Thread by @eriktorenberg

Some of my favorite takeaways & quotes from Mike Maples' interviews 👇

“The thing that I like to assume is every startup idea’s been tried… So, the question is not, Has my idea been tried before? The question is, Is it the right time for my idea to happen?"

A startup isn’t a company until it hacks its way through 3 distinct miracles:   

1) The insight hack (insight development)

2) The value hack (customer development)

3) Growth hacking (going from 0-1 to 1-X)

Value hacking:

Figure out what you can uniquely do that ppl are desperate for

Identify a focus group of customers that desperately need your solution

Iterate & improve your value proposition relentlessly until you start to see signs of exponential organic growth

If your value prop as a startup isn’t true enough, & your customer isn’t desperate enough, you won’t grow exponentially. You’ll instead have to spend $ to overcome the objections to the gaps in your value prop.

Only think about growth after you’ve proven your value hypothesis.

On ideas:

Most people are looking around their present world and searching for "white space" -- "startup opportunity".

Instead, live in the future, find what's missing, and then show people the way forward.

It might be time to start your startup when:

You have insider knowledge about a major change event.

You know the market opportunity and customer needs in a visceral way.

You have a vision of a problem to be solved based on your knowledge of the first two points

How do you know when it’s time to double down on an idea?

When no one can talk you out of doing it

If there’s anyone reasonable who can talk you out of it, you’re probably not ready for it

Or when the pain of regret from not trying > any possible pain experienced from failing

"Sometimes the world puts an opportunity in front of you that you’re in a unique position to capitalize on before others, that leverages a unique domain skill you have, and takes advantage of something you’ve seen before others because of your vantage point. It’s tempting to say:

"You’ll tackle it when you’re ready—when you have your things in place, when you have your ducks in a row, when the economy is more stable … But the reality is, if you plan to start something great, these kinds of opportunities are extremely rare—maybe even once in a lifetime."

The startup law of the jungle:

Startups are initially very vulnerable to predators (like a newborn animal on the plains) 

Being non-consensus and right affords the startup the time to survive, adapt, and & – no one preys on them because no one believes their idea’s important

With your product, have a good answer to the question: “What job do our customers hire this product to do?”

When you buy a new product, you hire it to help you do a job

If the product does the job well, you’ll tend to hire it again

If it does a bad job, you’ll fire it

When you’re starting a startup, you’re going to war together. You gotta know you want to be in the fox hole with this person. You GOTTA know it. Because it’s impossible enough as it is. A lot of these startups fail because the founders can’t see eye to eye on what has to happen

Launching Paradox:

"If you aren’t embarrassed by your product, then you launched too late” - Reid Hoffman

But Steve Jobs & Apple are the opposite: perfectionism.

The former approach works better when you’re the only person showing up with something they’re desperate for

Why Nows

Technology inflections: When Mike invested in Lyft, GPS locators in cell phones had just gotten good enough for ride-sharing

Adoption inflections: Also contributing to Lyft was the fact that nearly everyone had smartphones.

Navigate the Idea Maze:

Assume every idea's been tried, and ask why now or why you would have a different outcome.

Q's to ask:

Why did it fail?
What were the assumptions?
Why are my assumptions different?
How is the world different in a way that may change the outcome?

On capital intensiveness:

I like ideas where you can light a forest fire with just a match. I think that on some level, the true measure of the disruptive power of an idea is the degree to which it can make change without throwing money at it.

Fundamentally, a startup is all about harnessing exponential change to create a unique value proposition ppl are desperate for, that changes their point of view, & grows at hyper-warp speed, all done by ppl who live in the future. This has been remarkably true for remarkably long

Most decisions are one of two types – 70/30 or 51/49

If it’s 70/30, you know what you need to do – you’re just, for whatever reason, not courageous enough to follow through on it

If it’s 51/49, it almost doesn’t matter which one you pick

People don’t make the wrong decision b/c they don’t have the facts/framework, they do so because they let their emotions get attached to the decision in a way that interferes w/ their judgement.

Quite often, decisions are more simple than you realize – it’s the willingness to follow through that really matters more than anything else

The only wrong decision is no decision

The quickest way down the path is to make the leap – you can course correct later if need be

Stop putting your decisions off – Courage doesn’t grow with time.

If you’re deliberating constantly on a really hard decision, it’s probably because it really doesn’t matter what you choose

It’s good to have a plan, but life has a way of not caring. You want to have a strategy, but secrets emerge and bubble up all around you, & sometimes you find a secret in the wild better than the secret you were pursuing and you need to have the presence of mind to know it.

I enjoy trying to find the set of people out there in Silicon Valley who have the Jedi skills of knowing what’s going to happen & what’s interesting.

It’s less important to be the best expert, it’s more important to know the best expert & have good taste as to who that is.

“I would love to find a way to fund 0 to 1 projects that seem impossible, but if pulled off have a transformative effect on the world…things that seem like an impossible dream, but if you have the right money and funding mechanism, you could do it."

We’ve progressively moved away from ‘sound money'

This started ~10 years before the Great Depression when the Fed began manipulating interest rates

Why did they start doing this? – To impact how much money was/wasn’t being borrowed which would in turn affect the economy

For most things, price is set by supply and demand – money shouldn't be different.

When an interest rate is set, it should be based on what the bank believes to be the valid price for money based on the supply & demand.

Money is the most important thing to price in the economy.

Due to the low interest rates, many Fortune 500 companies are borrowing money to buy back their own stock

Last year alone, $800 billion was used in this way

This money could be used in better ways – like investing in new products, breakthrough ideas and job creating innovations

The result of this- fake company growth (by increasing a company’s stock price)

When you buy back your own stock – you’re not doing anything for the employees (you’re just jacking up the share price)

So the side effect of this – “Most of the innovation at Fortune 500 companies are at best sustaining innovations or efficiency innovations where they’re trying to remove labor from certain processes”

I believe that the lack of soundness of our money has done way more to create wealth inequality than most people realize

If interest rates were set by supply and demand, they’d certainly be higher (and so would the investment returns for many citizens)

The standard of living had increased ~14 fold from 1850 to 2000: More abundance created than in all of history combined.

Corporate Capitalism (Mass production) is largely responsible.

“Network capitalism” (Mass computation/connectivity) will be responsible for the next wave.

I don’t believe robots are going to eat the jobs as much as they’re going to eat the need for people to join companies

Instead of putting ppl out of work, Tech will give solo-entrepreneurs the tools to not need to have a job (help finding clients, aid them with billing, etc.)

I think there’s going to be a bull market of side hustles soon… From your iPad you can start recording a podcast, publish written word to anyone around the world….it’s mind blowing what we’ve done over the last 20 years for the individual