Embrace Surprise for Breakthroughs

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Effective leaders prioritize finding the best solutions over holding onto their original viewpoints. They display flexibility and are willing to change their perspectives when new evidence emerges, demonstrating independence from the need to be right. This approach fosters a mindset open to surprises, which is essential for discovering innovative breakthroughs. By being receptive to unexpected insights during discussions, these leaders uncover opportunities that others may overlook, thereby driving meaningful progress.

Mike Maples, Jr., co-founding partner of the VC firm Floodgate, is the veteran seed investor behind some of the 21st-century’s great success stories, including Twitter, Twitch, and Applied Intuition.

His book, Pattern Breakers (co-authored with Peter Ziebelman), articulates a new model of foundership, one built on the simple premise that transformative startups upend rather than improve current practices.

My company, OSV, is built around my belief that the collapse of the old models presents enormous opportunities to those savvy enough to seize them, so I had a blast quizzing Mike on the nuts and bolts of pattern-breaking foundership, from finding true believers to waging asymmetric war on the status quo.

If Mike’s theory sounds as interesting to you as it did to me, check out our Substack, where we’ve distilled some pattern-breaking insights and shared the episode transcript. I also encourage you to buy Mike’s excellent book.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did!

Important Links:

Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future; by Mike Maples, Jr & Peter Ziebelman
Twitter
Substack (Starting Greatness)
Floodgate
LinkedIn

Show Notes:

Seagull mode: an unexpected founder paradigm
How to wage asymmetric war on the present
Evading the comparison trap
Finding your people: how to build a movement
Why we should continually seek the truth
The customer isn’t always right, but the ones living in the future are
Why disagreeableness is undervalued
How to fix a pitch Franckendeck
Don’t use jargon as a substitute for clear thinking
How to find the true believers
How to live in the future
How founders are like trainspotters
Why wanting to be a founder is a bad reason to start a company
Reading habits of a pattern-breaker
The unreliability of memory
Mike as emperor of the world
MORE!

Books Mentioned:

Jonathan Livingston Seagull: A story; by Richard Bach
The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism; by Howard Bloom
The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World; by David Deutsch
What Works in Wall Street; by Jim O’Shaughnessy
Poor Charlie’s Almanac: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger; by Charles T. Munger