Farnam Street - Mike Maples interview
Un podcast foarte bun despre cum sa construiesti “the best startups” si ce inseamna sa fii un “good VC” dar lung, de vreo 90 de minute: https://fs.blog/knowledge-project/mike-maples/
Asa ca am folosit un SaaS cool (otter.ai) pentru a transcrie doar ideile principale, dar oricum a iesit o lista lunga deci rezervati-va vreo 7-10 minute pentru a le citi:
“Mike Maples is a co-founder and partner at Floodgate, a venture capital firm that focuses on giving emerging companies the boost they need to be successful. Companies like Twitter, Twitch and Lyft, just to name a few. Mike has been on the Forbes Midas List since 2010 and was named one of “8 Rising VC Stars” by Fortune Magazine.
In this discussion, Mike and Shane Parrish geek out about the role mental models play in making the best decisions possible. He shares his process of evaluating startups, what red flags result in an immediate “no,” and the qualities he looks for in a founder.”
“So when you think about a company, a company has a brand, they have products, they have supply chains, they have value chains, they have resources, processes, and values and capabilities that give them a market position. A startup has none of those things. And so what we've come to realize is that 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.”
“Sometimes people will ask me, how do you get a good startup idea? And the counterintuitive answer to that question is, don't try to think of a startup. And people are like, What are you talking about? That's, that's a crazy answer. Well, it turns out that 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.”
“Startups are about finding something valuable about the future, and then starting a movement of people who believe what you believe until everybody believes it.”
“The insight is a necessary prerequisite because it really contains the potential energy of the idea, right. And you want to have an insight that's so powerful, that if you're right, you change the rules and markets, and you create this massive movement with massive asymmetric upside.”
“I like to say that in a mature company, a team it's more like a marching band. People need their sheet music, they need to dance in formation and play their instruments in exact terms. But startup’s teams are not lot like that. They're these close knit teams of people who enjoy the craziness of the ambiguity, and enjoy improvising. They understand that startups are ambiguous, and that you're trying to improvise your way to success, rather than, you know, have objectives and key results and a lot of the basic management frameworks that larger company needs.”
“What you’re trying to do in value hacking is figure out what you can build that is unique that people are desperate for. If your insight is truly powerful, it will connect with somebody desperate because you’ll be solving problems in a novel way that’s never been solved that way before and it’s an order of magnitude noticeably better for those people.”
“So the way I see it is that the value phase or value hacking is really about seeking the truth rather than selling. And so if the truth of your value proposition is super compelling, then growth becomes the exercise of syndicating the truth. And if the truth of your value proposition is not present, you have to grow by throwing money at the problem growth, you have to spend money on marketing programs, and you have to persuade people to buy rather than teach people to buy.”
“And these people, [best founders], just have this ability to just absorb new ideas like a sponge, and they're incredibly mentally flexible in their ability to acknowledge when they might be wrong about something or when they don't know how to do something. And so they're they kind of have this combination of determination, but sort of a lack of ego around what they don't know and sort of a willingness to go fill the gaps in what they know.”
“When you ask a founder questions like, why do you think now is the time for this to happen? Why isn't it happened before? Why isn't it gonna happen sometime in the future from now? Why right now is the time? A good founder, regardless of the market they're in, will usually have a good answer to that. And it won't be a bunch of gobbledygook.“
“When I'm talking to somebody, very early in the discussion, I try to ask them just like, What motivated you to do this? Just like, tell me, what's up with that? Why did you decide to start this? And you can learn a lot about whether it's a real insight by why they decided to do this.”
“I found that my regret for not having tried it felt much stronger than my fear of failing. I had this feeling of if I don't do this, somebody is going to do it and I'm going to watch them doing what I knew all along, it should be done. And so when you get that feeling, not starting is not an option. And so you have to stop doing what you're doing immediately and go full time, hundred percent into it. So when when it's not all team members all in, I think that's a real problem. I think startups are so impossible that if you're not 100% committed, you just almost have no chance.”
“Incumbents have a harder time retaliating against a startup that has a orthogonal, asymmetric attack.”
“Clay Christensen used to call this the sword and the shield of disruptive startups. The shield is your your go-to-market strategy that is so different. The customer context that you're targeting is so different, that the incumbent doesn't feel an incentive to attack you. They just say, “oh, you can have that market, that's a stupid product, a stupid idea”. And so that's the shield that gives you time to perfect the technology. The sword is the skills that you build through time, skills that the incumbent lacks. And as you build the skills, the skills come up with momentum, by the time the candidate realizes that you're a threat, the asymmetry of your skills compared to theirs is too overwhelming for them to respond effectively.”
“The pattern is always the same. The incumbent says, “oh, you're going after a market or you're charging with a pricing model, you're doing something that I don't really care about, it's not really a threat to me”. And so they give you the upstart time to satisfy the early desperate customers who are unsatisfied. And then over time, as you build their skills and their capabilities, you become more effective attackers in the core markets, the incumbents.”
“Rene Girard was this French philosopher and he he had this theory that he called mimesis and his basic idea is powerful. He basically said that most desires that humans have are not innate desires, but their desires that rise because they see other people caring about it. The idea of mimetic behavior is that people tend to mimic the behaviors and seek the approval of others way more than most people realize. And that it's literally baked into our operating system as humans.”
“All the [disruptive ideas] came for people who were heretics in their time. And they were able to put forth those theories because they were more preoccupied with their vision of the future the truth than they were in getting everyone to agree with them right then and there. And most of the great startup founders, particularly the leaders, not necessarily the people on the team, but the leaders have been willing to be disagreeable. Being agreeable, seeking approval, is not in the service of advancing your startup cause.”
“A lot of the great founders that I've known, they face these situations where they've got one hour left to find a million dollars in the quarter. And there's no book you can read about business. No one it's gonna tell you how to do that. You just have to completely improvise and be anti-fragile. And it's a little bit like James Bond, right? Like when James Bond is about to get killed by the evil villain. That's when he does his best work.”
“So I think that the the most obvious example in history would be Jobs and Wozniak. Wozniak was the builder. And Jobs was the persuader. And that's not saying that Jobs isn't a product guy, Jobs is a technical, but I think we can agree that Jobs had incredible persuasive skills. And that Jobs could get people to, you know, they even called it literally a reality distortion field, which by definition, is getting someone to abandon their logic.”
“Usually the persuader is a good storyteller at some level, because they have to cause a whole bunch of people to abandon their logic and join a new cause that most people disagree with. And then the builder is the person who is living in the future and understands the technical trade offs, and how to build it co-create the future with other people better than anybody else does.”
“The great startups are kind of a crazy journey that a bunch of people embark on, where everybody's in on a secret together. And so in order to make that happen, you got to be a good storyteller.”
“I like to say it is most startups don't realize that you have to have contrarian insights as well as contrarian recruiting strategies. If you're dropping out of college to start a company, the first set of people you go after I think are genius, great people, that the world hasn't discovered yet.”
“Another aspect that that I think is super important is that a lot of large organizations can't handle contrarian thinkers, they either, you know that they don't value them to the same extent that you could value them in a smaller organization, they don't listen to them, they're unhappy in those roles, even if they do get hired. But most of the hiring process at these large organizations seems to be actually designed to get rid of contrarian thinking.”
“Part of being an entrepreneurial artist is seeing the emergence signals that you weren't necessarily looking for explicitly, but that reveal themselves and you see them with a sensitivity that an artist would see an emotional thing that they can put on canvas for their art. Always be curious.”
“You know, we like to say at Floodgate, that ego is about who's right. And truth is about what's right.”
“What I've learned is that facts are stubborn. And if the facts of your idea don't turn out to be true, you're out of business someday, like the facts aren't gonna suddenly be repudiated.”
“And so product market fit can be thought of as progressively eliminating all blockages until there are no more blockages in your startup. And then you're in a mode where you can invest in growth because it's frictionless.”
“I could never know their business as well as they know it, or what it takes to succeed as well as they know it. If I can, then I back the wrong founder. So the way I do my advising meetings is to try to help them find issues that they maybe haven't seen before, because they haven't seen as many startups as I have. And then I just say, “hey, you might want to look at this”. But I'm not attached to whether they take my advice, right? It's more like: “Huh, I've seen something that looks like that before. It looks like quicksand to me. Here's why. But it's your company. You decide.” You can help founders a lot by helping them avoid avoidable mistakes. That's where the mental models come in. You're saying to the founder: “Look, I'm not coming down from the mountain saying, I have the answers. I'm not telling you how to run your company. I'm saying that there's a bunch of counterintuitive lessons we've documented them. You can listen to it or you could decide not to, but I'd sure hate for you to fail because of something that you could have known about to avoid, because we just didn't talk about it.”
“So that's mostly how I think I help and then I try to help them think big. I try to help raise money. I try to help I try to help with the roller coaster when the chips are down and people feel, you know, bummed out when there's bad news. I think we've also been able to help a lot in terms of our brand and our networks.”
“I try to always ask myself, what would I want from my VC if I were a strong founder. And if the person isn't a strong founder, the business is probably doomed anyway. But if the person is a strong founder, the last thing they need is for me to tell them how to run their business.”
“You got four gears in a startup that needs to operate in harmony. First one, acquisition is it's literally about acquiring customers, whether it's consumer end users for a mobile app, or business customers for an enterprise app. In acquisition, you're always asking a set of economics oriented questions about how efficiently can you acquire a customer. Second one is engagement, that involves things like onboarding the user, making sure they have a guaranteed positive experience within a certain amount of time, making sure that they don't lose interest or enthusiasm about the product. And then the third, monetization, is how to make money from an engaged customer. There's a whole lot of different ways you can do it, there's freemium, there's subscriptions, there's ads, there's application downloads, there's digital virtual goods, bunch of different ways. And the last one is the enlistment, meaning how do I get those people to tell other people about your awesome product. One of the great heuristics of true product market fit is exponential organic growth. And exponential organic growth happens because your enlisted customers to tell other people, “this product rocks”, and it's the most efficient way to grow because you have your your zealot advocates syndicating the truth of your value.”
“Geoffrey Moore would probably say these four gears operate at different speeds. And what you want is them to be all operating at the same speed. Then each of these four gears acquisition, engagement, monetization and enlistment, they turn as a set of fly wheels that are integrated together. And all the gears can can rotate only at the speed of the slowest gear. Trying to make the gears go faster, it means trying to make the slowest gear no longer be the slowest. What we do is we create these growth gears that operate in harmony to produce a growth output machine.“
“We need a process that alerts us immediately when we're off track. Because if we don't fix that broken gear, before you know it, you start rapidly consuming capital because you're growing inefficiently.”
“Earlier, we talked about how startup teams are like a impro jazz band. So startup teams have artistry to make something that's never been made before and delight people with what they made. That's a very different skill set, then operating these gears at scale. And so I like to say that, you know, founders are kind of like McGyver in the insight phase, but they migrate to being “VP of Nothing” in the growth phase. Because in growt phase we need to find people who already know how to execute those growth gears. On the job training doesn't work in the growth phase of a startup. Because if we have to 10x your revenue in 18 months, you can't learn that on the job, you have to have people in those roles that know the job and can be trusted to execute. You don't get a six month window to become productive. It's funny, you know, if you think about the continuum of a startup to a company, it starts out with an insight or knowledge advantage and then slowly migrates to having an execution advantage.”
“I think culture would be the ultimate advantage, though, because even technological advantages seem on short term these days, executional advantages are real advantages, but they also strike me as short term, whereas cultural advantages can persist, on long term.”
“Lots of people tend to go through life taking one problem at a time, deciding one problem at a time. I think it’s helpful in living a better life to acknowledge that there are better ways to decide things. Sometimes you know there’s a better way through experience or reading books or whatnot and sometimes you don’t know what the better way is. I look at mental models as frameworks for making decisions that maximize the probability of the best outcome.”