#191 with Mike Maples - 4 Big Trends and $0 to $1 Billion Startup Idea Frameworks

let's say everybody's selling a banana you can't say i'm five x better banana you instead you should come out and say i'm an apple and not everybody's gonna want your apple but a hundred percent of the people who prefer apples are gonna want what you have yeah i feel like i could rule to where to i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a road less travel never looking back alright yeah sean this i'm i i was playing this pump podcast pretty good how'd do you feel it was good it was like we showed up no no context like what are we gonna talk about do i need to do i need talk about bitcoin do i need to have something smart to say about bitcoin because i kinda just you know but i believe i buy i hold right i'm like a monkey in this space and i'm not like you know one of these experts but but we talked about solo big solo capital slash solo and some of the different kinda like things around that so i thought i thought i was actually pretty good conversation ben was there and he goes like i liked this one because i feel like everything you said in this was something new that i never heard you say before he's like whereas you know once you listened to somebody for like hundreds of hours you kinda hear the same great he say it's over and over again he's like this felt like new stuff speaking of listening to us for hundreds of hours or listening to you at least we had a good episode we just interviewed this guy named mike maple mike was pretty cool so is a little under the radar but he started this thing called flood gate which is a really big venture capital firm but really fascinating guy what what all have they done they've done lyft twitch twitter cruise o which is like a giant enterprise company that's public so yeah bunch of bunch of big winners that he was an investor in pretty early considered one of the best venture capital firms are it so real insightful guy he kinda had a hint biology a little bit i mean it was like real high iq i've been using the word high functioning he's like a real high functioning he was a high functioning southern right he yeah this disarming way of talking because he's got this you know kinda like it was a southern or midwestern accent yeah and you know very very relatable likable guy but then the things he was saying each one was like you know like sort of a bullet into you know of of of an idea of an insight and i he definitely had like a few refined ideas of where he thinks the puck is going and i appreciate that i like that he gave us basically these four waves he's like know i believe these four inflection are happening right now and that's gonna create a bunch of opportunity and that's what i look for is like how is the world changing and then what's what's gonna be new because of these inflection points yeah i was taking notes the four things are blockchain cloud office american next the cloud culture for a consumer so those are like the four things and we went into like we didn't actually go into each one entirely but he talked a little bit about each one and we delve we went deep into cloud office and he talked about the opportunities there i thought it was great what do you think i loved it i love the way he had some phrases for things i thought at the beginning he was like a little bit too intellectual for me i was like okay wait where do i go with this but it was interesting but i didn't know how to attach it to like a concrete idea and then i thought about you know that was maybe the first twenty five percent and then the next seventy five percent i thought were fantastic where yeah came down to earth and also he has these his this kind of amazing way of talking and i'm kinda jealous dude you you are like that i know but i i because i because i try to be like that when i see somebody who's really good at i'm like oh shit you're good at this thing most people don't even care about this thing he had these little phrases coined terms for either himself or his fund or his philosophy or his mental models and you know he he'd be like you know startup is like a jazz band not a marching band and then he was explained the analogy and then he was like he was like i i want people to choose not compare which is hard to understand but once he explains it then was like oh like that's actually a wonderful mental it's like that kanye song where it's like what does it mean it's like i don't know what it means but it sounds provocative and that's all i felt with a lot of his things was like effort i was like and immediately interested i leaned in when he would say one of those phrases even though my brain hadn't figured out exactly what it means yet and then he would explain it right so anyways i thought it was really good and super nice dude i i really thought came you so humble and and very likable so i don't know great episode i i liked him a lot i agree and he offered come back i couldn't tell if so like when guys are being nice i'm like well if you have time let's just keep going but i i could tell if he was being kind we'll have to have him back on he was awesome right how did you feel about when you hit him up for some intros there was that nerd i thought it's pretty smooth yeah you gave them the opportunity to be a hero and if not it was totally okay yeah i asked him i'm gonna start asking i guess that the the question i'm gonna start asking is who do you think would be an awesome guess like who would be good for those podcast podcasts and then what do you think the best way to get touch with them right and then they have an opportunity to be like yes reach out to he's a nice guy or yeah let me just shoot a note right now i'll tell them i'll i'll answer you guys right i thought i thought i was a extreme i know i've i wanted to call it out because people listening and they get this sort of behind the scenes of of as i heard you say it i was like oh guy sam going the wow we didn't get the kill on this time but we go i i i feel as though i we've built enough rapport with him i can i'll email mike and maybe he'll help he'll hook it up but yeah he did a good job there we go so mike do you i was connected to you because my friend my good friend noah ka was like got a holler this guys it's pretty interesting and i had known about you as well because tim ferris lived near me and was friend of mine and he told me that he's like there's like two people or three people whose advice i listened to when it comes to investing one is neville the founder of evangelist sure two is scott be who started be hanson and is now probably gonna be the ceo of adobe and three was you and okay and i was like that's kind of interesting you know i i have not really heard of my too much you know is you're kinda you're kinda you kinda keep a a low profile and i looked it up and so you started flood gate which eventually you guys have invested in like twitter twitch lyft all types of amazing stuff but we so we have this podcast organized nice pretty popular you know millions of people listen and all we do is this brainstorm interesting ideas and so we thought know we gotta get you on to come and talk about some stuff and so here we are let's give it a shot why not thanks for having me and by the way i've listened to your podcast a bunch of times i remember the the in the episode with the with kenneth sis from instagram is more one of my favorite ones so for forgot what what's the exact is starting starting greatness or staring starting starting greatness yeah starting great it's and it's it's kind of a labor of love you know i some of the people that work at flood gate occasionally we'd have some hallway conversation or in a meeting they're like dude i wish we could recorded that right so so in many ways the the guests knowledge help with the the the content but but we're trying to help help the some of the key ideas of starting greatness come alive through the voices of the guests go because i think there's some some counterintuitive lessons of starting a great startup up they're not obvious to people right and you have a you have a hey a good voice and then b your intros are are great on the pub you it always had a like i i know how much time you spent on that but the intros are great compared to us we put where we're sort of famous for we barely do an intro like you'll be ten minutes in and be like who the hell is this guest and then you know sometimes at the end we do the sort of irish goodbye where we're like okay that's it we we just sort of like we end it would go about our day and so people have like started making fun of us making sure about the the irish bike because they're like dude i also hate saying goodbye it's it's you know the hate the unwind of a conversation i like how you guys just leave and and so that's that's kind of our thing but what we want i guess wanna start with we could talk about kinda like all the great stuff you've invested in but i guess i'm more curious about what's get what's got you excited now what spaces is what trends are you seeing where you're like i don't fully i don't fully know what's there but there's enough there for me to be interested yeah and it it might be kind of a good segue into how i think about what the next big thing will be because there's this there's this thing that i say to founders which is very count it's very counterintuitive intuitive i say if you wanna start a great start don't try to think of a startup and the reason for that is that great startup founders are like time travelers and they they get out of the present and they visualize different futures that are a breakthrough that break free from the present and when you try to think of a startup right now you tend to orient yourself in the world of the present and so you tend to come up with incremental conventional ideas rather than breakthrough ideas that sort of change the arc present to a different future and so and that gets to the areas that i'm interested in so what i what i encourage founders to think about are what are the inflection what are the waves of change they're gonna be so massive that it's gonna allow an entrepreneur to change the subject about the future because on some level these waves are the gathering power it's like all the power of the ocean when you surf you you gotta catch the right wave to have a chance to do great things and it's these waves or these inflection they allow the entrepreneur to wage asymmetric warfare on present only with big inflection does an entrepreneur go from being disadvantage to incumbents to having a fundamental advantage piece of incumbents and so then in terms of the areas that i'm interested in i tend to go with the inflection and so one inflection i'm interested in obviously is the blockchain chains with crypto i think that that if i was starting a startup up today that's probably where i would spend most of my time another another area of interest for me is the the transition from what i like to call office culture to cloud culture and so in the past the cloud was sort of more of a delivery mechanism and a business model for application software but now what we see happening is that the the you know microsoft office literally is a metaphor of the office and it's files and memos and file drawers and that's what our desktop looks like but now people you know it's it's not the editor that matters as much anymore as the comment system and the version it's kinda more like github meets knowledge work and so you know when you when you have cloud culture rather an office culture you you can take advantage of a lot of arbitrage thyme arbitrage talent arbitrage geography arbitrage you know the very tim ferris you know we've talked about him a little bit earlier and then the the other thing that i'm interested in is what i loosely refer to as america next and so on some level i think that twenty twenty was the first real year of the twentieth century or twenty first century and why is that i think that there were a lot of issues that people were paying lip service to a lot of stag nation that people were paying lip service to and i think that twenty twenty help people understand our military needs to become more agile and more tech forward that are research in drugs and drug discovery that our ability to get life saving remedies to market faster we need to take seriously there's just you know china as a geopolitical challenger and so as a result i think that there and you know now people talk about build back better but i just believe fundamentally the united states the western world are gonna decide they need to invest for real in tech forward infrastructure and then on the flip side of that they're gonna realize our infrastructure vulnerable to cyber hackers and ransom wear and things like that whether it's organized by rogue gangs or nation states so so those are i'd say those three areas plus also i'd say cloud culture applied to consumer which some call the med but those are those are the main things that i'm chasing right now and you know obviously i had a lot of colleagues as well at flood gates so we you know we go after security and cloud infrastructure and other things but the areas that i described are the ones that i'm most accurate most actively going after that for that cloud office one what what products are you looking at that excite you yeah so i'll i'll kinda give you an example so one company i'm involved with is called alma act and it allows teams of people to create documents but like if you think about it this has already happened in code and in design so in code you had github and in the past you just had code snippets that you shipped around and had some version control but github made code social and you could branch and fork and you know collaborate as a team at the center rather than as an afterthought and then fig did the same thing with design right so fig and so so what what we believe is that in a world where talent can live anywhere in the world it's gonna matter more that you write things down and get consensus and part of how you get consensus is you have a paradigm that's not office centric in documentation but it's cloud centric and so you know why shouldn't you just like github hub be able to branch and merge and fork documents and be able to within that one document know every version of that document that every ever existed and everybody's and you know if somebody forks it and uses it let's say it's an employee handbook if somebody uses it for their next company why not wanna know that as well and so but but that's just one of many examples of where i believe that in the future you're gonna have all these different products that pre suppose that people will collaborate you know what else do i think will happen i think people will say if it can go in the cloud it should if it can be asynchronous it should because if i put things in the cloud and make them asynchronous i can take advantage of all those different forms of arbitrage to run my company veteran whereas if i'm a meeting centric culture i have to be in the room where it happened when a decision got made and i just think that that's an outdated way of thinking about things in today's world what so sean and i are are similar or almost the same age we or we are the same age we like when we started work i mean we use google docs right away but right you're a little bit older than us and like that would that was you'd probably didn't i mean that was kind of kind of interesting to you right when that when that first came around so when you say like what needs to be in the cloud in my head i'm like wait are you kidding me isn't everything already like that what specifically are for for example there's there's startups that are doing like virtual office so they're like great everybody's remote you have all these advantages remote what do you miss out on you miss out on being able to socialize and get to know each other and build trust outside of the you know the water cooler the what you the conversation that you used happen in the break room so there's these crazy startups that are saying basically like like online town and stuff like that that are like here's a virtual office you can literally walk around you can bump into people i don't know if any of these work right but they're like taking stab at trying to move the like physical office into the cloud too sam so it's not just docs are in the cloud but hanging out as in the cloud right but into coworkers in the hallways in the cloud yeah and the and the problem with most cloud offerings today is that they're basically hosted office culture right so like zoom zoom is a meeting but it's a meeting online it's not like it's a synchronous in any way it's not it you're just re hosting the meeting rather than redefining how work happens now with zoom you can take advantage of geography arbitrage i suppose so that is a good thing but you're not able to take advantage of time and talent arbitrage as easily but like like what i what i believe ends up happening at the limit is in in office culture everybody has a job description and and and what i think in cloud culture you know people have already talked about this but this idea of a jobs to be done theory and so like when you think about it all of us don't just have one job all of us do a whole bunch of jobs like if you take even a very simple example let's say that i work at a a flower shop i might type things into the computer to manage customer records i might take reservations and orders i might some parts of the day arrange the flowers well when you really think about it the principle of comparative advantage would suggest that any parts of that any of those jobs to be done that could be done asynchronously or in the cloud you should try to do that if you can because then you could take advantage of labor arbitrage time arbitrage and geography arbitrage and then if i'm a great flower arrange that's what i should be spending my time on is the thing that i'm really good at and so but i think cloud culture lets people do it the limit is broadcast their comparative advantage to the world and get paid by the network for giving the network what it wants so i think that it'll you know the reason i call it cloud culture as well is who says everybody has to work at a company right like people said that robots are gonna eat the jobs but i think that's precisely the opposite of what's true i think that software is gonna reduce the need for people to think they need to work at companies because it's gonna all the things i would have had to possess to to have a job i'm not gonna need those things anymore by working at a company i'm gonna be able to have all those things in software on my own and so i think more and more people are gonna people are gonna realize that really there there is a aggregate of jobs that people do and all of them could be thought of as like almost like a derivative that could be assembled in different ways and then move to the cloud or you know let you specialize and i think that that'll over time change the fundamental culture of how teams work and tell me tell if i'm misunderstand this but i think one thing that you just said in there is that this idea that one person belongs to one firm is right potentially now and outdated and you know suboptimal idea that instead you said like a user basically contributes to the network and gets paid for that contribution to the network and so one person might belong to multiple firms right and you know firm might change so so what does that look like you're the time traveler yes let's say we fast forward ten years smart guy like me how does my like today you know my company got acquired by twitch i got a day job at twitch you know great that's that's you know something i do and i know before covid thanks for your efforts there by the way i mean we we monetize that a little while ago but thanks for your efforts of course anything i do for you by the way a b saying we monetize that is a wonder that that's a really cool flex i'm gonna i feel that so okay so then what ten years from now so like maybe maybe i should start from the beginning there so what do i think is really happening right that that underlies all my investing i basically believe that starting around eighteen fifty we had centralized means of production mass distribution mass production and what that allowed us to do is to create the modern corporation but in eighteen seventy there was no accounting there were no org charts none of the stuff that we take for granted as a company really existed but mass production and mass distribution had tendency ce to centralize things because you got supply side economies of scale and mass distribution allows you to get things out to people i think what started to happen probably in the late seventies early eighties with the micro processor is now the economy is animated by mass computation and mass connectivity and those two those two attributes tend to decentralized the means of production and so you know i think we've moved from river rouge plant for ford model t's to personal three d printers in the future and i think we've moved from peak centralization of three tv networks in the late fifties or early sixties to now anybody can be their own publisher or media company that goes direct and so there's a a lot of very basic assumptions we have about companies they're just a hundred fifty year artifacts of time like a somebody in eighteen twenty wouldn't recognize a normal company of today there weren't there weren't any companies more than twenty people in the us you know in in eighteen twenty hardly me maybe a few spending looms with a hundred people but so what i believe is now the idea is the the social contract between a person and a big company people assume that it's not gonna that it's gonna persist and i think it's gonna be radically different so in in the in the nineteen hundreds you know you had people wanting to be at a company for very long time and you had large country companies because the coordination advantages of having a large organization at scale with supply side economics was valid and created abundance then the same happened with the military then the same thing happened with a government media all of our major institutions but now i think the pendulum is swinging in the other direction towards a worldwide network where everybody on the network every individual is a note on that network and every individual has a note on that network has a comparative advantage and they get they get paid by the network when they give the network what it wants and that's true for money it's true for jobs it's true for everything in my view are there examples of startups now that are that are executing this yeah so in the early days our investments were in these pure play networks twitter twitch companies like that what what does that what do i mean pure play a a pure play network would be you're not really rei imagining a part of the economy so like twitch was a whole new thing that you could argue that twitter's had a big impact on the media but but that wasn't the thesis when we invested but then we started to get interested in this idea of well perhaps every sector of the economy is gonna be reimagine around sort of the the the the micro means of production and so rather than economies of scale it's gonna be local economies of algorithm computation and networks that span the globe and so why did we invest in lyft lyft was a more modern way to think about getting a ride than taxis taxis are a centralized command control tops down dispatch driven technology lyft says hey riders and drivers can advertise their presence in real time on a network and algorithms will form an ad hoc connection so it's kinda like this return of the invisible hand and now all of a sudden the invisible hand is done by algorithms rather than you know kind of in the good old days of people trading fur or musk or something like that but like it's it you know that's what we see happening time and again you know home connect is another board i'm on they're trying to create incentives for people to use less electricity but but they're basically applying the ideas of software to find networks to subtracting energy that homes use during certain times to the day and so i believe that every you know what is tesla really tesla is a car company that's animated by network capitalism not industrial capitalism right they've they it's a software to defined car it's updated over the air it leverages machine learning it leverages network effects with all the sensors and the network to help it self drive better apple was a network capital centric phone compared to like nokia which thought we need to sell the best widget and so in sector after sector of our economy the companies that are software defined at their core i believe software defined network centric companies at their core are gonna keep winning and they're gonna keep displacing the companies that think of computers as the thing that you did to make your industrial thing go faster so you know burger king isn't it a software to defined network even though it has computers it uses computers to say how many hamburgers did i sell today but it doesn't use computers to food in any fundamental way and the companies that we're investing in our companies that leverage network capitalism to reimagine reinvent markets from beginning damn the big idea i hope that wasn't it may me a little bit out there but well kind of it's yeah it's such a big idea that it's hard to how can i make this more practical for myself and the listeners of someone interested in this field yeah and so the way i would say to make it more practical if you're a listener is the tendency is to say what's my career path going to be but through the lens of the twentieth century you know i'm gonna i'm gonna make a a progressive set of steps and i'm gonna you know i'm gonna get rewarded as i do the things that i seem to need to do in society but i would argue that it's more important in today's world to figure out a what am i awesome at or or maybe not even what of i the best in the world at but what is my what am i best at among all other things i'm good at what am best at and then what does the world value and then what am i passionate about and it's like the intersection of that set of things is where you wanna develop your talents because over time that's where your competitive advantage will be the highest and that is where the network will pay you the most for contributing to the network but i think sometimes it's useful to not think of not just what company do i wanna join or what set a company should i join my career instead you should say the entire world is a network everybody is a note in that network how can i be the best version of myself as a note on that network how can i create the most possible value for that network so that i'll be get recognized by it and pay paid for the value that i deliver so how do you do that so let's say let's take you for example so let's say you you look at the world this way as it's a giant network and and you're trying to have your comparative competitive comparative advantage so what's your comparative advantage yeah i would say that my job is to be the very best partner for a super ambitious founder in the zero to one phase so right like if you look at my podcast people say hey why don't you have this guest why don't do you have that guest but starting greatness is all about zero to one awesome startup super ambitious what was it like before they succeeded and there's power there's addition in subtraction you know like sometimes by saying what you're not for but like mixing down you're very powerful to the people who care about your niche because people say where have you been on my life and so what you're trying to do is find that set of like minded c conspirators for the niche that you've really chosen to be great at and and not get preoccupied with the fact that you can't do it all right you're you're way better off understanding what you can just stick the landing at and and and and develop your talents so you can do it even better and better your time and today flood gate is more like a traditional firm right it's like a company kinda like let's say current world slash old world right you have a you have a brand you have multiple employees you have a central fund you have your lp base sort of static and then you're investing in a specific let's say set a criteria of of companies whereas the way you're describing things it sort of field like correct me if i'm wrong it sort of sounded like in the future what you twenty years from now what what you might have done instead of set up plug gate is you would have set up i don't know you know a one person investing fund you yourself or like a dow or something like that basically a a trust that's gonna invest in a whole bunch of things on the network and and you wouldn't need the structure of of a fund with employees and with all these different things so would you if you didn't have this already set and you're were setting it up for the next twenty years would you have set up you're investing differently than you did with a kind of traditional vc fund well i i like the way we're set up because i think that when you're when you're investing in these crazy risky startups ups too early way too early or legally ambiguous too early it's good at friends and it's good to have people to run ideas by but we have a very i i'm not say i i'm not sure our point of view works for everybody so i don't even think a startup is a company right so i think a startup is the the capabilities and talents of the founders and their insight about the future and what you're what you're betting is on two things one is that their insights right and two is they're good enough to navigate the idea to a great product someday but like lyft started a z ride and twitter they couldn't decide whether to call it voice mail two point o or t w t r but twitch started as justin dot tv o started as sas and so like what do you do with the fact that ninety percent of your profits come from things that started out different and so my my theory on that is the way to succeed is to realize that a startup isn't a company at all and that it's it's the insights and the founders and you're you you you you make fun of your ability to predict what they're gonna come up with this false precision to even try but instead where you should be precise can these people do the job and is this is this powerful enough breakthrough insight you you i i believe it's your partner i looked up who the top venture capitals were i think it was your partner what's what's her name anne mir yeah yes and is i looked at like cb insights two thousand twenty two thousand nineteen two thousand eighteen till seventeen i think she was in the top ten sometimes number two or three in many many many of the years consistently you just showed me a sign or a a a a thing of dollar bills with steve blank you know who's like godfather of silicon valley saying everything mike does turned into money you i wish what what what makes you guys great now what makes you able to spot these interesting opportunities i think that you you know it's funny if you if you had say warren buffett on your show or you know you've had stan drunken and miller before on your show right and when they talk about investments you'll probably notice they talk about a few things what's the operating history of the organization what is their competitive moat you know they they have a set of factors you know that caused them to think that a company is a good investment or not what's interesting is in our world none of those mental models apply and so because the start not a company there is no operating history there there is no moat they don't even have a product yet they got no customers and so what i think we're better at than most is a understanding that's true and b then asking okay so what should the mental models be right if if charlie mu and warren buffett have ninety mental models and they don't apply to start up investing well what are the mental models for start investing then and so we've spent years right just being students to that question and you know we probably got about thirty or so that we've developed but we try to we try to evaluate the startup up through the lens of those mental models rather than making the mistake of thinking that startup up as a re hosted company and that's one or two of those mental models that we wouldn't expect right like you know i might expect somebody to say you know we wanna be in a a big market with customers really love your products like okay yeah great you know we wanna be growing you know extremely fast exponential growth well yeah it's obvious at that point i also enjoy check mate so so what's a what's a mental model that's not so obvious where hundred people in a room would nod their heads and immediately say i already do that already think that way when i when it comes to investing for me yeah so i'll just give a few examples you know so i'd say at a meta level we have a set of models about founding teams and then we have a set of models about insights and founding team a good example would be jazz band and not a marching band so in companies you have org charge you have people who want cheap music and dance steps and if you don't give that to them the the organization is gonna be a chaotic mess and all screwed up and disco in a startup up it's more like when you go to the french corridor and you watch a jazz band there the got the lead goes on a r and everybody else just goes with it and you'll never hear that tune the same way ever again but everybody knows that that's what they're in it for and nobody's saying hey that's not on my sheet music you didn't say that was gonna happen brett that's the way they like to offer their art to the world and so i like to say when a when a startup starts it goes through this breakthrough sequence it has to have a great insight which is something about the future that's not obvious that most people don't know and then after that they have to create a product breakthrough where they get product market fit in zero to one and then they have to have a growth breakthrough where they get a escape velocity and then and only then do they earn the right to someday be in the pant of companies but it's but it's wrong headed to give startup founders big company advice at any of those stages in fact all of those stages are different it would be bad to give growth advice to an insight developer for example because it would be precisely wrong so that would be an example on the team side to me the on the inside perspective it would be don't be market first because there is no market yet and so rather than trying to think of a startup up market we wanna arrive if its startup up markets by following inflection we wanna we wanna say okay cost of an ai prediction is going down exponentially how is power gonna shift in the industry because of that and like what what new markets might arise that it never existed before these inflection they they power your why now so like with lyft gps has got included for free and smartphones and we believe that everybody's gonna have smartphones someday even though in two thousand ten only ten percent dead so you could say wow now i could see a world in the future where drivers and riders will be able to locate each other on network and ever and there'll be a network effect because there'd be all these people have these phones you could have been right about that before then but you would have still failed because you wouldn't have had enough people with the phones and they wouldn't have been able to find each other and so i'd say that's the other counter thing is that you can't you can't look at the company's tangible operating history because there is none what you have to do instead is imagine a world where their inflection change the future in a dramatic way and that that you know change the rules and like all the stuff that people think is gonna happen something very radically different gonna happen and why do i believe this entrepreneur what what is it that they've discovered about the world that could cause me to take that bet what you're describing is is awesome and it's like but but it's it's a it's a narrow it's a narrow but wonderful outlook so what you're describing about inflection and looking at the world in twenty years it's definitely about disruption and these are things that are this is what allows an uber or an area of airbnb to go from not even an idea to a small idea to a fifty to a hundred billion dollar company these are like really disruptive and trans transformative things but then on the other side there's like on the podcast actually aired today sean interviewed this guy named brian who owns one hundred percent of one eight hundred got junk the revenue might be four or five hundred million dollars and he owns all of it so he's who knows he's probably worth two or three billion dollars and has probably a pretty calm life and he's not doing anything probably probably innovated at all i mean maybe there's like micro innovations like you know our supply chain is a little bit interesting or the way that we dispatch people's is a little bit interesting or or it could just be operational excellence meaning our website ranks number one or we know how to gain right then was it was it yes spell name two fran how do you so like you're all you're what we just discussed was far on one end do you ever look at the other side or or for your job you only care about one side and maybe you just like for for shoot the shit or talking to your friends who wanna get wealthy you say like yeah but this side's actually kind of interesting too yeah yeah and it's funny because we alluded to this earlier i don't try to be for everybody i try to be the the very best at the thing i try to be good at and so my view is that i wanna go very focused on breakthrough startups and in that zero to one phase and how they so i'd like to say i'm a rocket fuel salesman and i go i go to founders and i say don't take my fuel if you don't wanna achieve escape velocity with that rocket that's on the launch pad because if you're not sure it's a rocket is fuel isn't gonna be good for your vehicle right may just your scooter right and so like i probably don't deserve too much credit when it does escape i probably don't deserve too much of the blame when it doesn't right i i'm just like just be clear about what i'm selling here and and people say well you know it's not realistic that that everybody should build one of the twenty billion dollar plus exit startups of the year and i'm like and you're you're correct about that like i'm not saying that my advice or my approach is mainstream or even normal in fact i would say it's hyper not normal but like but in that area in that area of i sell rocket fuel to people who wanna blast their rockets into outer space and get escape velocity i try to be the very best period and so like that's that's what i'm in it for so a lot of your listeners might be like oh well that's interesting and kind of intellectually interesting but i'm not i'm not one of those but that's okay there's lots of ways to get rich in this world and there's lots of lots of ways to succeed in business every comes back to everybody should know what's my comparative advantage and and not be preoccupied by all the things you can't be the best at so you're not even close to the guy who sees like oh wow there's a a ton of really poorly run laundry stores or laundry mats we should buy all of them and and put a back end software i mean that that doesn't even kinda closely or that doesn't even even get you excited well not only that like if somebody said hey can you give me some advice on how to grow this i would say you should not listen to me i don't know what i'm talking about i don't know how to do laundromat mass at scale like it's it's not even a question whether i'm interested it's a question whether i'm confident and and i'm not i'm like i'm i'm not and i don't try to be and i i let go of the idea that i need to be you that i love i love your answer by the way i something to say about that too but i would say like you know you've made me realize that i think one of the things that we're we're trying to build our comparative advantages is like we could on this we get on this podcast twice a week and we shoot the shit either just me and sam or bring a we're a great guess like you on and we talk about everything from i think one of the most popular episodes was you know biology talking about like the future startups ups are cities and i like what what and you know biology will will bend your brain with the blockchain and then the next episode so he's probably the most listened to and the second most to is this side hustle this entrepreneur has where he's we break down his business of vending machines he's got twenty seven vending machines is making six figures of profit and you know he got started with very little capital and it's doesn't take rocket science or rocket fuel to do it and our listeners like the the breath of that of how we can hop from blue collar we have a a segment called the the hill billy side hustle which is like you know just a blue collar kinda like simple thing you can do all the way to okay what is you know some disruptive idea you know how does ai and impact space and is it okay if we talk about biology for a minute because i think he's like amazing and and it's crazy so so like you know earlier i mentioned this idea of cloud culture i think ba probably has the best handle on this of anybody i talked to so like and and you know i've i've listened to much of what he said but like what i think happens at the limit is that all of these different cloud cultures are like their own societies yep and so right now the main main organizing principle of is the nation state which is also an economies of scale centric model right but if you think about it what is bitcoin really bitcoin is a society of people who care about sound money and the protocol is what enables governance and so these cloud societies at the limit i think look more and more like the future version of countries right you know what is a country really it's a bunch of people who decide what their boundaries are who decide who gets in the club and they have a constitution where they decide how to separate powers and how to protect the rights of individuals against the mob and the tyrant that's exactly what bitcoin does with its protocol and just to use some other examples so bitcoin is the people who have this you know cult like belief for a religious belief around sound money ethereum is people who believe in programmable money and then wall street bets which is like hey let's just middle finger to you know to to the large you know to the incumbents so how do how does you know david beat goliath and we're gonna we're basically gonna screw around with them and make profits while we do it that's what we're here for and we will we will assign ourselves names you know they call themselves recharged and things like that because in their culture that's okay right yep burning man as a pop up culture that happens for a week in the desert where all these people will go behave totally differently than i will the other fifty one weeks out of the year and so there's a whole bunch of these either pop up cultures cloud cultures that all have different different virtue different admissions criteria and and and all the different pieces you you just described yeah and and it's so interesting because it there's historical parallels right like in the in the reformation the pope used to declare all the answers and then all a sudden the printing press comes out and double entry counting and now martin luther can distribute the bible to lots of people with in a permission way ironically and then not only that the merchants of venice can trade with each other without central authority because they can have double entry records and keep track of io and so to me like the internet and blockchain are just so amazingly parallel to that and i and i think society ebb and flows it's like when you're too decentralized for too long gets chaotic and so then then you have innovations that centralized the means of production but then it gets to centralized and so what we're seeing now i believe is wall street bets perfect example the people at the edge are saying the network should decide not the center and if you read books like revolt to the republic and things like that you see a world where the people at the edge are starting to say about the people at the center you're illegitimate just like people at the edge back in the reformation started to say that about the the pope and some of the things that we're happening with exclusionary you know sort of insider or only activities and so right and in the last two years you know social media went from you know the edge to call it pointing at mainstream media mainstream media now is like synonymous with the with fake news that wasn't even a thing five years ago right mainstream media is now used as a derogatory description of something which is yeah kinda crazy right that's a that's a big change and and the important thing is like i try not to be too judgmental metal about it so i don't sit there and say oh these mainstream media people are no good i'm just like it's inevitable that media is gonna decentralized it's inevitable that money will it's inevitable that politics will it's inevitable that a lot of these things will and it's like arguing for it against it's kinda like arguing against the direction of the wind it's it's just it's it's fruit but but but then back to the your listeners to me what that means writ large is if the twentieth century was about being the quote unquote organization man and following the rules and progressing up the hierarchy it doesn't exist or now you have to be you have to take agency for your own life and own your comparative advantage and understand that that is your responsibility as a free person in this world and if you do that you're gonna be incredibly rewarded in the twenty first century but if you wish that it's like the twentieth i got bad news for you it's not gonna be flood gate invested into refinery twenty nine right yeah for those we unfortunately or i mean it is what is a lot of our listeners are men so they don't know refinery attorney when i a is a huge media company geared for women refinery twenty nine dot com they were pretty big right they were like maybe two hundred million dollars or a hundred fifty million dollars in revenue and then they sold or merged or something like that with advice right yes and vice is like a probably a billion dollar a year entity at this point with with everything they have going on do you think that media companies like that given what you're saying about i mean because vice is at this point even though they weren't new vice and refinery twenty nine are probably almost like old school at this point do you think that those style media companies are still gonna be great companies given what you've just said well i think that there's gonna be a very rich ecosystem of all types of media companies but but to me the defining new characteristic will be that media is no longer a function of the credential elites telling you what to think and that that was the real problem that we started to get in the media in my opinion is that you you had a set of credential elites running these media companies of which there weren't very many and these institutions are all inherited now rather than founded and so the people running these institutions didn't really understand what made them great in the old days and so they they started to get worse over time in their effectiveness and legitimacy and so to me the real question about media is not so much is there one way it's gonna happen versus not i think that the winners will be those that niche down have a comparative advantage and the type of content that they cover and attract the attention of the people who care about that type of content and and the credentials won't define it because the the the old media companies had credential deletes running them but they also had a monopoly on distribution with the newspaper and how they how they got print magazines out and things like that so i think that all of that's gonna change is there any media companies or opportunities that you're looking at and you're like that's kind of interesting for us i would i would say that my colleague again mir ko is probably smarter about that than i am you know and it's funny even within flood i tend to stick to my areas that i'm excited about and i so there's a a lot of exciting things that all i'll that i'll miss probably but like two questions yeah i'm gonna ask you question that might be hard to answer because it's one of those things like oh you how how are you you but you you've said a couple things that caught my attention you you know you have these nice phrases so one is i didn't realize that i see this on your biden here i didn't realize you coined the term thunder listeners i've heard many investors talk about thunder listeners that's something they wanna invest in which like sort of like you know the the godzilla type companies that emerge every decade or so and like that's what you really chase because those are where all the returns are and those are what changed the world but you also said the kind of the rock i'm a rocket fuel salesman yep you are catch than your average dc you are more i don't know you have you have a little sort of gift there of coin these little mind viruses these little little phrases that stick with people rather than just saying a bunch of jargon is that a skill you learned consciously or is that just you know growing up your parents talk like that where did that come from i don't know but i guess the the way i look at things in this world is you wanna force a choice and not a comparison and and so like what do i mean by that like by the level you you just did it again did it again yeah exactly right and so so like like if i say hey we're investing in particularly disruptive types of companies that's not the same as saying thunder lizards right and so why is it so important well if you're trying to create a breakthrough by definition it breaks free from the present so by definition it can't be compared to something in the present because if it's comparable to what's in the present it's too incremental it's too conventional and so like when i say force a choice and not comparison i i say to founders if let's say everybody's selling a banana you can't say i'm five x better banana you instead you should come out and say i'm an apple and not everybody's gonna want your apple but a hundred percent of the people who prefer apples are gonna want what you have and like forget the guy wants the bet best banana there's a thousand of those people you need to waste not an org of energy on them you need to spend your time on the people who potentially value or advantage and start a movement around that you know earlier we talk about markets companies have markets that could be segmented sub segmented and classified startups don't startups they create movements they create they have a secret about the future they get early believers who c cons with them to create a c create a different future and the market emerges as a consequence of the movements succeeding but in the early days we just have to get people moving we have to get people moving to somewhere different not better and so as a result we must for it force a choice and not a comparison and as a seed investor i have to do the same thing because there's two thousand seed funds now and so it was innovative when they and i helped invent seed investing in two thousand six but like now there's two thousand firms and so we have to come up with some way for people to say okay i can't reconcile the choice of working with flood gate versus brand x and i sam writing writing checks with writing checks on the spot that's how we differentiate i know but i think there's a lot to be it's it's it relates to reaching down i think a lot of people would benefit from the idea of how can i force a choice and not a comparison it takes more courage and it it forces you say no of more than you say yes to but if you if you do it the right way the stuff you say yes to i like to say it's less but better there's the way to think about it you've you've had some amazing people in your podcast you've invested in a ton of amazing companies and i bet you know just about everyone in this world of all these people that you've invested in or or or did business with if you guys were put on a on a stranded island who do you think would come out on top who who's the most formidable person that you've you've you've worked with oh there there been so many great people i think a lot of it would be a function of just who had the right idea at the right time you know so much of this is just i call it a founder future fit it's just like you know like when it when did mozilla it was just he was the perfect person in the world at the perfect time to do that idea and so you know it's not just how formidable is the person but it's also just was it was the timing right and were they just the right person the right time but i'm i'm a i'm obsessed with stories and i love interesting personality types is there anyone that fits that bill of of being incredibly formidable like to the point of like you you think how can you be more like that person or or i wish everyone thought a little bit more like this person yeah yeah so i i try to learn from everybody but i not never try to imitate or be like somebody else because then that that that defeats the purpose i'm that now i'm comparing myself to somebody else and so i never do that i don't believe that people should compare themselves with anybody i think they should learn for people but i don't think they should compare themselves to others and i don't think they should have heroes and i think that yeah you mentioned a couple people that you've learned from you know biology being one you know tim ferris said he learned from you who are some other names you know if if people listen to this and they're like you know or or me right i i've really enjoyed hearing to talk during this hour i think you got a bunch of smart ideas i wanna know you know what's he eaten basically what's your information diet what are what are your sort of some of your favorite people to follow and learn from that you're getting a bunch of interesting information that's not just like the rest yeah so well i like the the farm street blog a lot with shane parish and and and and by the way just because i don't invest like buffet and mu doesn't mean i don't study him like crazy right because i think that when i when i read how they look at the world i'll i'll understand what's different about how they look at the world but i'll also connect dots that will make the difference of my world more clear mh i i read a ton i cry read about one or two books a week just in general what what are some of the ones that i've read recently that i like one i like a lot is called the courage should be disliked by a couple of japanese authors i think it's it's amazing and so then i went down this rabbit hole of the the psychiatrist alfred adler who who kinda came of age at the same time as freud and young but wasn't as famous but i think he's i think that alfred adler ideas about individual agency are perfectly time for the twenty first century so i've been liking in everything that i can get my hands on about him and it's and it's weird because although i read a lot of books there's there's always a subset that i come back to over and over again where i try to take notes and because i try to i try to make sure i really understand it so that i could explain it to somebody else in a really clear way so i so i like the courage should be disliked quite a bit i've been reading a lot of stuff on stoic lightly which i find to be very misunderstood but you know what's the misunderstanding i think that most people think of stoic as you know emotion turn the other cheek when things go bad and i actually find that when you read about the stoic and that there are actual philosophies in this world they're actually quite optimistic and quite inspiring and i find that it's helpful for me to internalize so like things like some of the the lessons of stoic and some of the lessons of alfred adler i'll find myself reading those books over and over again and and trying to make the list of things of learn and asked myself every day and my and my exercising those muscles and then there be other things where i'm like a friend of i say there's a really good book oh my gosh just read that so right you know that's just fun it's great alright we're coming up on the hours we can we can wrap it mike thanks for joining this is great where where do people find you if they wanna get more so obviously the podcast so start greatness where where else should they follow and get more yeah i'm on twitter at m two jr r let's see where that's probably the best place yeah or fl dot com you're you're a tweet machine i've been following you since i talked them years ago about you okay yeah and and if you guys wanna cover any other topics happy to i know that we kind of bounced around so i want the the very next i feel like that would have been a interesting one that i think we should we we if you're up for we could do around two around american airlines i think there's a bunch that's there that a that people i'm gonna talk about yeah in all these themes right like i think that the idea also of a you know blockchain and sort of thinking about the the future of money and how we're going to a currency governed by commons rather than fiat government is interesting i think that you know the evolution of you know i i'd like to say that computing phases you had mainframe frames and you had pcs and you had internet and they always start with an enabling technology and they comm monetize the prior so mainframe computers were expensive and then pcs computers were basically free proprietary software becomes valuable okay next thing the internet software becomes open source ama lots of proprietary data becomes valuable and so one way i look at blockchain chains are there they're the next wave of computing and that they're gonna probably democrat data and control of things back to networks and then what becomes a valuable thing my my instinct is it's about governments and so there's there's like a lot of conversation we could have about that that might be interesting and then totally agree america next all all the stuff that i think is gonna have to happen for the the military be more agile and for us to kind of upgrade our thinking about stuff you know when when you're talking i'm like this is what i could be like if i could just focus on three things that i really believed in and i just stopped thinking about other shit for like two years i could have this level of clarity and and insight and you're making me wanna focus which sam and many others in my life i've ever have i've tried to get me to focus before and this may be the the most effective way well there's no one way right like i like to be people or like a tea right it's like a you wanna be mile wide and inch intra deep so that you just can appropriate creative ideas from the world but then i think you wanna be a mile deep somewhere right so it's like a t right and it's like that's why you read several books at a time but then you also go deep on a small number they're truly great do you who who should we invite next onto this podcast who you think is some of the is some is some of are some of the best storyteller and prolific idea folks you had reid hoffman we're we're trying to get in touch with him is there anyone else that you think is is we should invite every re reid hoffman and naval ra you know chris sa is always a good storyteller i can think about that you know the instagram are fun andy radcliffe it probably not as famous as some some of your guests and stuff but boy is he a clear thinker had a great communicator what's the best way to get in touch with reed just a colby you think probably let's see or you just say that i've mentioned you guys and that if it's a good show and then i enjoyed it a be the people that you just mentioned i'll email the people you just mentioned and i'll say mike said you're the mike you're the guy hell so you know i haven't seen as much a chris sa lately so i don't know if that would be as effective with him but but i think that some of the other guys would would wouldn't recognize me pretty well i showed up for chris one morning he texted and he said hey i i got a film with shark tank intro we need some bodies in the background to for my my intro and i i left my job i went to where he was at night in the morning and i filmed a i was a body double i was i was an extra in the background for his shark tank intro so i'll pull that favor card and be like hey chris now's the time to pay it back yeah they if you haven't have mark cuban i think he's really good and and by the way on this so it's funny because you guys are using zen lancaster so shane harris so i was on his sorry shane parish and on his after he listened to the to the talk he's like there's so many upfront questions i wish i'd asked you can we do this again and so i was like sure so we ended up having a lot of content that he kind of cut down but like if if if you find yourself in that position here let me know i'm happy to help you make it as bet you know less but better right so if we can right you know we're gonna if we're gonna ship a product it might we'll be fucking awesome right so i love you where are you from i was born in oklahoma but moved all around because he said dad was an ibm yeah and then worked at microsoft yeah i feel like how old how old of you early fifty three yeah so you're i'm i'm thirty one so you would have had to have me when you were quite young but i feel like you could you could you i could you could be my uncle i think i i i it's funny that's what the founder call me their nickname for me is the crazy uncle so be great i think we we kinda looked the same i could tell you i i thought you would have been from the midwest or maybe the style i'm from missouri kinda yep show me state yeah and my cousins live in oklahoma and fit in owens oklahoma where they buck bowls i i i had a i have a feeling you and i we we could be distant cut distant cousins so we don't even know it yeah yeah you never know coming from missouri oklahoma you'd never know yeah what i appreciate us man this is awesome shawn anything to say no my camera died i'm at the overheating mark but mike this is great thank you for coming on i i enjoyed that that was good and you're in austin now i live in marin county so i'm in northern california oh i thought you live in austin for some reason no i i helped tim though find his place when he decided to move i you know i used to live in austin about up until about fifteen years ago and my families from there all my relatives and stuff and so you know you just be instead of what everyone else did it it seems so and everybody keeps asking me when are we gonna move back to austin i you know i don't know i'm pretty i'm happy with where we live but you know it's pretty crazy time so you never know we'll see well well thanks for being here we'll talk soon i feel like i could rule to word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a travel never looking back