20VC: Floodgate's Mike Maples on What Makes Category Kings, What Most Venture Funds Do Wrong When Hiring & 'The Dance Of Product Market Fit'

Mike Maples is a Founding Partner @ Floodgate, one of the leading early-stage venture funds in the valley. Mike has made investments in the likes of Twitter, Twitch.tv, Weebly, Chegg, Bazaarvoice, Okta, and Demandforce. As a result, Mike has been on the Forbes Midas List since 2010 and was also named one of "8 Rising Stars" by FORTUNE Magazine. Before becoming a full-time investor, Mike was involved as a founder and operating executive at back-to-back startup IPOs, including Tivoli Systems (acquired by IBM) and Motive (acquired by Alcatel-Lucent.) In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Mike made his way into VC and came to found Floodgate? 2.) How did the investment decision-making process change for Mike with the institutionalisation and fiduciary responsibility of an LP backed fund? 3.) How does Mike approach team building with Floodgate? What does he look for in his partners? What do most funds do wrong when hiring and expanding their team? 4.) Mike has a very different way of reading product and the associated market. What does Mike mean by saying the ‘dance of product market fit’? Who leads what? How do they work together? What are the reasons startups do not achieve PMF? 5.) How does Mike assess the aspect of category creation? What are the fundamentals required to be a category king? What characteristics do category kings have? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Mike’s Fave Book: The Top 5 Regrets of The Dying Mike’s Most Recent Investment: Dispatcher As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Mike on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Angelloop is the leading post funding management platform for private market investors and their portfolio companies. They help investors manage and track their portfolio companies on the cloud while providing them with access to their investments performance data. Angelloop helps founders of startups track their performance, manage their cap table and keep their investors in the loop. Investors get free access while their portfolio companies pay only $49/Month. Use or share the promo-code 20MinVC to get your portfolio companies online with a two month trial. I’d like to thank Wealthfront for sponsoring today’s podcast. Wealthfront are financial advisors that can help you invest your hard-earned dollars. Wealthfront’s modern financial services helps tailor plans specifically for you, making it easy to reach your financial goals. Wealthfront has low fees and no trading commissions… It’s financial advice at a fraction of the cost of a traditional advisor, all online. And if you sign up using my URL, you’ll get your first $15,000 managed for free. Go to Wealthfront.com/20vc.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Oh my god, I am so excited for today's episode. Ever since I started the 20 Minute VC, today's guest was one of the five names on my very secret list of investors that I most wanted to interview throughout the process. To learn more about the list, you can add me on Snapchat @HStubbings, but to the show stay and I'm thrilled to welcome Mike Maples. Now, Mike is the founding partner at Floodgate, one of the leading early-stage venture funds in the Valley, and Mike has made investments in the likes of Twitter, Twitch, Weebly, Chegg, Bizarre Voice, Okta and Demandforce, just to name a few incredible companies. As a result, Mike's been named on the Forbes Midas List since 2010 and was also named one of eight rising stars by Fortune magazine alongside the likes of Peter Thiel, Josh Koppelmann and Roloff Botha. But before becoming a full-time investor, Mike was involved as a founder and

• 0:45Harry Stebbings?

  operating executive at back-to-back startup IPOs, including Tivoli Systems, acquired by IBM, and Motive, acquired by Alcatel-Lucent. I also want to say a huge thank you to Mike's partner Anne Murako for the intro to Mike today, and if you haven't heard Anne's show previously, then that really is a must and you can find the links on the site at the20minutvc.com. But before we meet Mike today, I'd like to thank my friends at Wealthfront for sponsoring today's podcast. Being a financial whiz in today's complicated world of finance can be really challenging, and that's one reason I'm such a big fan of Wealthfront. They're a financial advisor that can help you invest your hard-earned dollars by combining financial experts with Silicon Valley engineers. Wealthfront's built a modern financial services company that helps tailor plans specifically for you, making it easy to reach your financial

• 1:29Harry Stebbings?

  goals, and they also have incredibly low fees and no trading commissions. It's financial advice at a fraction of the cost of a traditional advisor, all online, and if you sign up using my URL, you'll get your first $15,000 managed for free. This really is a no-brainer of a great opportunity, getting the help you need to get where you want to be. You work hard for your money, so it should work hard for you. Go to wealthfront.com/20vc, that's wealthfront.com/20vc, two zero vc. So if Wealthfront are the go-to place for investing your money, Angel Loop is the go-to place for managing investor-to-founder relations. Angel Loop are the experts in facilitating communication and data sharing between companies and investors. On the platform, founders track Their performance metrics and send updates out to their investors on the state of their business.

• 2:14Harry Stebbings?

  And investors can then help their founders in real time with introductions, follow on funding and much more. Angel Loop is free for all investors and only fifty nine dollars for companies each month. Right now they're offering a free two month trial with the promo code twenty minute VC. So check it out at angeloop.com or in the show notes. And I think you've heard enough from me though by now, so I'm delighted to hand over to the one and only Mike Maples, founding partner at Floodgate.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 2:47Harry Stebbings?

  Mike, such a pleasure to have you on the show. I heard so much from Anne about you when she was on the show, but thank you so much for joining me today.

• 2:54Mike Maples?

  Oh, thanks for having me, Harry. It's a pleasure.

• 2:56Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I'd love to get the ball rolling by discussing how you came to found Floodgate. And what the aha moment was for you in terms of the funding gap that really existed in two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight time.

• 3:07Mike Maples?

  Yeah, so I was, I used to live in Austin and I had been an entrepreneur. I was involved with a couple of startups. And while I was in Austin and when Motive was in the process of going public, I saw a whole bunch of things happening, starting out in California where it was costing less than ever to start a company. So when we started Motive, you had to buy a Solaris server, an Oracle database. Usually you hosted it at an Exodus data center. And what we were seeing, or what I was seeing at the time, was that with open source software, offshore labor, search engine marketing and, you know, universal broadband connectivity and ultimately later, things like Amazon Web Services, the cost of starting a company went way down.

• 3:51Mike Maples?

  And so I used to have this saying that five hundred thousand is the new five million. And when I would talk to entrepreneurs, they literally couldn't raise a million dollars in Silicon Valley. They could either raise a tiny amount of money from angels and friends and family, or they had to go straight to a five million dollar series A round with a VC firm. And so it was, it was kind of a, both a combination of pain that the founders were experiencing and the opportunity to address that pain. And so decided to initially. I invest my own money and then ultimately I raised a fund and the first one was in two thousand six.

• 4:24Harry Stebbings?

  And one of the investments from those early angel funds was Twitter and I know that you five hundred X Twitter according to what you've said previously. So why did you decide to really institutionalize and formalize the process with the floodgate fund?

• 4:37Mike Maples?

  There's a, there's this movie that I like called The Sandlot and at the end of the movie Babe Ruth is quoted as saying that heroes get remembered but legends never die and I had this thought that we had a chance if we did a few things right to have a legendary impact on the venture business and so there were two things that I saw. One was the opportunity to create a permanent new category of firm in kind of in the micro sector. But the broader opportunity was what I would refer to as the democratization of innovation. And so when, when I started investing in these tiny little startups that didn't need very much money, I started to notice that the entrepreneurs didn't look all the time like traditional entrepreneurs.

• 5:20Mike Maples?

  And so traditionally, the folks who've been funded have been white twenty something or early thirty something alpha geeks. But I was finding that some of the founders who pitched me were African American. I was finding that some of the entrepreneurs who pitched me were women. I was finding that a whole cross section of people, when the costs of starting a company collapse, are sort of able to raise their hand and declare themselves an entrepreneur. And they're no longer experience the barrier of having to raise five million dollars as a bearer to entry in starting their company. And so I thought that if we were going to do something legendary, first of all, I had to have a firm that was

• 5:59Mike Maples?

  gender and ethnically balanced, but also I thought that perhaps that we could see this trend before other people saw it and start to invest in the companies of tomorrow that would have different types of entrepreneurs. And so I would say those are, those are the two things I've really been focused on the last ten years is showing the world that there's a new kind of opportunity for new kind of venture fund and then getting that to be a category of the business and then. Kind of consistent with that is that entrepreneurship is changing and becoming democratized.

• 6:29Harry Stebbings?

  And with the scaling of the fund upstream, how did that change your investment decision making process from being the kind of angel pool which you had beforehand very successfully? How did that change when you went upstream with kind of fiduciary responsibilities in a team?

• 6:43Mike Maples?

  Yeah, well, I think there are some things that have changed and some things that haven't. Ultimately, here is the problem with a firm, any firm, and then there's also an opportunity. So the problem with most firms is that they have less than or equal to one really good investor. And then they force the, what's called the limited partners or the LPs, to buy the bundle of everybody else who's not a good investor. And so what you, what you want, though, is for the whole of the team to be better than the sum of the parts. And a lot of that comes from how you treat each other and how you make decisions. And so if you, for example, if you have politics, you'll make worse decisions because one person

• 7:24Mike Maples?

  may not vote for another person's deal, or one, one person might, uh, talk somebody out of doing something. The other failure mode is group think. And so you can, you can become too consensus driven and lose the magic of what causes somebody to have the insight of a, of a great startup before the world believes. So what our challenge has been and remains is how can we make sure that as a group, we're, we're making better decisions than we would have, you know, as a random collection of individuals? And there's, there's some things that we do to ensure that, but, you know, time will tell if, if it's the right approach.

• 8:00Harry Stebbings?

  I'm intrigued, what do you do to ensure that kind of enhanced individual?

• 8:03Mike Maples?

  Yeah, well, one, one thing that we do is we've observed that the, the best companies that we've invested in have been pretty crazy at the time you had to decide, right? So Twitter, back to that example, they were deciding whether to call it voicemail 2.0 or TW TTR. And we didn't even know if it was a product, much less a company. And so at the time, it's like, okay, you say what you're doing, 140 characters or less, there's no roadmap, there's no revenue model, that's all it does. And, and we can't even decide what to call it. So they always seem kinda crazy. Another example, twitch.tv started out as Justin.tv. And literally, I invested when Justin Khan walked into a coffee shop with a camera on his baseball cap

• 8:48Mike Maples?

  with wires going into a backpack. You know, he looked like he had a bomb or something. And so, so you know, they seem crazy at the time you have to decide. And so then, back to your question, Harry. We have, we have a rule at Floodgate where there's, there's no voting system. And for a deal to happen, someone has to pound the table. So if, if I come in and I say, so here is a recent example, Cruise Automation, the self-driving car company that just got bought by GM. I came in and I said, I want to do this Cruise deal. I think that Kyle's really smart. He made me money on Twitch. And, you know, I've decided I want to do it. And a lot of people read me the riot act and said, this is crazy. We don't have a strategy. There's no, you know, we don't even have product yet in the market. There's, we're going to compete against everybody.

• 9:33Mike Maples?

  You know, you got, you just have to be insane to do this. And so then a few months later, Cruise gets bought for this big price. And one of the younger folks at Floodgate who'd recently joined said, boy, it's really a shame we talked you out of that Cruise deal because we'd have done well on that. And then I said, what, what do you mean? Of course I made that investment. And so, so, you know, at Floodgate, if everybody says, I think this will make money, we should do it. But nobody pounds the table, it doesn't happen. So somebody has to be irrationally in love with the project. And somebody has to say, I'm willing to sign a part of my personal fund checkbook to this investment. I'm willing to be held accountable for the success of it. And, you know, it's kind of an interesting, interesting difference between that

• 10:17Mike Maples?

  and some of the other funds which do have a voting system and can have veto power and that kind of thing.

• 10:23Harry Stebbings?

  In terms of accountability within Floodgate, as you said there, in terms of their own kind of pool of capital within the fund, do you carve out the fund as in 20 for Anne, 20 for me, 20 for Iris? Or is it very much a free-flowing kind of interstate period where it's a collaborative unit?

• 10:38Mike Maples?

  Well, we do, we start out that way. We, we start out saying, okay, with, with the beginning of a fund. Everybody's gonna roughly have a certain sized checkbook. And the reason that we do that is we want, we want everyone to understand that when they make an investment, that we all have to be accountable for our decisions and what we take a stand for. And so, you know, each of us has a checkbook that we assign sort of the pound the table deals against. And so that's, that's kind of how it works. If we're in a meeting and, and we all talk about it, we go back and forth and, and it comes down to somebody in the room has to decide, I will take responsibility for this. I still have funds in my checkbook for this fund to apply to it. Now, if, let's say that it's a couple of years in and, you know, we're in the next

• 11:23Mike Maples?

  Facebook, we're in the next Google, we're in the next Workday or LinkedIn or, or one of these, maybe the next Twitter. We might decide to allocate some of our reserves and sort of double down as a team on the ones that, that are producing the best results for the team. So it's, you know, ultimately venture capital is a team sport and you have to, you sort of have to reconcile the need to have accountability with the objective of the, the team playing as a team, being good to each other and sort of caring about the fund performance more than just their individual performance.

• 11:56Harry Stebbings?

  And before we dive on the team there, which I do want to touch on, how do you approach the follow-on funding aspect in carving out the, the follow-on fund fro- from the initial funds?

• 12:06Mike Maples?

  Yeah, so, so the way we do it is we, we have this saying, always play offense with your money. We try to have our reserves be as focused as we can on the, on the winning companies. But we also have to have some reserves for the companies that are encountering difficulties and it's taking a little bit longer than planned to achieve certain milestones. So, you know, but what you want to do is you want to have discipline and integrity about when you follow on and when you don't. And what, what happens in a lot of venture funds is that they just, they just keep bridging and bridging these companies to nowhere. And that, that ultimately isn't even good for the founder, right? I mean, ultimately, we have to, we have to have discipline and integrity about which ideas are working and which ones aren't. You know, ultimately, the, the years that a founder is working on a startup are the

• 12:50Mike Maples?

  best years of their lives. And so they should be working on projects that they think could be truly exceptional.

• 12:55Harry Stebbings?

  I have to say, bridges always make me inherently more nervous. Um, how do you approach bridges?

• 13:01Mike Maples?

  Well, and it's funny because most bridges really aren't bridges. They're what I would call a peer. So, you know, sort of like, yeah, we need more money. I'm like, a bridge is like when somebody's come in and said, I'm gonna put money in this company, but we're out of money until the deal closes. And so you bridge it to that well-defined next financing.

• 13:19Harry Stebbings?

  As a milestone that they're going for.

• 13:21Mike Maples?

  That's right. Whereas like what happens too often in the business is the company runs out of money, can't raise any money. And so they come back to venture fund and they say, okay, we need more money and we have no idea when we're gonna get more money. And that's an example of a bad bridge. You know, that's, that's an example where the VC firm probably isn't showing a lot of integrity around how they use their follow-on money. And the founder has probably gotten to that place because, you know, they didn't have a strategy or plan to manage their money very well.

• 13:51Harry Stebbings?

  And we said, we said about the team there, and I do want to give back to the team at Floodgate, because I've got a question from Iris, one of the Floodgate team. So considering your team's slightly non-conventional background, we had Anne on the show and heard about her background for VC. How do you approach building teams then with Floodgate? And what did you look for in the individuals that you chose?

• 14:11Mike Maples?

  Yeah, so it's funny, this is another area where we might be a little bit different. So we don't, we don't recruit people based on their expertise in a certain area. So like, for example, we don't say, oh gosh, we don't have enough consumer people, let's go get a consumer person. Or we don't have enough data center people, let's go get one of those. Because the, the business changes so fast and we need to have the types of people who have sort of the, the mental agility to move from space to space really fast. But I would say that, so there's that. But, but I think that the more important thought is that, when, when you really think about it, if you're, if you're gonna bring somebody into your company or into your firm, if that person fits and works out, they create massive value over years and hopefully decades.

• 14:55Mike Maples?

  And what a lot of, what a lot of funds do wrong, in my opinion, is they say, oh, we need a data center guy, let's go get one. And they hire a recruiter and they go hire one. And then they discover the person's not a culture fit, or then they discover that the person isn't curious enough, or that they don't- They don't really, they don't really have a, a, an opinion about why they want to be an investor. And so the meta lesson I've learned about recruiting is that you want to spend a huge amount of time upfront. Because if you, if you get the decision right, it pays you back forever. And if you get the, conversely, if you get the decision wrong, it punishes you forever. Because, you know, so far, at least at Floodgate, in, in order for us to bring somebody new on board, there has to be a unanimous vote. So it's the opposite of pounding the table for a deal.

• 15:39Mike Maples?

  You know, there has to be a unanimous vote. We all, we all want this person on board. If we recruit somebody who's not a match, then that even screws up our ability downstream to recruit people that we want in the future because they may, they may veto that person. Or they, you know, it's like, all of a sudden now, the people who are voting on the next person are a suboptimal group of people who are voting because you made a bad hiring choice. And so I'd say that, that Harry, that the most important thing that we focus on is in hiring and team building is really taking the time to get the, sort of the upfront decision right. And, you know, and it's like so many things in business. When you start a company, if you spend time upfront figuring out what's our culture going to be, how are we going to avoid management debt? How are we going to avoid technical debt?

• 16:24Mike Maples?

  If you do those things in addition to just building a product, you're going to recruit better people. You're going to have a better value system. If you're a salesperson and you do a good job of qualifying the customer, telling them the truth and finding people who value your advantage, you know, if you have discipline and integrity with your customers, you're going to have more happy customers and a higher net promoter score and lower churn. And so it's kind of all related to this idea of spending a huge amount of time upfront to sort of get it right.

• 16:50Harry Stebbings?

  And in terms of kind of reading people there, you also have a very different perspective of reading product and kind of associated markets to product. So talk to me about the dance of product market fit that I've heard you discuss before. Kind of who leads what and how they work together in an integrated fashion.

• 17:07Mike Maples?

  The reason I like to say that it's a dance is that a lot of companies have this tendency to think of, okay, I have a product and I'm going to launch it into the market, right? Almost like a cruise missile, right? Into the, into the market and then hopefully the market absorbs that product, you know, and it fits the needs of the market. And to me, sort of, you're sending a, you're bringing a product to the market, but you're also trying to bring the market to the product. And so, at any, at any given point, when somebody is building a product, we encourage them to, to sort of, understand not just what your advantage is that you're building, but who's going to value that advantage and who are those people? And why specifically are they going to value the advantage that you're building?

• 17:52Mike Maples?

  How would you calibrate the value of that? And then, and how do you test, as you're developing the product in an iterative way, if the thing you're going to bring to the market is also going to have a market that comes to your product? So I think that's one thing. But the other, the other side of it is, just like people say that VCs need to be good pickers and they need to pick good entrepreneurs and opportunities, it's also true founders. And so, you know, Josh Koppelman and I have talked about this before, but, but a lot of people say that 80% of success in venture is picking the right opportunities. And what I find is that a lot of times that the founders, when they're picking their opportunity to go start a company around, they rush the pick and get straight to doing the product.

• 18:37Mike Maples?

  And a lot of founders would be better off if they didn't rush the picking part of it, just like a lot of VCs would be better off if they didn't rush the pick. And so, you know, selecting the right opportunity is a huge part of the success or failure of a company. And so, part of the dance of product market fit as well is sort of respecting the value of picking the right market in the first place.

• 18:58Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I'd love to be educated here, Mike, because I'm from a contrarian school of thought and think very much that actually venture's not so much a picking game and far more now, a game of access and access to the top one percent of funds. So, so why am I wrong in thinking this? Why is it still about picking and access isn't the predominant reason for venture success?

• 19:21Mike Maples?

  Yeah, well, if you're a limited partner who invests in venture funds, I would say that it is all about access, right? So a very tiny fraction of the venture funds do perform in the long term. And I would say that the earlier you invest, the more important picking skills become, right? So if you're investing later stage, branding obviously matters a lot because you're going to have a company that's becoming a more obvious breakout win, and you're going to be competing against firms that have big reputations in the market. And I would say that in our stage of the market, reputation still matters a lot, particularly if the founder is accomplished and being chased by a lot of VCs. But I would say that

• 20:06Mike Maples?

  being able to identify the future capitalist mutations is even more important. So, you know, in our sector of the business, everything is so crazy, early, risky, and maybe even legally ambiguous. It's hard for me to say that our very best wins have been hotly contested and competed for, at least at the time we invested.

• 20:26Harry Stebbings?

  In terms of going back to the product market fit, though, and discussing markets themselves, how do you assess category creation? You know, the likes of ephemeral messaging didn't exist five to 10 years ago, pre-Snapchat. Now it's a multi-billion dollar market. So how do you look at kind of category creation and the fundamentals of it?

• 20:46Mike Maples?

  The way I look at that is, first of all, like, what is a category? Why does it even matter? You know, so when I think about category kings, I think of a more evolved type of business. So a lot of companies, they think that their job is to create a product to sell to customers. And so they say, okay, I need to build a product, and then I need to go sell it. And if I sell a lot of it, I was a successful company. But category kings think differently than that. Category kings are trying to create not just a company, but they're trying to create a movement. And they're trying to enlist people to their cause outside of even the employees of the company and outside of even necessarily just the customers of the company. And the best companies that become category kings

• 21:31Mike Maples?

  You know, why does that matter? If you're the king of a category, you change the way a customer spends their money, which is ultimately why a category king gets eighty percent of the profits. So, for example, Starbucks convinced the world that they no longer needed to spend only fifty cents for a cup of coffee, but rather should spend four dollars for a latte or for, you know, more money, even for a, for a basic cup of coffee.

• 21:55Harry Stebbings?

  Which we do.

• 21:56Mike Maples?

  Which we do, right? And so, uh, so, so like, why, why is it important that Starbucks sort of redefined the category coffee? It's because they redefined how people thought they should spend their money and they appropriated a large part of that spend. And, and, you know, it's, Salesforce did that for, uh, cloud computing in the early days, right? When Marc Benioff took this provocative point of view of no software and don't deploy rickety, heavy enterprise on-premise software that's too expensive to buy and maintain. That approach is intellectually bankrupt, you know? Have your, have your enterprise software be in the cloud. And so, and, and if Benioff establishes that idea, which he did, he, he became the company that was best positioned

• 22:38Mike Maples?

  to, uh, take advantage of customer-changing spending power, you know, patterns when they, when they went over the cloud. And so ultimately, that's what we're looking for when we think about categories is, you know, how can we define some, uh, new market real estate that causes a corresponding change in how the customer spends their money and the, the change in how they spend becomes biased toward your solution and, and your approach?

• 23:04Harry Stebbings?

  Well, Mike, I, I wanna dive into a quick find out. So I say a short statement and then you give me your immediate thoughts. About sixty seconds per answer. How does that sound?

• 23:12Mike Maples?

  Oh, we'll give it a try.

• 23:13Harry Stebbings?

  So, so let's go for, this one's my favorite, actually. Your favorite book and why?

• 23:17Mike Maples?

  Uh, let's see, that's a good one. There's a book written by a woman named, uh, Bronnie Ware called, uh, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, that I like a lot. And I've, I've paid a lot of attention to it recently.

• 23:30Harry Stebbings?

  The favorite moment of the floodgate journey, when was the real highlight for you so far?

• 23:35Mike Maples?

  You know, there've been a few times when it's really struck me that things were going our way. One time I was at Twitter and somebody told me that the State Department had asked them not to bring their servers down for daily maintenance because the State Department thought that the Iranian election was being stolen and that the tweets that were coming out of it were going to be an important part of the historical record. And so that and I guess another time I was picking up my daughter Sloane at a playdate and the mom says to me, hey, is it true what Sloane said that you seed funded this Twitter deal? Yeah, I just saw him on Oprah last week. How did you find this company?

• 24:19Mike Maples?

  So I guess that was, yeah, seeing Twitter do really well and then later on seeing hashtags everywhere and seeing tweets stream on TV all the time, that was really gratifying.

• 24:30Harry Stebbings?

  Then what do you know now that you wish you'd known when you started?

• 24:34Mike Maples?

  I wish that I had believed even more what I believed, which is it's all about exceptional people and exceptional companies. And the one thing you have the least of is time and it's important to spend that time on people, opportunities, situations that you think are going to be truly exceptional and that are going to make a difference in your life and other people's lives. And it's tempting because of the emotional fear of missing out that you can sometimes experience to jump into situations where you relax your quality bar. And you know, the number one reason I pass on companies is I don't think the idea is worthy of a founder's talent. And I just, I've learned that whenever I've spun my wheels or whenever I've gotten off

• 25:18Mike Maples?

  track, it's because I did not maintain enough of a focus on a commitment to exceptionalism.

• 25:24Harry Stebbings?

  The favorite blog or newsletter for you? What are your must reads when they come in?

• 25:27Mike Maples?

  I'm not sure that I have an absolute favorite. I just, usually I just go through Twitter and I just, I just go through my Twitter stream and just like just serendipitously click on what seems good.

• 25:38Harry Stebbings?

  The biggest challenge for you going forward with Plug8 today?

• 25:41Mike Maples?

  The biggest challenge for us is to go from being one of the early groups of people who defined the micro VC landscape to

• 25:51Mike Maples?

  Building a fund that competes as a team as well as the very best, you know, like I look at Benchmark and Sequoia and I have huge respect for their sustained long-term performance and I want us to be able to look back and say we were at least that good and I want to be able to, you know, when I, when I visit the campuses, the colleges and foundations that invest in us, I want to be able to point to buildings that got built because of returns that we helped create with these great companies. And so, you know, we just have to up our game on every single level if we're going to be that good.

• 26:25Harry Stebbings?

  Is the vision to continue scaling Floodgate to a three, five, six, seven, eight hundred million fund with time?

• 26:31Mike Maples?

  Uh, no, we'd never be that big. I, I don't think we'll ever be as big of a fund as like the Series A guys. I think that we wanna, we wanna do in the micro cap, micro VC space what Benchmark and Sequoia have done in the Series A arena, you know, be the, be the, have the absolute best product for entrepreneurs seeking capital, uh, and the absolute best returns of best companies. But I think that the, the broader vision that we care about is that we believe that, that, you know, the exponential forces of Moore's Law and Metcalfe's Law have the potential to bring abundance to every man, woman, child in the world in the next 20 years. And we want to be the company that funds the startups that bring that abundance to the world. But we want to do it before the rest of the world

• 27:16Mike Maples?

  believes. We want to do it when it's still crazy, early, risky, when, uh, before there's really anything to join.

• 27:23Harry Stebbings?

  And then final question, your most recent public investment and why you said yes?

• 27:27Mike Maples?

  Uh, you, you mean, when you say the most recent public investment, do you mean the, the most recent one that went public or the most recent one?

• 27:34Harry Stebbings?

  The recent one that you can discuss just in, in public.

• 27:37Mike Maples?

  Yeah, one of our most recent investments is a company called Dispatcher and what they've done is very clever. They take dynamic mapping data and they use it to help field employees get to where they're supposed to be at the right time. So for example, PG&E has a 120,000 mile lines on their power grid. And dispatcher can take information from their mapping systems and from their realtime data gathering and they can put people in the field at the right places. So if a tree is about to fall on a power line, they can spot it. If a storm is coming in, they can know where the outages are most likely to occur. And so if you can, if you can solve

• 28:20Mike Maples?

  that problem, you create huge dollar savings for PG&E, but more importantly, a lot fewer power outages and fewer fires and safety hazards. And so I think that that company has a chance to be very important because their technology is very deep and the problem they solve is very compelling.

• 28:36Harry Stebbings?

  Well, Mike, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It was such a pleasure to hear about Floodgate's incredible journey and your transition with it. So thank you so much for sharing it with us.

• 28:44Mike Maples?

  You bet, Harry. Thanks for having me.

• 28:48Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I do have to say, having Mike on the show today was a huge personal milestone for me. He really has been one of the investors I most respect and admire. And I'm so grateful to him for coming on the show today and a big hand to Anne, his partner, for making the introduction. And if you love the show with Mike today and do not want to leave the world of the 20 Minute VC, then you can add me on Snapchat at H Stebbings with two B's or sign up for the newsletter on the20minutavec.com. We'd love to see you there. However, before we leave you today, I'd like to thank my friends at Wealthfront for sponsoring today's podcast. In today's complex financial world, it can be really challenging to be a financial whiz, and that's one of the reasons I'm such a big fan of Wealthfront. They're the financial advisor that can help you invest your hard-earned dollars by combining financial experts with Silicon Valley engineers. Wealthfront's built a modern financial services company that

• 29:33Harry Stebbings?

  helps tailor plans specifically for you, making it easy to reach your financial goals. Wealthfront also has incredibly low fees and no trading commissions. It's financial advice at a fraction of the cost of a traditional advisor, all online. And if you sign up using my URL, you'll get your first $15,000 managed for free. This really is a no-brainer of a great opportunity, getting the help you need to get you where you want to be. You work hard for your money and it should work hard for you. So go to wealthfront.com/20vc. That's wealthfront.com/20vc. Also, a big hand to Angel Loop, the go-to place for managing investor-to-founder relations. They're the experts in facilities. ...communicating and data sharing between companies and investors.

• 30:14Harry Stebbings?

  On the platform founders track their performance metrics and send out updates to their investors on the state of their business and investors help their founders with introductions, follow-on funding and much more in real time because of that transparent and easy communication flow. And Angel Loop is free for all investors and only $59 for companies each month. Right now they're offering a free two-month trial with the promo code 20MINUTEVC. Check it out at angeloop.com or in my show notes. As always, we so appreciate all your support. You can always email me [email protected]. That's my email, it all goes to me and I love to hear your thoughts, but I cannot wait to bring you Wednesday's episode with Lindell Eekman at Foundry.