Even though there’s a .00006% chance that a startup will reach a $1 billion valuation, Silicon Valley investor Mike Maples Jr. has placed early bets on more than one startup that beat the odds.
Across his nearly two-decade investing career, Maples found that startups he invested in early that are now worth over a billion dollars, like Twitch, Twitter, and Lyft, shared one thing in common — they broke patterns. Instead of competing in a crowded space, successful startups defined the future on their own terms.
“Most people, when they saw the iPhone 4S, didn’t realize that the thing in their hand or in their pockets could change the future, but the Lyft guys and the Uber guys did,” Maples said on a Thursday episode of the Masters of Scale podcast with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
Maples added: “I have to break the pattern in order to escape the gravitational pull of the present, right? And so, I like to say great start-ups have to force a choice and not a comparison.”
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Maples gave Airbnb as an example of a startup that successfully forced a choice. According to Maples, Airbnb turned the strengths of the status quo (identical stays wherever you go around the world) into a weakness (wouldn’t you rather have a unique stay that reflects the place you’re in for the same price?).
In doing so, Airbnb created a separate category noticeably different from what was already out there — which forced consumers to make a choice and not a comparison to what already existed.
Maples said that Airbnb also had another trait of a groundbreaking startup: It created a social movement beyond money or business. Instead, Airbnb focused on transforming society and people’s lives.
“What I find is that the great startups very often are more like social movements,” Maples pointed out. “Typically a movement has a minority of people who feel a sense of grievance with the status quo majority. And that minority of people wants to change the future.”
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Pattern-breaking, social movement-starting startup ideas are polarizing and most people won’t like them at first — but Maples says that all you need are those few people, the minority who can start a movement, who think the idea is “amazing” and can’t live without it.
In a separate Harvard Business School profile, Maples explained that when Twitter co-founder Evan Williams pitched him the idea for Twitter, Williams had no roadmap or revenue model.
Williams’ rationale was that when he made Blogger, a million people wrote blogs. If there was a micro-blogging platform, maybe he could get 10 million people to write micro-blogs.
Twitter, now X, was acquired for $44 billion in 2022 by Elon Musk.
Twitter co-founder and CEO Evan Williams. (Photo by David Paul Morris/Getty Images)
What gets an investor to say yes at an early stage to an idea like Twitter, with little data to go off of about the startup’s track record of success or the market it is trying to create? The answer is the founders themselves. Maples stated in the profile that he was looking for technically excellent founders with drive and tenacity.
Maples pointed out additional qualities on the Masters of Scale podcast: the founder’s ability to find groundbreaking ideas and their ability to deliver on those ideas.
“Time and again, the product that ends up winning is not the product that you see when you’re doing a seed investment,” he said on Masters of Scale. “That was true of Twitter. It was true of Twitch. It was true of Lyft.”
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