PODCAST · business
Pattern Breakers
by Floodgate
Host Mike Maples Jr. from venture capital firm Floodgate offers lessons from the rare startup super performers — BEFORE they were successful. Pattern Breakers features interviews with some of Silicon Valley’s most legendary entrepreneurs and thought leaders, including Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Kreiger, business maverick Mark Cuban, and Shopify co-founder Tobi Lütke.
Episodes
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Max Mullen: How Instacart Solved the Problem of Grocery Delivery
When Max Mullen was a teenager, he used his mother’s credit card to order some candy and soda off the internet from the online company Kozmo.com. Less than an hour later his order arrived, and Mullen was hooked on grocery delivery as a breakthrough idea that could make people's lives easier. But…
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James Beshara: How a Dangerous Problem Led to a Magical Solution
For most of his 20s, James Beshara tried to go big as a startup founder in a hot category where he burned tons of money in hopes of getting big fast. Instead, he ended up with a heart condition and a fire sale. So he decided to radically rethink his approach, and start with a problem that he...
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Immad Akhund: How Mercury Saved The Day For Startups
When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed over 48 hours in March 2023, it marked the third-largest bank failure in United States history and the largest since the 2008 financial crisis. But the fintech company Mercury was willing and ready to save the day for startups in need, landing $2 billion in new...
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John Zimmer: Pink Mustaches, Rideshare Wars, and the Legacy of Lyft
Lyft co-founder John Zimmer helped spark a movement to revolutionize transportation, but the road was never a smooth one. Zimmer and co-founder Logan Green had to outmaneuver entrenched taxi monopolies and rewrite the rules of urban mobility on the fly, all while scaling a business model that…
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Spenser Skates: How Perseverance Paid Off for Amplitude
When Amplitude launched in 2012, the analytics market looked crowded, and the company spent more than a year struggling to find any traction. But co-founder and CEO Spenser Skates prioritized truth seeking over narratives. He studied the outcomes of past Y Combinator batches and noticed a simple...
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Wade Foster: Why Zapier is Built for the AI Revolution
When Wade Foster was a kid growing up in Jefferson City, Missouri, there weren’t many models for how to carve out a career in entrepreneurship. But when he and his friend Bryan Helmig developed an easier way to help users connect web-based applications, they ushered in what would eventually…
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Howie Liu: Building Airtable to Feel Magical
Spreadsheets were originally designed for finance people. But when Howie Liu and his co-founders started Airtable in 2012, they had a deeper insight that a spreadsheet-database hybrid could be used by anyone for just about anything, including project management, content calendars, recipes, and…
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Joe Liemandt: The AI-Powered School Rewriting the Future of Education
Long before he attended Stanford, founded software giant Trilogy, or became the youngest member of the Forbes 400, Joe Liemandt wrote a high school paper about the potential for a futuristic technology called Artificial Intelligence. Four decades later Liemandt sits in the principal’s chair at...
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Mårten Mickos: Essential Lessons From A Legendary Tech CEO
Mårten Mickos isn't the kind of CEO who tries to dream up world-changing ideas or invent brand new markets. Perhaps best known for leading MySQL to becoming a $1 billion success story that powered Facebook, Google, and YouTube, Mickos also led teams at Eucalyptus and HackerOne and has…
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Eric Schmidt: The Implications of Superintelligence
Best known as the CEO who helped transform Google from a promising startup into one of the best businesses in human history, Eric Schmidt has recently become one of the most important voices in the global conversation about artificial intelligence. He’s co-written two books on the subject…
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Pedro Franceschi: Lessons from an Evolving Entrepreneur, from Hacking iPhones to Building Brex
At just 13 years of age, Pedro Franceschi was one of the first to jailbreak the iPhone. By the time he was 15 he had co-founded a payments company that would process over a billion in transactions. And by the time he was in his early 20s, helped transform a last minute YC pivot into Brex, one of...
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Mitchell Hashimoto: How Solving His Own Problem Sparked HashiCorp
The most successful founders don't usually chase startup ideas. Instead, they're pulled toward problems they can't ignore. Back in 2009, Mitchell Hashimoto set out to fix what frustrated him by hacking nights and weekends, open sourcing the tools he wished had existed for over a year. His quiet...
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Jake Knapp: The Founder’s Guide to Product-Market Fit
For startups in the zero to one phase, finding product-market fit isn't everything. It’s the only thing. And there are few people in the entrepreneurial world better at solving the product-market fit puzzle than Jake Knapp, who helped build Microsoft Encarta and Gmail, co-founded Google Meet, and...
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Amjad Masad: Resolve, Persistence, and the Rise of Replit
Amjad Masad's journey is defined by relentless persistence. Born and raised in Jordan, he borrowed computers to teach himself coding, and then earned money building software for local internet cafes. He applied to Y Combinator again and again, finally gaining acceptance on his fourth try. His...
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Aaron Levie: The Restless Founder Plotting the Future of Cloud Storage and AI
When the team behind Box first went looking for funding back in 2005, they tried just about every trick in the book. They sent Bill Gates a fax. They dropped a prospectus off at Paul Allen’s house in Seattle. And they took a shot at convincing Mark Cuban to join two ambitious college kids with a...
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Guillermo Rauch: The Product Visionary Fueling Vercel and Millions of Developers
Guillermo Rauch didn’t find success by accident. He began working on computers as a kid growing up in Argentina and was hooked immediately, eventually falling in love with programming and open source before moving to Silicon Valley. Since then his blend of technical foresight, audacious ambition...
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Zach Perret: The Survival Story of a Fintech Giant
Long before Plaid became a $13.4 billion fintech juggernaut, it was just another struggling startup. Co-founders Zach Perret and William Hockey burned through cash and pivoted from one failed idea to the next, ultimately getting turned away by roughly 100 VCs during seed round funding. But Plaid...
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Baiju Bhatt: First Robinhood, Next …. Outer Space?
As the co-founder of Robinhood, Baiju Bhatt didn't just help launch a company. He sparked a movement that fundamentally shifted the dynamics of investing, and created a new path for everyday people to participate in the markets. But can the man who changed the way people think about money do the...
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Josh Reeves: How Gusto Took The Pain Out Of Payroll
When Josh Reeves, Tomer London and Edward Kim founded Gusto in 2012, roughly 40 percent of the employers in the United States were still doing their payroll by hand. Thousands of small business owners spent their time reading up on various federal and local tax codes or buried in late-night...
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Breakthrough Lesson: RIP To Old-School Marketing
Most startups stick to traditional methods of getting their message out. Pattern Breakers, however, don't follow the old rules of marketing. Instead they ignite a movement where they ultimately rise to the top, uncontested, while others later scramble for the leftovers. In this Breakthrough…
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Niels Hoven: Teaching Two Year-Olds to Read Like Second Graders
The team behind the educational technology company Mentava is a small one, but its product idea is extremely ambitious: An app that teaches two year-olds to read at a second grade level. The idea is the brainchild of founder Niels Hoven, a father of four committed to accelerating K-12 education…
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Daphne Koller: Changing Lives With Coursera
Few startup founders follow a path to success like Daphne Koller, a polymath whose academic career in machine learning, computer vision, and computational biology make her a force far beyond the business arena. Koller left her academic career at Stanford in 2012 to co-found Coursera, the world’s...
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Pattern Breakers: Which Startups Change the Future?
On this special episode of Pattern Breakers, host Mike Maples Jr. of Floodgate joins LinkedIn founder and legendary investor Reid Hoffman for a conversation on Hoffman’s podcast Masters of Scale, where iconic business leaders share lessons and strategies that have helped them grow the world's…
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A Sneak Peek at Pattern Breakers
Today is a huge day for Pattern Breakers, the book. Co-written with Peter Zeibelman of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Pattern Breakers has been dubbed “the most important start-up book of the last ten years” by legendary entrepreneur and co-creator of the Lean Startup movement Steve...
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Maddie Hall: A Different Path to the Future
There is no single path to becoming the founder of a pattern-breaking startup. For Maddie Hall, her journey began with a crucial choice: to brainstorm startup ideas or to spend time with people already shaping the future. She chose the latter, following Sam Altman at OpenAI as his Chief of Staff....
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Breakthrough Lessons: Founder-Future Fit
Check out the Pattern Breakers Blog at patternbreakers.substack.com for even more Pattern Breaking content from Mike. Mike's book Pattern Breakers is available now wherever you buy books. Follow Mike on X!
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Justin Kan: Pattern Breaker Personified
If pattern breaker was a term in the dictionary, you just might find an image of Justin Kan. From his attempts as a teenager to send a camera to outer space, to selling his first company on Ebay, to strapping a camera to his head to play the starring role on Justin.tv, Kan has always been a man...
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Breakthrough Lessons: The Value of a Superbuilder
In the early days of a start-up, the superbuilder can be as important to greatness as the start-up leader, and they’re often not the same person. But what are the traits of a great superbuilder, and why do they play such a crucial role in the zero to one phase of a company? In this Breakthrough...
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Kyle Vogt: A Problem Solver With A Purpose
Kyle Vogt has always been fascinated with designing robots and machines. From his youngest days, he retrofitted his father's car to drive itself along the highways of his home state of Kansas. Later, he dropped out of MIT and became a wildly successful startup founder, playing a crucial role in…
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Breakthrough Lessons: Learning to Savor Surprises
The ability to notice and savor surprises is a key overlooked skill of the greatest founders. It allows you to narrow in on the types of capabilities that will lead to breakthroughs. In this Breakthrough Lesson, Mike Maples, Jr of Floodgate calls on the lessons learned by Twitch co-founder Emmett...
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Emmett Shear: How Twitch Changed Media by Merging it with Gaming
Emmett Shear was a gamer long before he helped define one of the most important new media companies at the intersection of gaming, media, and the creator economy. What can we learn from his success as a founder? (hint: it has something to do with truly listening to users.) Check out the Pattern...
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Breakthrough Lessons: The One Thing That Matters Most…
In the early days of a startup, finding product-market fit is paramount. Once you have it, failure is almost impossible. Without it, you can do everything else right, and still fail. In this Breakthrough Lesson, Mike Maples, Jr of Floodgate discusses three heuristics for maximizing the odds of...
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Michael Seibel: “The Godfounder” Discusses Justin.tv, Twitch, and Y Combinator
Michael Seibel didn’t set out to become a legendary startup founder. As a young man, his sights were set on politics, dreaming of a future on the Supreme Court. But his friendship with fellow Yale classmate Justin Kan led to a fortuitous cross-country trip to California that changed everything.…
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Welcome to Pattern Breakers
Mike Maples, Jr. of Floodgate is back with a new season of his podcast, once called Starting Greatness, now renamed Pattern Breakers. The focus remains, but with increased ambitions. In this season intro, Mike explains his reasons for expanding the podcast's scope, what listeners can anticipate...
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Breakthrough Lessons: Nail Your Niche
Founders are naturally drawn to the tantalizing potential of their product reaching a vast market, but the route to victory starts with nailing a niche before going for the broader opportunity. In this lesson of greatness, Mike Maples, Jr of Floodgate calls on the lessons of Spotify co-founder...
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Daniel Ek: How Spotify Revolutionized The Music Business
When he was a little boy growing up in Sweden, Daniel Ek was obsessed with two things: the binary realm of computers and the artistry of music. As a young adult, he combined his love for both by co-founding Spotify, which became the global standard-bearer for streaming, Spotify now has more than...
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Breakthrough Lessons: Crisis Reveals Greatness
Startup founders dealt with uncertainty, stress and trauma in the wake of the run on Silicon Valley Bank, but the most important lessons from this crisis never showed up in social media. In this lesson of greatness, Mike Maples, Jr of Floodgate calls on the actions of a variety of founders who...
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Untold lessons from the SVB bank run
The recent run on Silicon Valley Bank led to a variety of accusations, recriminations and finger-pointing on social media, but how can FOUNDERS actually learn from the crisis? And what lessons can we learn from the founders who crushed it under tough circumstances? In this episode, Mike Maples…
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Breakthrough Lessons: Refuse Mediocrity
When we REFUSE to accept mediocrity, we can start building greatness. But how can you avoid the pitfalls of learned helplessness and help your company break through the arbitrary limits that impede progress? In this lesson of greatness, Mike Maples, Jr of Floodgate calls on the lessons of Boom...
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Blake Scholl: How Boom Supersonic Took Flight
More than fifty years after the first Concorde took flight, consumer air travel is actually SLOWER. Blake Scholl and his team at Boom Supersonic are out to reverse this stagnation and change how we think about commercial aviation. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE interviews Scholl to...
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Mark Leslie: Silicon Valley Go-to-Market Legend (Part 2)
Mike Maples, Jr of Floodgate welcomes back go-to-market expert and Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer Mark Leslie for the second of their two-part interview, this time focusing on the role and responsibilities of a CEO and a deep dive into Leslie’s Compass, an essential set of…
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Breakthrough Lessons: Leslie’s Compass
When a startup product goes to market, the two key muscles it can flex are marketing and sales. In nearly every facet of a startup product, marketing or sales takes the natural lead in getting the product to customers. But startups often pour resources into these two areas in unfocused ways, and...
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Breakthrough Lessons: The Sales Learning Curve
When a startup launches a new product, it's tempting to ramp its sales force too quickly. Often, this leads to a crash-and-burn scenario for companies that failed to learn what it took for the *entire organization* to achieve product-market-fit. In this lesson of greatness, Mike Maples, Jr of...
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Mark Leslie: Silicon Valley Go-to-Market Legend (Part 1)
During the 1990s, Mark co-founded Veritas Systems, which he piloted from nothing to 6,000 employees and $1.5B in revenue in a decade. Now a lecturer in management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Leslie is one of the foremost experts in go-to-market strategy in Silicon Valley, and in...
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Breakthrough Lessons: The Infinite Game
We’re taught from a young age about *finite* sporting games like baseball, basketball, and soccer. Or board games like checkers or chess. Or academic games like grades and test scores. Or status games like credentials and university degrees. In these games, we know the rules and how to determine...
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Tobi Lutke: A Startup Founder Arming The Rebels Against Amazon
Growing up in Germany, Shopify co-founder and CEO Tobi Lutke was never quite comfortable with people telling him to do things because that's the way they're done. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE interviews Lutke to discuss the origins of Shopify, the difference between finite games...
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Tim Westergren: How The Band Kept Playing At Pandora
Tim Westergren maxed out 11 credit cards, racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and was rejected 348 times for a second round of funding for his revolutionary idea for a music streaming platform. But like any true artist, Westergren remained committed to his vision of creating an...
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Breakthrough Lessons: The Artistry of Startup Breakthroughs
Too many people mistakenly believe that being a good entrepreneur comes from simply talking to customers and solving their pain. But the most impactful companies are built for aesthetic reasons - think of Twitter, Lyft, Apple, and Medium - and those companies serve as expressions of what their...
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Breakthrough Lessons: “BIG D" Design
Lots of people think about design from the perspective of how a product should look and function. But design can be applied to greatness on many more levels than most realize. In this lesson of greatness, Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE discusses how you can design your opportunity, your team, your...
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Qasar Younis and Peter Ludwig of Applied Intuition: A Startup Designed to Win
Qasar Younis and Peter Ludwig both grew up in the backyard of American automotive giant General Motors in Detroit, but didn’t cross paths until their days as product managers at Google. Since then they’ve pooled their affinity for cars and technology as the co-founders of Applied Intuition, a...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Host Mike Maples Jr. from venture capital firm Floodgate offers lessons from the rare startup super performers — BEFORE they were successful. Pattern Breakers features interviews with some of Silicon Valley’s most legendary entrepreneurs and thought leaders, including Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Kreiger, business maverick Mark Cuban, and Shopify co-founder Tobi Lütke.
HOSTED BY
Floodgate
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Pattern Breakers have?
Pattern Breakers currently has 114 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Pattern Breakers about?
Host Mike Maples Jr. from venture capital firm Floodgate offers lessons from the rare startup super performers — BEFORE they were successful. Pattern Breakers features interviews with some of Silicon Valley’s most legendary entrepreneurs and thought leaders, including Netscape co-founder Marc...
How often does Pattern Breakers release new episodes?
Pattern Breakers publishes regularly with 114 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Pattern Breakers?
You can listen to Pattern Breakers on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Pattern Breakers?
Pattern Breakers is created and hosted by Floodgate.
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