Embracing Your Unique Comparative Advantage

Mike Maples is one of the OG seed investors of the last two decades. As a co-founding Partner at Floodgate, Mike has been on the Forbes Midas List eight times in the last decade. Some of Mike’s investments include Twitter, Twitch.tv, Clover Health, Okta, Outreach, Chegg, Demandforce, and Applied Intuition.

In Today’s Episode with Mike Maples We Discuss:

04:02 Does Seed Even Make Sense as an Asset Class? 

05:16 Fund Size and Strategy: How to Do a 10x Fund?

08:12 Follow-On Investments: Are they BS?

16:41 Finding Inefficiencies in the Market

26:31 Exit Strategies and Liquidity Events: When to Sell?

35:14 How Floodgate Lost Billions Missing Airbnb and Pinterest

35:43 3 Frameworks for Evaluating Startups

36:23 Case Studies: Zoom and Okta

43:34 How to Truly Analyse Product-Market Fit

45:22 Challenges with Overfunding Startups

50:02 2024 in Review: Company and Fund of the Year

54:25 Predictions for 2025