. And then after that, they have to create a product breakthrough where they get product market fit and zero to one. and then they have to have a growth breakthrough where they get escape velocity. And then only then do they earn the right to someday be in the pantheon of companies. But it's wrongheaded to give startup founders big company advice at any of those stages. In fact, all of those stages are different.

It would be bad to give growth advice to an insight developer, for example, because it would be precisely wrong. So that would be an example on the team side. to me on the insight perspective, it would be don't be market first because there is no market yet. And so rather than trying to think of a startup market, we want to arrive at startup markets by following inflections. We want to say, okay, cost of an AI prediction is going down exponentially. How is power going to shift in the industry because of that? and like what new markets might arise that had never existed before. These inflections, they power your why now.

So like with Lyft, GPS has got included for free in smartphones, and we believe that everybody's going to have smartphones someday, even though in 2010 only 10% did. So you could say, wow, now I can see a world in the future where drivers and riders will be able to locate each other on a network and there will be a network effect because there will be all. these people have these phones, you could have been right about that before then, but you would have still failed because you wouldn't have had enough people with the phones and they wouldn't

have been able to find each other. And so I'd say that's the other counterintuitive thing is that you can't look at the company's tangible operating history because there is none. What you have to do instead is imagine a world where their inflections change the future in a dramatic way and that, you know, change the rules and like all the stuff that people think is going to happen, something very radically different is going to happen. And why do I believe this entrepreneur? What is it that they've discovered about the world that could cause me to take that bet? What you're describing is awesome. And it's like, but it's a narrow, it's a narrow but wonderful outlook. So what you're describing about

inflections and looking at the world in 20 years is definitely about disruption. And these are things that are, this is what allows an Uber or an Airbnb to go from not even an idea to a small idea to a 50 to a $100 billion company. These are like truly disruptive and transformative things. But then on the other side, there's like on the podcast actually aired today, Sean interviewed this guy named Brian who owns 100% of 1,800 got junk. The revenue might be four or 500 million dollars and he owns all of it. So who knows, he's probably worth. two or three billion dollars and has probably a pretty calm life and he's not doing anything probably innovative at all i mean maybe there's like micro innovations like you know our supply

chain is a little bit interesting or the way that we dispatch people is a little bit interesting or or it could just be operational excellence meaning our website ranks number one or uh we know how to name right one of a hundred knock was a stellar name a cute brand how do you um so like you're all what we just discussed was far on one. one end. Do you ever look at the other side or for your job, do you only care about one side? And maybe you just like the, for shooting the shit or talking to your friends who want to get wealthy, do you say like, yeah, but this side's actually kind of interesting too. Yeah, and it's funny because we alluded to this earlier. I don't try to be for everybody.

I try to be the very best at the thing I try to be good at. And so my view is that I want to go very focused on breakthrough startups and in that zero to one phase and how they, so I like to say, I'm a rocket fuel salesman. And I go to founders and I say, don't take my fuel if you don't want to achieve escape velocity with that rocket that's on a launch pad. Because if you're not sure it's a rocket, this fuel isn't going to be good for your vehicle. Right. It may just, it's on your scooter.

Right. And so, like, I probably don't deserve too much credit when it does escape, but I probably don't deserve too much of the blame. when it doesn't, right? I'm just like, just be clear about what I'm selling here. And people say, well, you know, it's not realistic that everybody should build one of the $20 billion plus exit startups of the year. And I'm like, and you're correct about that. Like, I'm not saying that my advice or my approach is mainstream or even normal. In fact, I would say it's hyper, not normal. But like, but in that area, in that area of I sell rocket fuel to people who want to blast their rockets into

outer space and get escape velocity, I try to be the very best, period. And so, like, that's, that's what I'm in it for. So a lot of your listeners might be like, oh, that's interesting and kind of intellectually interesting, but I'm not, I'm not one of those. But that's okay. There's lots of ways get rich in this world, and there's lots of, lots of ways to succeed in business. It comes back to everybody should know what's my comparative advantage and not be preoccupied by all the things you can't be the best at. So you're not even close to the guy who sees like, oh, wow, a ton of really poorly run laundry stores or laundry mats, we should buy all of them and put a backend software.

I mean, that doesn't even kind of closely, or that doesn't even get you excited. Well, not only that, like if somebody said, hey, can you give me some advice on how to grow this? I would say, you should not listen to me. I don't know what I'm talking about. I don't know how to do laundromats at scale. Like, it's not even a question whether I'm interested.

It's a question whether I'm competent. And I'm not. I'm like, I'm not and I don't try to be. And I've let go of the idea that I need to be. I love your answer, by the way. I have something to say about that too. But I would say like, you know, you've made me realize that I think one of the things that we're trying to build our comparative advantages is like we get on this, we get on this podcast twice a week and we shoot the shit either just me and Sam or bring a great guest like you on. And we talk about everything from, I think one of the most popular episodes was, you know, Bologi, talking about.

like the future startups are cities and it's like, wait, what? And, you know, biology will bend your brain with the blockchain. And then the next episode, so he's probably the most listened to. And the second most listened to is this side hustle, this entrepreneur has where he's, we break down his business of vending machines. He's got 27 vending machines. He's making six figures of profit. And, you know, he got started with very little capital. And it doesn't take rocket science or rocket fuel to do it. And our listeners like the breadth of that, how we can hop from blue collar, We have a segment called the Hillbilly Side Hustle, which is like just a blue collar,

kind of like a simple thing you can do all the way to, okay, what is, you know, some disruptive idea, you know, how does AI impact this space? And is it okay if we talk about biology for a minute? Because I think he's like amazing. Let's do it. He's crazy. So like, you know, earlier I mentioned this idea of cloud culture. I think biology probably has the best handle on this of anybody I talk to.

So like, and, you know, I've listened to much of what he said, but like what I think happens at the limit is that all of these different cloud cultures are like their own societies. Yep. And so right now, the main organizing principle of society is the nation state, which is also an economies of scale centric model, right? But if you think about it, what is Bitcoin really? Bitcoin is a society of people who care about sound money. And the protocol is what enables governance. And so these cloud societies at the limit, I think, look more and more like the future version of countries. Right.

You know, what is a country really? It's a bunch of people who decide what their boundaries are, who decide who gets in the club, and they have a constitution where they decide how to separate powers and how to protect the rights of individuals against the mob and the tyrant. That's exactly what Bitcoin does with its protocols. And just to use some other examples, so Bitcoin is the people who have this, you know, cult-like belief, religious belief around sound money. Ethereum is people who believe in programmable money. And then you have Wall Street bets, which is like, hey, let's just middle finger to the large, to the incumbents.

So how does David beat Goliath? And we're basically going to screw around with them and make profits while we do it. That's what we're here for. And we will assign ourselves names. They call themselves retards and things like that because in their culture, that's okay, right? Burning Man is a pop-up culture that happens for a week in the desert where all these people will go behave totally differently. and they will the other 51 weeks out of the year.

And so there's a whole bunch of these either pop-up cultures, cloud cultures that all have different virtues, different admissions criteria and all the different pieces you just described. And it's so interesting because there's historical parallels, right? Like in the Reformation, the Pope used to declare all the answers, and then all of a sudden the printing press comes out and double entry accounting. And now Martin Luther can distribute the Bible to lots of people in a permissionless way. ironically. And then not only that, the merchants of Venice can trade with each other without a

central authority because they can have double entry records and keep track of IOUs. And so to me, like the internet and blockchain are just so amazingly parallel to that. And I think society ebbs and flows. It's like when you're too decentralized for too long, it gets chaotic. And so then you have innovations that centralize the means of production, but then it gets too centralized. And so what we're seeing now, I believe, is Wall Street Betts, perfect example. The people at the edge are saying the network should decide not the center. And if you read books like Revolt to the Republic and things like that, you see a world where the people at the edge are starting to say about the people at the center, you're illegitimate.

Just like people at the edge back in the Reformation started to say that about the Pope and some of the things that were happening with exclusionary. you know, sort of insider-only activities. And so all the years, you know, social media went from, you know, the edge to pointing at mainstream media. Mainstream media now is like synonymous with fake news, right? That wasn't even a thing five years ago, right? Mainstream media is now used as a derogatory description of something, which is kind of

crazy, right? That's a big change. And the important thing is, like, I try not to be too judgmental about it. So I don't sit there and say, oh, those mainstream media people are no good. I'm just like, it's inevitable that media is going to decentralize. It's inevitable that money will. It's inevitable that politics will. It's inevitable that a lot of these things will.

And it's like arguing for it or against. It's kind of like arguing against the direction of the wind. It's just, it's fruit. But then back to your listeners, to me, what that means writ large is if the 20th century was about being the quote-to-quote organization man and following the rules and progressing up the hierarchy, it doesn't exist anymore. Now you have to be, you have to take agency for your own life

and own your comparative advantage and understand that that is your responsibility as a free person in this world. And if you do that, you're going to be incredibly rewarded in the 21st century. But if you wish that it's like the 20th, I got bad news for you. It's not going to be.

Floodgate invested into Refinery 29, right? Yeah. For those, we unfortunately, or I mean, it is what it is. A lot of our listeners are men, so they don't know. Refinery 209 is a huge media company geared for women. Refining 29.com. They were pretty big, right? They were like maybe $200 million or $150 million in revenue.

And then they sold or merged or something like that with Vice, right? Yes. And Vice is like probably a billion dollar a year entity at this point with everything they have going on. Do you think that media companies like that, given what you're saying about, I mean, because vices at this point, even though they were new, Bison and Refroner 29 are probably almost like old school at this point. Do you think that those style of media companies are still going to be great companies, given what

you've just said? Well, I think that there's going to be a very rich ecosystem of all types of media companies. But to me, the defining new characteristic will be that media is no longer a function of the credential elites telling you what to think. And that was the real problem that we started to get in the media, in my opinion, is that you had a set of credential elites running these media companies of which there weren't very many. And these institutions are all inherited now, rather than founded. And so the people running these institutions didn't really understand what made them great in the old days. And so they started to get worse over time.

in their effectiveness and legitimacy. And so to me, the real question about media is not so much, is there one way it's going to happen versus not? I think that the winners will be those that niche down, have a comparative advantage in the type of content that they cover and attract the attention of the people who care about that type of content. And the credentials won't define it because the old media companies had credential, elites running them, but they also had a monopoly on distribution with the newspaper and how they

got print magazines out and things like that. So I think that all of that's going to change. Is there any media companies or opportunities that you're looking at and you're like, oh, that's kind of interesting for us? I would say that my colleague, Amiricose, probably smarter about that than I am. And it's funny, even within floodgate, I tend to stick to my areas that I'm excited about. And I, so there's a lot of exciting things that I'll miss probably. I'm going to ask you a question.

Yeah. I'm going to ask you a question that might be hard to answer because it's one of those things like, oh, you know, how are you, you, but you've said a couple of things that caught my attention. You know, you have these nice phrases. So one is I didn't realize that I see this on your bio here. I didn't realize you coined the term thunder lizards. I've heard many investors talk about thunder lizards at something. want to invest in, which is like sort of like, you know, the Godzilla type companies that emerge

every decade or so. And like, that's what you really chase because those are where all the returns are. And those are what changed the world. But you also said the kind of the rocket, I'm a rocket fuel salesman. You are catchier than your average VC. You are more, I don't know, you have a little sort of gift there of coining these little mind viruses, these little phrases that stick with people rather than just saying a bunch of jargon. Is that a skill you learned consciously, or is that just growing up, your parents talk like that? Where did that come from?

I don't know, but I guess the way I look at things in this world is you want to force a choice and not a comparison. And so, like, what do I mean by that? By the way, you just did it again. You did it again. Yeah, exactly. Right. So, like, if I say, hey, we're investing in particularly

disruptive types of companies, that's not the same as saying thunder lizards, right? And so why is it so important? Well, if you're trying to create a breakthrough, by definition, it breaks free from the present. So by definition, it can't be compared to something in the present. Because if it's comparable to what's in the present, it's too incremental, it's too conventional. And so, like, when I say force a choice and not a comparison, I say to founders, if 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 going to want your apple, but 100% of the people who prefer apples

are going to want what you have. And like, forget the guy who wants the best banana. There's a thousand of those people. You need to waste not an urge of energy on them. You need to spend your time on the people who potentially value your advantage and start a movement around that. You know, earlier we talked about markets. Companies have markets that can be segmented, sub-segmented, and classified.

Startups don't. Startups, they create movements. They have a secret about the future. They get early believers who co-conspire with them to create a, co-create a different future. And the market emerges as a consequence of the movement succeeding. But in the early days, we just have to get people moving. We have to get people moving to somewhere different, not better. And so as a result, we must, for it, for,

a choice and not a comparison. And as a seed investor, I have to do the same thing because there's 2,000 seed funds now. And so it was innovative when Anne and I helped invent seed investing in 2006, but like now there's 2,000 firms. And so we have to come up with some way for people to say, okay, I can't reconcile the choice of working with Floodgate versus Brand X. And I think a lot of people writing checks with writing checks on the spot. That's how we differentiate. Well, I don't know, But I think there's a lot to be, it relates to niching down. I think a lot of people would benefit from the idea of how can I force a choice and not a comparison.

It takes more courage. And it forces you to say no more than you say yes to. But if you do it the right way, the stuff you say yes to, I like to say it's less but better is the way to think about it. You've had some amazing people in your podcast. You've invested in a ton of amazing companies. And I bet you know just about everyone in this world. of all these people that you've invested in or did business with,

if you guys were put on a stranded island, who do you think would come out on top? Who's the most formidable person that you've worked with? Oh, there have been so many great people. I think a lot of it would be a function of just who had the right idea at the right time. You know, so much of this is just, I call it a founder future fit. It's just like, you know, like when Andresen did Mozilla, it was just he was the perfect person in the world at the perfect time to do that idea.

And so, you know, it's not just how formidable is the person, but it's also just was the timing right and were they just the right person, the right time? But I'm obsessed with, I'm obsessed with stories and I love interesting personality types. Is there anyone that fits that bill of being incredibly formidable, like to the point of like you think, how can you be more like that person?

Or I wish everyone thought a little bit more like this person. Yeah. Yeah, so I try to learn from everybody, but I never try to imitate or be like somebody else. Because then that defeats the purpose that now I'm comparing myself to somebody else. And so I never do that. I don't believe that people should compare themselves with anybody. I think they should learn from people, but I don't think they should compare themselves to others. And I don't think they should have heroes.

You mentioned a couple people that you've learned from, you know, biology being one. Tim Ferriss said he learned from you. Who are some other names? You know, if people listen to this and they're like, you know, or me, right? I've really enjoyed hearing you talk during this hour. I think you got a bunch of smart ideas. I want to know, you know, what's he eaten? Basically, what's your information diet?

What are your sort of some of your favorite people to follow and learn from that you're getting a bunch of interesting information that's not just like the rest? Yeah. So, well, I like the Farm Street blog a lot with Shep. Payne Parish and by the way, just because I don't invest like Buffett and Munger doesn't mean I don't study them like crazy, right? Because I think that when I read how they look at the world, I'll understand what's different about how they look at the world, but I'll also connect dots that will make the difference of my world more clear. I read a ton. I probably read about one or

two books a week just in general. What are some of the ones that I've read recently that I liked? like a lot is called The Courage to Be Disliked by a couple of Japanese authors. I think it's amazing. And so then I went down this rabbit hole of the psychiatrist, Alfred Adler, who kind of came of age at the same time as Freud and Young, but wasn't as famous. But I think he's, I think that Alfred Adler's ideas about individual agency are perfectly time for the 21st century. So I've been liking everything that I can get my hands on about him. And it's weird because although I read a lot of books, there's always a subset that I come back to over and over again

where I try to take notes because I try to make sure I really understand it so that I could explain it to somebody else in a really clear way. So I like the courage to be disliked quite a bit. I've been reading a lot of stuff on stoicism lately, which I find to be very misunderstood. What's the misunderstanding? I think that most people think of stoics as, you know, emotionless, turn the other cheek when things go bad.

And I actually find that when you read about the stoics and that there are actual philosophies in this world, they're actually quite optimistic and quite inspiring. And I find that it's helpful for me to internalize. So things like some of the lessons of stoicism and some of the lessons of Alfred Adler, I'll find myself reading those books over and over again and trying to make the list of things to learn and ask myself every day, am I exercising those muscles? And then there will be other things where I'm like, a friend of mine will say this is a really good book.

I'm like, ah, I should just read that. So, you know, that's just fun. It's great. All right. We're coming up on the hour so we can wrap it. Mike, thanks for joining. This is great. Where do people find you if they want to get more?

So obviously the podcast, so start in greatness. Where else should they follow to get more? Yeah, I'm on Twitter at M2JR. Let's see where that's probably the best place. Yeah. Or floodgate.com. You're a tweeting machine. I've been following you since I talked to him years ago about you.

Okay. Yeah. And if you guys want to cover any other topics, happy to, I know that we kind of bounced around. I want the American Next. I feel like that would have been an interesting one that I think we should, if you're up for we could do a round two around American X because I think there's a bunch that's there that people are talking a ton about.

Yeah, in all these themes, right? Like I think that the idea also of, you know, blockchains and sort of thinking about the future of money and how we're going to a currency governed by commons rather than the Fiat government is interesting. I think that, you know, the evolution of, you know, I like to say that computing phases, you had mainframes and you had PCs and you had Internet. And they always start with an enabling technology and they commoditize the prior. So mainframes, computers were expensive.

And then PCs, computers were basically free. Proprietary software becomes valuable. Okay, next thing, the Internet software becomes open source, amassing lots of proprietary data becomes valuable. And so one way I look at blockchains are they're the next wave of computing and that they're going to probably democratize data and control of things back to networks. And then what becomes a valuable thing, my instinct is it's about governance. And so there's like a lot of conversation we could have about that that might be interesting. And then I totally agree, America Next, all the stuff that I think is going to have to happen

for the military to be more agile and for us to kind of upgrade our thinking about stuff. You know, when you're talking, I'm like, this is what I could be like if I could just focus on three things that I really believed in, and I just stopped thinking about other shit for like two years. I could have this level of clarity and insight. And you're making me want to focus, which Sam and many others in my life have ever, I've tried to get me to focus before. And this may be the most effective way.

Well, there's no one way, right? Like I like to be. I like people are like a T, right? It's like you want to be a mile wide and an inch deep so that you just can appropriate creative ideas from the world, but then I think you want to be a mile deep somewhere. So it's like a T, right? And it's like, that's why you read several books at a time,

but then you also go deep on a small number. They're truly great. Do you, who should we invite next onto this podcast? Who do you think are some of the best storytellers and prolific idea folks? You had Reed Hoffman. We're trying to get in touch with him. Is there anyone else that you think is, we should invite here?

Reid Hoffman, Naval Ravikant, you know, Chris Saka is always a good storyteller. I can think about that. You know, the Instagrammers are fun. Andy Radcliffe, probably not as famous as some of your guests and stuff, but boy, is he a clear thinker. I have a great communicator. What's the best way to get in touch with Reed? Just a cold email, you think? Probably.

Let's see. or you just say that I've mentioned you guys and that it was a good show and that I enjoyed it. The people that you just mentioned, I'll email the people you just mentioned. And I'll say Mike said you're the guy. You know, I haven't seen as much of Chris Sacka lately. So I don't know if that would be as effective with him. But I think that some of the other guys would recognize me pretty well. I showed up for Chris one morning.

he texted and he said, hey, I got to film a shark tank intro. We need some bodies in the background for my intro. And I left my job. I went to where he was at nine in the morning. And I filmed a, I was a body double. I was an extra in the background for his shark tank intro. So I'll pull that favor card and be like, hey, Chris. Now's the time to pay it back.

Yeah, if you haven't had Mark Cuban, I think he's really good. And by the way, on this, so it's funny because you guys are using Zencast. So does Shane Harris. So I was on his, sorry, Shane Parrish. And on his, after he listened to the talk, he's like, there's so many upfront questions, I wish I'd asked you, can we do this again? And so I was like, sure. So we ended up having a lot of content that he kind of cut down.

But like if you find yourself in that position here, let me know. I'm happy to help you make it, you know, less but better, right? So if we can, you know, if we're going to ship a product, it might as well be fucking awesome, right. So. I love you. Where are you from? I was born in Oklahoma, but moved all around because my dad was an IBMer. Yeah, and then worked at Microsoft.

Yeah. I feel like, how old, how old are you? Early, 53. So I'm 31, so you would have had to have me when you were quite young. But I feel like you could, you could, you could, I can. You could be my uncle, I think. That's funny. That's what the founders call me.

Their nickname for me is the crazy uncle. Yeah, I think we kind of look the same. I can tell you, I thought you would have been from the Midwest or maybe the south. I'm from Missouri. Oh, nice. Yep. Show me state. Yeah.

And my cousins live in Oklahoma in Owens, Oklahoma, where they buck bowls. I have a feeling you and I, we could be distant cousins. We don't even know it. Yeah, yeah, you never know. Coming from Missouri and Oklahoma, you never know. Yeah, well, I appreciate this, man. This is awesome. Sean, you got anything to say?

No, my camera died. I'm at the overheating mark. But, Mike, this is great. Thank you for coming on. I enjoyed that. That was good. And you're in Austin? Now I live in Marin County, so I'm in Northern California.

Oh, I thought you lived in Austin for some reason. No, I helped Tim, though, find his place. So when he decided to move, I used to live in Austin about, up until about 15 years ago and my families from there, all my relatives and stuff. And so, you know, I've stayed in the opposite of what everyone else did. It seems so. And everybody keeps asking me, when are you going to move back to Austin? I don't know. I'm pretty happy with where we live, but, you know, it's pretty crazy time. So you never know. We'll see.

Well, thanks for being here. We'll talk soon. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On a road, let's travel, never looking back.