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Equity

Floodgate's Mike Maples says startups that people 'don't like' may be the best ones to back

Equity

TechCrunch

Founders, Silicon Valley, Finance, Ipo, Vc, Technology, Business News, Startups, Business, Venture Capital, News, Stock Market, Entrepreneurship, Techcrunch

4.2365 Ratings

🗓️ 10 July 2024

⏱️ 29 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Mike Maples Jr. is a prolific angel investor and co-founder of early-stage venture firm Floodgate. Over the years, he’s taken a lot of bets. Some have paid off handsomely (Twitter, Twitch, Lyft and Bazaarvoice, for example). Others have not. On today's episode of Equity, Mary Ann sat down with Mike to dig into a number of topics, including some of his most memorable investments, the one that got away, what he looks for when evaluating startups that pitch him - and what Godzilla has to do with it. We also talked a bit about his new book that he co-authored with Peter Ziebelman called “Pattern Breakers. Why some startups change the future.” Press play and join the conversation!

Transcript

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0:00.0

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

0:15.3

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

0:19.3

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

0:24.6

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

0:29.2

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

0:45.0

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

0:49.2

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

0:54.0

So before you became a full-time investor,

0:56.0

you were actually a founder and operating executive

0:59.0

at a couple of startups that went public, right?

1:02.0

Tavoli Systems? Tivoli systems.

1:04.0

Tivoli, apologies, I've butchered that.

1:07.0

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

1:13.3

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

1:16.5

that went on to become quite large,

1:18.0

including Twitter, Twitch, Clover Health, Lift,

1:22.1

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

1:27.4

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

1:31.5

Why Some Startups change the future.

1:33.8

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

1:38.7

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

1:45.2

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

...

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