Although it is .00006% With the startup’s probabilities of reaching a $1 billion valuation slim, Silicon Valley investor Mike Maples Jr. has placed early bets on greater than one startup that has exceeded expectations.
Because of his law two a long time In his investing profession, Maples has found that startups he invested in early on are now value over a billion dollars, equivalent to CrampTwitter and Lyft had one thing in common: they broke the mold. Rather than competing in a crowded space, successful startups defined the future on their very own terms.
“Most people didn’t see the iPhone 4S and realized that the thing they were holding in their hands or pockets was going to change the future, but the people at Lyft and Uber did,” Maples said on Thursday’s episode of the show. Masters of scale podcast with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
Maples added: “I have to break the mold to escape the gravity of the present, right? And that’s why I like to say that great startups have to force choice, not comparison.”
Maples cited Airbnb as an example of a startup that effectively forced alternative. Maples said Airbnb turned the strength of the establishment (an identical stays wherever you go in the world) into a weakness (wouldn’t you relatively have a unique stay that reflects where you are, for the same price?).
In this fashion, Airbnb created a distinct category that was distinctly different from what already existed—forcing consumers to make selections relatively than compare to what already existed.
Maples said Airbnb also has one other hallmark of a disruptive startup: It has created a social movement that goes beyond money and business. Instead, Airbnb has focused on transforming society and people’s lives.
“I find that great startups are often more like social movements,” Maples noted. “Usually, a movement has a minority of people who have a grievance with the status quo of the majority. And that minority of people wants to change the future.”
Startup ideas that break the mold and start social movements are highly emotional and won’t appeal to most individuals at first—but Maples says it only takes a few people, a minority, who can start a movement, who think the idea is “amazing” and can’t live without it.
In a separate Harvard Business School In his profile, Maples explained that when Twitter co-founder Evan Williams approached him with the idea to create Twitter, Williams had no roadmap or revenue model.
Williams’ rationale was that when he created Blogger, a million people were blogging. If there was a microblogging platform, perhaps he could get 10 million people microblogging.
Twitter, now X, was acquired by Elon Musk for $44 billion in 2022.
Twitter co-founder and CEO Evan Williams. (Photo: David Paul Morris/Getty Images)
What makes an early-stage investor say yes to an idea like Twitter, with little data to go on about the startup’s track record or the promote it’s trying to create? The answer is the founders themselves. Maples said in his profile that he looks for technically excellent founders with drive and persistence.
Maples noted additional characteristics of the Masters of Scale podcast: the founder’s ability to find breakthrough ideas and the ability to bring those ideas to life.
“The product that always wins is the one that’s not the one you see when you make a seed investment,” he said at Masters of Scale. “That was Twitter. That was Twitch. That was Lyft.”