Hello and welcome back to Equity Tech Crunch's flagship podcast about the

business of startups. I'm Marianne Asavado and this is our Wednesday episode

where we hone in on a trend in the startup world and dive deep. Today we're talking to prolific

angel investor and floodgate co-founder Mike Maples Jr. Mike it's so

awesome to have you here today. How are you? I'm great. Thanks for having me. Yeah, no, we're excited. We're going to talk about a number of things today, including your previous investments over the years, your investment philosophy, and of course your new book which just came out yesterday but

before we jump into everything Mike I want to give our listeners for those who

aren't familiar with you although I'm sure most of them are a brief backgrounder on you.

So before you became a full-time investor,

you were actually a founder and operating executive

at a couple of startups that went public, right?

Tavoli Systems? Tivoli systems.

Tivoli, apologies, I've butchered that.

Tivoli systems and motive, both of which went on to go public and get acquired by much larger companies.

And then as an investor, you've backed dozens of startups

that went on to become quite large,

including Twitter, Twitch, Clover Health, Lift,

Bazaar Voice, Octa, probably too many to even name.

And now you've co-authored a book with Peter Zebelman called Pattern Breakers,

Why Some Startups change the future.

So we're going to dig into all that more, but one of the things I wanted to start out with is I saw

in your bio that you coined the term Thunder Lizards and that's described as a metaphor derived from

Godzilla that describes the tiny number of truly exceptional companies that are

...