Pod Insights Equity Podcast Floodgate's Mike Maples says startups that people 'don't like' may be the best ones to back About this episode 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!
Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes over at Simplecast.
Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript 0:11 Speaker 00 Hello and welcome back to Equity Tech Crunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Mary Ann Azevedo 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?
0:31 Speaker 01 I'm great. Thanks for having me.
0:32 Speaker 00 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 background 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?
1:01 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:02 Speaker 00 Tivoli Systems.
1:03 Speaker 01 Tivoli Systems.
1:04 Speaker 00 Tivoli, apologies, I butchered that.
1:06 Speaker 01 No worries.
1:06 Speaker 00 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, Lyft, Bazaar Voice, Okta, probably too many to even name. And now, you've co-authored a book with Peter Ziebelman called Pattern Breakers: Why Some Startups Changed the Future. So, you know, 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
1:48 Speaker 00 companies that are wildly disruptive capitalist mutations. And apparently, you think of yourself as a hunter of the "atomic eggs" that beget these companies. So,
1:58 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:59 Speaker 00 How on earth did you come up with that?
2:01 Speaker 01 I'm not sure, but I was looking for a term that wasn't too jargony sounding. And thunder lizard, the metaphor does come from Godzilla and Godzilla. Godzilla was hatched from radioactive atomic eggs and swam across the ocean and emerged with an attitude and began breathing fire and swiping holes in buildings and eating train cars like sausage links. And I always just thought that was a good metaphor for a startup is these capitalist mutations that appear seemingly out of nowhere and change the rules whether you like it or not. Then my job is to spot them when they're at the atomic eggs phase before we even know what's going to come out of it necessarily. It's like I have a Geiger counter and I put it up to that egg and see if I think it has the potential to be a game changer in the future.
2:46 Speaker 00 Yeah. Is that a Godzilla figure I see in the background there?
2:49 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah. You know, you got to stick with your metaphors, I suppose.
2:53 Speaker 00 Well, one thing I'm curious about, how rare do you think finding these eggs are these days? I don't know. It just seems like it's harder and harder, at least as a journalist, and I'm not trying to compare what I do to what you do, although I think there's some similarities in terms of us evaluating startups for what feels unique, what has promise, what has potential. And at least on my end, it seems like it's getting harder and harder to identify startups that are really doing things that are just very, very different. I feel like I'm getting a lot of copycat pitches in general, things like that. So I was curious, as an investor, what is your perspective? Is it harder now to find these atomic eggs than it was, say, 10 or 15 years ago?
3:33 Speaker 01 It might be. I think there's roughly the same number, but there's a lot more noise. A friend of mine, Andy Radcliffe, who helped start Benchmark, tried to understand how many companies a year are created that ever get to 100 million revenue as independent companies. And it's on the order of about 30 in the United States, you know, 30 plus or minus five, not that many.
3:53 Speaker 00 No, that's not a lot at all.
3:55 Speaker 01 And so there are lots of startups that have good exits. There are lots of startups, but not that many that truly change the future and that fundamentally impact the landscape. And in a world where there's crazy amounts of money, lots of seed funds, lots of angels, accelerators, lots of people wanting to pursue entrepreneurship as a career, there's a lot more noise than there once was. So 15 years ago, it was easier to bet that an entrepreneur was doing their startup for authentic reasons rather than they thought they wanted to be a high status founder.
4:27 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's really interesting you say that. I kind of feel that too as a journalist. Like, there's just a different vibe overall. Not to say there aren't very earnest founders out there, really, but it feels like the authentic ones that are really like super passionate about solving a problem and not just out there trying to make money or make a splash. It feels a little bit like that's harder to come by. And I don't know if that's just me getting a little more cynical or jaded, but I don't know. That's just sort of what it feels like. I mean, is it much more competitive now to you? Because I know you primarily invest at the very early stages.
5:01 Speaker 01 I think it is, but it's interesting. Most of the great startup ideas that I've seen have this element of them that's non-consensus and right. And so ironically, when a startup opportunity is competitive from an investment point of view, usually that's a bad sign. Usually that's a sign that everybody likes it, which means it's too similar to what's already come before. The best startups that I've been involved with are radically different from anything that's ever happened. You know, so like Lyft, nobody after taking a Lyft ride said, how does that compare with taxis? You know, it just couldn't be reconciled with taxis. There's a product of today that I like, the Cybertruck. And like, some people think the Cybertruck is ridiculous and goofy, but it doesn't play the comparison game,
5:43 Speaker 01 right? It's like, it can't be reconciled. Nobody says, how's that different from an F-150?
5:47 Speaker 00 Yeah.
5:48 Speaker 01 So like, the great startups are sort of an affront to the present. They're a disagreement with the present. And as a result, most people don't like them. And if too many people do, it's not enough of a breakthrough.
5:59 Speaker 00 Interesting. So it's actually kind of a turnoff if there's a lot of competition or too much other investor interest, rather than a signal that it's a company you want to necessarily back.
6:10 Speaker 01 For me, it's off-putting. And by the way, I don't blame the founders or whatever. It's just that, you know, human beings are conditioned to like things. And so if everybody likes an idea, it's too similar to what they know by definition. It's the ideas that polarize that win. It's the ones that most people dislike, but a small number of people say, oh, my gosh, where have you been all my life? I'm desperate for this. And so that's what we're really looking for. And those ideas look strange at the time you have to decide. You know, they look like atomic eggs where we're not quite sure what's coming out of it yet.
6:42 Speaker 00 So that's kind of a little risky, I guess, is an investor willing to take
6:45 Speaker 01 A lot risky.
6:46 Speaker 00 Take bets, right? Which in your case has, has obviously paid off in some cases. So you've, just to back up a moment, when did you found Floodgate exactly? And you founded it with Anne Miura Co., is that correct?
6:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, so Anne and I started to work together in 2008 and decided to go into business in a sort of formal way together in 2010. So we've been working together for about 16 years.
7:10 Speaker 00 And I'm glad you mentioned LIFT because I do want to ask you about LIFT. But before we get into that, I'm curious, okay, we talk about risk, we talk about bets, we talk about successes, but I'm sure along the way, there were some of those bets that didn't exactly pay off. Can you think of any that memorably stood out to you where you learned a lot from?
7:29 Speaker 01 Oh, man, for sure. So one thing that I like about your question is it kind of highlights the role of risk in startups compared to other companies. Warren Buffett invests in corporations and Warren used to say, still does say, "Rule number one, don't lose your money. Rule number two, don't forget rule number one." Rule number one in my business is don't pass on Airbnb because you can only lose 100% of your money. So Brian Chesky offered me a chance to invest and it would have been at a $1.5 million valuation. And had I invested, I would have made 6,000 times my money.
8:04 Speaker 00 Oh, my goodness.
8:05 Speaker 01 Yeah. So if I, let's say I'd invested half a million dollars and lost it, you lose half a million. But if you make 6,000 times, 500,000, I try not to think about it too much because it hurts even to this day to think about.
8:17 Speaker 00 I can imagine.
8:17 Speaker 01 It's a different orientation on risk, right? Like risk in a big corporation is, don't interrupt something that's compounding. Risk in a startup is something you take. And so a startup is a bet on a high-risk, wildly upside future. And so you're betting on the expected value, not just the probability of success. That's what I do is I invest in founders who are taking risk that most people wouldn't take. But it's worth taking because the upside is so enormous if it works. So that's what we're looking for. It's not worth, in my view, investing in a startup where if we're right, we're spectacularly right. Because if we can't be spectacularly right, We won't get paid for the risk we take.
8:59 Speaker 00 Right. Well, before we get into those cases where you're spectacularly right, I have to ask, because I'm sure our listeners are curious too. Why did you turn down that opportunity to invest in Airbnb?
9:09 Speaker 01 It hurts. So Michael Seibel introduced me to Brian and Michael had been one of the founders of Justin TV. And this is before Brian had even applied to Y Combinator.
9:20 Speaker 00 And Justin TV, by the way, is what is today Twitch, right?
9:22 Speaker 01 That's correct. So Justin TV pivoted to Twitch.
9:25 Speaker 00 Okay.
9:25 Speaker 01 In another crazy, random, good thing in the future. But Michael introduced me to Brian. Brian hasn't applied to YC. Michael doesn't think he's ready. And he comes into the conference room and it's a room full of cereal boxes, Obama O's and Captain McCain Crunch. And I say, okay, Brian, I'm confused. I thought your air bed and breakfast. I didn't know you're selling cereal. And he goes, well, that's how we're funding the company right now. You want to buy a cereal box? And I said, I don't think I'm, I'm not really in the market for cereal. My first big mistake, those cereal boxes are collector's items now. So then, so he pitches me and he says, Michael tells me that you don't like slides, that you like demos, you like to see the product. And I said, yeah, that's right. So he fires up the product and it doesn't work.
10:10 Speaker 01 And, and I'm like, hey, well, what's going on? He says, I'm really sorry. We're having problems with the servers. He can't get it to work. And I said, okay, that's fine. Let's just look at the slides. And he's like, well, I didn't bring any slides because I didn't think you were going to want to see slides. So we're sitting there 20 minutes into the meeting and that's all that's happened so far. And so unfortunately I just didn't have the presence of mind, a failure of imagination. You know, the logistics got so screwed up in the meeting that I wasn't awake enough to the possibility of what this could be. And, uh, you know, it remains the biggest miss of my career.
10:42 Speaker 00 Well, I'm sure, I'm sure you learned from that. So then in future situations that may have been similar, maybe you were a little more, I guess, open minded.
10:50 Speaker 01 Awake.
10:50 Speaker 00 And obviously, again, I mean, that may have been a miss, but you've had a ton of success stories. You mentioned Lyft and your book, you kind of, and I read this excerpt, that you share a story of how you came to invest in Lyft. And I thought it was humorous because you, you talked to your co-founder and you were like, hmm, should we invest in something that, that is illegal? Yeah. I just, I thought, wow, because you know, years and years ago, for those of us who've been around here around on the earth for a little while, all we ever had were taxis, right? When we wanted to get around, like, so this concept was. Really foreign, but you mentioned that Lyft and its rival Uber are companies that kind of are examples of startups that capitalized on inflections. And those inflections were the advent of GPS-enabled smartphones that could track
11:35 Speaker 00 your location for free, as well as Facebook Connect, which enabled websites and smartphone apps to incorporate Facebook's profile information, allowing other users to see it. So when you heard about Lyft, what drew you to back it, even though it was just this really crazy novel out there concept?
11:53 Speaker 01 And you know, I'd like to say that we knew this at the time, but some of it was instinct and luck and timing and a bunch of things. But Lyft is a great example. I love that question because it illustrates so many things. So as you pointed out, Lyft harnessed an inflection, GPS chips in the iPhone 4S. And inflections matter a lot because they let the founders fight unfair. So business is never a fair fight. The advantage goes to the incumbents by default. So the startup has to have a mechanism to make the fight unfair on their terms. They need a weapon, an asymmetric weapon, to wage warfare on the present. And so the inflection is a new thing that provides new empowerment that an entrepreneur
12:37 Speaker 01 can harness to create something radical. So the next thing that Lyft embodied was an insight. And so the insight with Lyft is that means you could do sharing economy for cars. So just like Airbnb let you use the internet to locate hosts and guests and do housing short-term rentals, now you could locate riders and drivers in real time using this GPS chip. And so the Lyft founders had the insight to launch ride sharing. And Travis wasn't far behind, right? He pivoted Uber Cab to Uber X. Lyft illustrates another great thing, which is not just pattern-breaking ideas, but pattern-breaking behaviors and actions. And so they launched an illegal service.
13:18 Speaker 01 And you know, they knew that if they'd asked the government of San Francisco for permission, they would have said no. And so they said, we've got to launch this thing. We've got to get customers to fall in love with it. And then we'll negotiate with the San Francisco CPUC. Government, but now there's going to be people in love with this thing. And now they're not going to be in a position to just say, you can't do it just because not many people are going to launch something illegal. You know, that takes some real courage. That takes disagreeableness. It takes an escape from conformity. That's also something that the Lyft founders embodied.
13:52 Speaker 00 Seeking forgiveness rather than permission, as the saying goes. Yeah.
13:56 Speaker 01 And you can go too far, right? There's been what happened with Theranos or there's, you know, a lot of things that have been not adequate changes to the future where the founders use their charisma to deceive people. But when you have that one two punch of a great radical idea that truly embodies the future, and then the founders who are willing to make it happen to move people, sometimes even unwillingly at first into that different future. That's where the magic really comes from.
14:22 Speaker 00 You say also that what makes inflections interesting is that they create an opportunity to alter the rules that govern the competition in the future rather than simply improving existing products according to the current rules. But what if it didn't turn out the way, I mean, what if they just had gotten shut down? I mean, what if, what if the city had been like, no way? I mean, this is not going to fly. We, no, we're not going to allow this. I mean, that could have happened too, right?
14:45 Speaker 01 It could have. Yes. It has happened. So like I invested in a company called Outbox Mail and they would digitize your physical mail and you could read it on your tablet or your computer. And we went to the postmaster general and thought he was going to love this because you could filter out junk mail. So we say, hey, you know, you can even filter out junk mail. And he's like, well, I'm going to shut you guys down. I'm not going to cooperate with you guys at all. I want you to go out of business. And the reason was, it turns out that the business model of the postal service is to help the junk mailers get that junk mail to your kitchen table. And so that's a significant part of their profits. And so we weren't able to secure the cooperation of the postal service. And without their cooperation, there's just no way you can make this business happen.
15:28 Speaker 00 Yeah, that wouldn't work.
15:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:35 Speaker 00 One of the things also I found interesting that you said is that startups don't cause inflections. Inflections actually happen externally to startups. So I think that's an interesting point because I think sometimes there's this notion of startups are the ones like creating the opportunity or creating this new market or things like that. But it's not so much necessarily always the case that, I mean, startups of course come up with great ideas, but very often the inflections are things that are happening, obviously externally, that help fuel the growth of certain startups. Like you bring up this stark contrast between Twitch and Quibi. And interestingly, if you looked at them on paper, early on, Quibi had raised nearly
16:16 Speaker 00 $2 billion, had all these big names attached to it, and then it crashed and burned after six months. On paper, looking at that compared to Twitch, which I think had obviously a kind of a more humble start, you would have expected a different outcome, right?
16:30 Speaker 01 Yeah. And it's interesting. What I think that that illustrates from an inflections point of view is there are two ways to look at the future. One way to look at the future is to forecast. And when you forecast, you say, I think the future will extend logically from the present. It'll look different, but it will evolve from the present. And another way to look at the future is to say, I believe it's going to be radically different from the present. You're not going to even recognize the future as it exists now. And I call that backcasting because when you say that the future will be radically different, you work backwards from that radically different future and you move people to your different point of view about what the future should be. Startups win when they backcast well. They win when they offer radically different
17:15 Speaker 01 futures. Incumbents win when the future is going to be an extension of the present. And the reason is that if the future is an extension of the present, the incumbents have already defined the rules of competition. And so a lot of startups, without even realizing it, buy into a certain context. If they're not leveraging inflections, they don't have a mechanism to create a radically different future. There's no reason for the future to be substantially different. It's always going to flow from the present. And so that's what we want, is an inflection that we harness somehow to bend the arc of the present into a radically different future. And so that's why they happen external to the startup, but that's why they need to be harnessed by the founder.
17:55 Speaker 00 And how do you think Twitch founder harnessed an inflection?
17:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think almost without knowing it, there were a couple. So right before Twitch, at the time it was Justin TV, the person of the year on time was you for YouTube. And so user-generated content was taking off. YouTube had just been acquired by Google. And so there was this relentless desire among young people to express themselves online and become internet famous. And Justin Khan was kind of like an internet influencer before there was even a word to describe it. That's what he wanted to be at the time. And so he was harnessing this trend towards user-generated content. But also, the broadband penetration reached critical mass in 2005. You had also a proliferation of CDN technologies that made it more possible
18:44 Speaker 01 to stream video to the edge. And so all of these things were happening at the same time. Later on, more inflections happened. Games became more social, which meant more people would want to watch people stream the games that they played as groups and communities. And so sometimes the inflections even happen while the startups in flight.
19:02 Speaker 00 Right, yeah. I'd like to talk more about what's going on now and what's ahead, right?
19:07 Speaker 01 Sure.
19:07 Speaker 00 So you mentioned in areas like genomics, AI, there's still numerous opportunities for major shifts. Obviously, AI is what's, you know, the craze right now. I use that word. Craze may not be the best, best term, but it's kind of interesting how it just suddenly turned this corner. I mean, we've been talking about artificial intelligence for years. It's not like it just came out or anything like that, right? I mean, it's been around for years, but all of a sudden, when OpenAI released ChatGPT, everything changed. It became this open doors, right? Of opportunity for a ton of other startups to come in and capitalize on AI. And not just companies that are what you would describe as AI startups, but now it feels like every single startup, or almost every single startup,
19:50 Speaker 00 either has to incorporate AI somehow into what they're doing or are looking for ways to do so. So in your opinion, have we reached an inflection point in AI, or is that still coming?
20:01 Speaker 01 Well, it's interesting. AI is one of these things that it almost seems more than just an inflection. It almost seems like a sea change, right? It's like when I was a kid, the IBM PC and the Apple II ushered in the era of mass computation. And you know, you had Moore's Law and computers proliferating. And then you had this era of mass connectivity with the internet and the smartphone where you're connecting everybody in the world in these networks. And now it feels like we have this era of mass cognition where cognitive operations are starting to become cheaper and cheaper and more powerful. I'm seeing inflections every week almost. And you know, every week, there's a new LLM that leapfrogs the prior one, or Sam Altman does a new demo that makes what just seemed remarkable obsolete.
20:44 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah. It's a hard time to be a startup when that keeps happening, right?
20:49 Speaker 01 The hardest part for startups right now, I think, is coming up with an insight. And so I see lots of startups where I say, I could see why that product is going to be very cool. I could see how it empowers people. I would want to use it myself, but I don't know why there's not going to be 10 just like it and why it's not going to be leapfrogged in 90 days. And so we need that insight. It's not enough just to have something appalling. We have to be non-consensus and right. And that's harder to do. I think that there are opportunities where people have been non-consensus and right, but I think they're more rare.
21:20 Speaker 00 So in your opinion, this AI sea change, is it a legitimate one? Or is do you feel like it's overhyped at all?
21:27 Speaker 01 I think that both could be true at the same time. So like, it's, it's interesting. Like in 1999, it probably felt like most of these companies were overhyped. And in fact, most of the companies that existed then don't exist anymore. Google wasn't even public yet. If you'd bought Amazon, it would have gone down 95% before it went 500 times up, right? And so I think you can be overhyped and still right. And you know, everybody says the new economy was overhyped in 2000, but we kind of are in a new economy now. And so I think that AI will be directionally transformative. And I think that the believers in it are right. But there will be some massively overvalued companies in the short term.
22:05 Speaker 00 For sure. As an investor, I mean, like I touched on earlier, it feels like it must be harder and harder to find these breakout companies or startups. So when you're being pitched via product demonstrations, right? What criteria do you really look for? Or what does a company need to be a potential thunder lizard?
22:23 Speaker 01 Yeah. So there are three or four stress tests that I use. So the first is the inflection stress test. And so I'll ask the founder, this sounds interesting. What inflections does it embody? And, oh, you say that's an inflection. Are you talking about a trend or an inflection? Like if you're, if you're saying L L Ms are a new thing, what specific L L M are you talking about? What specific new empowerment does that L L M provide? How empowering is that? Who does it empower? And under what conditions will that persist? And so that's a different way of looking at it. So I want to look at what the inflection is. And then I say, what do you know about the future that's not obvious? And what have you been doing to live in the future that other people haven't been doing? So I ask
23:04 Speaker 01 a lot of questions about that. And then the other questions I ask are more about their ability to persuade people to move to a different future. And so why are people going to stick their neck out to follow this person? Why are certain early believers going to want to co-create that different future with this founder? And is this the person ideally suited to make this idea real? And do they have the combination of persuasive and storytelling skills? Are they disagreeable enough in the right ways? Those are the types of things I ask for on the pattern breaking action side of things.
23:37 Speaker 00 So it's interesting. It sounds like you're not just betting on the ideas or the potential for a product or concept, but maybe just as much on the founder too?
23:47 Speaker 01 For sure. I want to know that, you know, Steve Jobs used to talk about think different. So I want somebody who thinks different and acts different. And the think different comes from the insights. And I'm more focused on what's the insight than on, is this exactly what the product will be? Because 80% of our profits have come from pivots. And so in the success case, there's an 80% likelihood, it won't be the same thing.
24:12 Speaker 00 Oh, really? That's a larger percentage than I would have expected.
24:15 Speaker 01 It's pretty crazy, you know? And it's, the reason is that I think what I'm really investing in is the insight. And so if a founder has an insight, they have a first mover advantage into the future. And they can still pivot their product by varying the implementation of it, or by varying the audience for the product to the right mix to get product market fit. So that's more important to me is do I believe they have the right insight? Do they come by it honestly? Is it empowering? Will people be desperate for this empowerment? And then you're right, the founder has to have the ability, the wherewithal to convince people of the rightness of the insight. And that's a pretty rare set of traits, right? It's like hard to convince people. It's unsettling to move to a different future.
24:59 Speaker 01 It's easier to stay in the present, even if it's, even if it's painful, you're comfortable in your present state of pain because you're used to it. You know, it's hard to get people to change and stick their necks out and be the first to adopt something and to embrace something.
25:13 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think when we think about pivots, sometimes they can be misconstrued as being a negative occurrence for a company. But what I'm hearing from you is that in many cases, in your portfolio companies, pivots were actually a very, very good thing for a company. So how, how do you pivot in the right way? Like, what's the secret to doing that? Because sometimes pivots can go well and sometimes they can bomb a company.
25:35 Speaker 01 That's right. So most people, when they misuse the term pivot, what they really want is a mulligan, right? They want to just a do over. And so to me pivot is a great metaphor because it's like in basketball, you plant your pivot foot and you move your body. Your pivot foot in a startup is the insight. And so you move your body by changing the implementation or by changing the target customer. And product market fit is answering a specific question. What can we uniquely do that people are desperate for? The insight, the pivot foot is the uniqueness and that needs to stay fixed. The desperation is what you find by navigating the implementation to the right people who are desperate.
26:17 Speaker 01 And if you have a powerful insight, there should always be somebody desperate because you're offering a specific form of massive empowerment that only you offer. And so the trick is to find the person who says, oh my God, I've been waiting for this. Where have you been all my life? If your insight is wrong, your startup is doomed. If you leave your pivot foot, you're no longer pivoting. You're just stuck in the air, you know, in space randomly. That's what I mean by pivot. But if your insight is right, you've got lots of options, lots of different degrees of freedom to find product market fit.
26:50 Speaker 00 So we're almost out of time, but one of the things I'm curious about and probably our listeners are too, what has you most excited right now as an investor?
26:58 Speaker 01 I have to admit, I'm pretty excited by AI and what it could mean. I've only seen two other sea changes in my life, in my career, and I feel like this is one. And so how could you not be? But I'm also excited about Bitcoin and its potential to revolutionize currency, because I think that our Western governments in particular have been irresponsible in printing too much money and creating these massive debts. And I think that Bitcoin, for the first time, creates the conditions of accountability where I have some hope that even the Western governments will start to rein in their profligate ways and be more disciplined. So I like that and the implications of that and the opportunity to build an ecosystem around that. So I'm
27:42 Speaker 01 excited about that. But, you know, in the end, I'm just excited. I'm always surprised by what people come up with. And there's always that founder who has an insight about the future that you're just like, wow, I can't unsee that. But, you know, it's like bird spotting in Amazon rainforest jungle. You know, it's kind of like you don't know what you're going to see. You just want to make sure that you spot it when it reveals itself.
28:06 Speaker 00 That's a good analogy. Well, Mike, this has been so much fun. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your insights with us. Thank you so much. Where can our listeners connect with you online?
28:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, so a couple of places. So I have Substack, patternbreakers.substack.com. You know, not a lot of surprise there. And then the book, Pattern Breakers, is available wherever books are. Twitter, now X, at M2JR.
28:30 Speaker 00 M2JR?
28:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:31 Speaker 00 All right. Awesome. Well, thanks again for joining us on the show. And to our listeners, you can find me on X at Bay Area Writer and Equity on X and Threads at EquityPod. As always, Equity will be back on Friday with our weekly news roundup. I'll personally be on vacation, but the show will still go on. So we'll talk to you then. Until then, have a great week ahead. Thanks.
28:56 Speaker 00 Equity is produced by Teresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our illustrator, and we'd like to give a big thanks to our audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch Audio Products. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.
Previous A new trend for Seed VCs, and the scariest part about OpenAI's data breach Next There's always something happening to OpenAI's board Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
