Podcast Notes Playlist: Startup

The Danny Miranda Podcast

Podcast Notes Key Takeaways

• “Ruling institutions often go from being service providers to rent-seekers”– Mike Maples Jr.
  • The ability to exit is what gives your voice its power
    • Bitcoin provides you an exit opportunity from the centralized financial system
    • Covid has digitally separated work from location, creating exit power over local governments
  • Governments are being forced to treat us more like customers again rather than assets because more options emerge from the decentralization of products/services
• Category Design: Trying to be the better choice isn’t credible, being different is believable
  • “I’m not the best, I’m the only. You want to force a choice and not a comparison.” – Mike Maples Jr.
• Scalable start-ups that design new product categories are the way to defeat your susceptibility to inflation
  • Contributing towards existing institutional product categories only creates further dilution of the dollar down the corporate production line – feeding the machine per se
  • The phrase ‘the robots are going to eat your job’ is political speak to uphold industrial-era social contracts that maintain organizational power
  • Don’t subordinate your creativity as a trade-off for organizational hierarchy
• Software gives people the ability to create a scalable business and participate in a more net positive, competitive, and decentralized business ecosystem
  • Competition drives innovation, the ‘robots’ are going to create more opportunity for the entrepreneur
  • “The future doesn’t happen to us, it happens because of us” – Mike Maples Jr.

Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.org

Mike Maples Jr. is the co-founder of Floodgate (early investor in Twitter, Twitch, and Lyft) and the host of the Starting Greatness Podcast.

In this conversation, we spoke about surviving how an entrepreneur survives near-death experiences, the balance of centralization vs. decentralization, why you should seek to join a breakthrough company, and how to manage your own psychology.

Emoji to describe this episode: 🤯

Mike's Links

Starting Greatness Podcast / Twitter

Advice by Patrick Collison

Continue the conversation with me...

Twitter / Instagram / YouTube / Website

Rahul Vohra of Superhuman has adopted some of the most cutting-edge approaches to making a business product people *want* to use, rather than have to use. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE talks to Rahul about how any startup founder can apply the principles of game design to their products, and why this is becoming increasingly important in a world where users (rather than IT) increasingly decide which products win.

Keith Rabois is a General Partner at Founders Fund and is one of the most respected minds in Silicon Valley. Keith is also a co-founder and CEO of OpenStore. He previously was part of the PayPal mafia, served as the COO of Square, and co-founded real estate company OpenDoor. Keith also has invested in many industry defining businesses including Yelp, Linkedin, and hundreds of others.

In this conversation, we discuss building tech companies, great hiring questions, identifying the best founders, Miami, Afghanistan, China, OpenStore, Square, Founders Fund, and the state of the media.

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Invest Like the Best

Podcast Notes Key Takeaways

• “Software is eating the world”– Marc Andreessen
  • We are getting better at making more with less
• If you want more job creation, you want more technology and productivity growth
  • Chart of the century – provides a great outline on the dilemma we are facing when it comes to this equation
• System shock – Covid provided a catalyst for many macro level business decisions that wouldn’t have been made
• “The more detached the legacy system (college & university) gets, the more practical and pragmatic the private sector will get” – Marc Andreessen
• It’s time to build everything – we have too much bureaucracy on production

Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.org

My guest today is Silicon Valley icon, Marc Andreessen. Before co-founding the legendary venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, Marc was an early pioneer of the internet. At age 22, he built Mosaic, the first widely adopted web browser and the technology that underpinned Netscape Communications. Marc was an early proponent of cloud computing, social networks, and the software business model. In each case, Marc seemed to be well ahead of the crowd. During our conversation, we explore how software is making the world better, how slow sectors like education, healthcare, and housing are eating the economy, and Marc’s vision of the future for A16Z. Please enjoy my conversation with Marc Andreessen.

 

Before we transition to the episode, I wanted to highlight our newest series, Business Breakdowns. Each week we do a deep dive into an individual business to understand what makes it great. Find more information on joincolossus.com or search for and sign up to the Business Breakdowns feed on your preferred podcast player.                                        

 

For the full show notes, transcript, and links to the best content to learn more, check out the episode page here.

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Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, Inc. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes. 

 

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Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus

 

Show Notes

[00:04:10] - [First question] The ways in which software is eating the world

[00:06:25] - The power of transitioning from atoms to bits and its impacts

[00:09:57] - Potential downsides and credible concerns as we shift into an automated world 

[00:16:00] - Major impediments of productive growth over the coming decades  

[00:23:12] - Real change versus false change due to COVID-19 writ large 

[00:30:06] - Thoughts on the rising cost of post-secondary education in light of the internet

[00:37:03] - Why doesn’t Google have their own university and if they might in the future

[00:41:30] - Whether or not an entrepreneurial focus on generally slower sectors may produce excess returns

[00:44:17] - Thoughts on hardware, its unit economics, and its role in shaping society

[00:47:52] - How to think about investing in immensely complicated, large-scale projects

[00:54:10] - What they’re building at A16Z, a new crypto fund, and where their sights are set

[01:03:09] - East coast investing styles and things we can borrow from them

[01:06:01] - Potential plans to step into the public equity space 

[01:11:09] - Defining why it’s time to build and the imperative it sets

[01:15:13] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him

It takes a lot of effort to build a breakthrough product. It's perhaps even rarer to design a company that endures. In this interview, Mike Maples Jr of Floodgate interviews Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn of Cloudflare to highlight what we can learn about how to get a startup's foundation right, along with recruiting, hiring, and company design.

A special episode of One on One where Marc and Ben, joined by special guest Steven Sinofsky, former President of Microsoft Windows, discuss talent retention, management and communication, the future of Silicon Valley, and other big unanswered questions surrounding remote work.

Most people think that risk should be avoided. But Vinod Khosla teaches us otherwise...Risk is something people *take* when they create breakthroughs. This lesson of greatness talks about the key frameworks for why this is the case as well as how to take risks intelligently to tilt the odds in your favor.

Startups change the future so they MUST be different, rather than better. Christopher Lochhead shows us how category designers realize that different is believable from a startup, but better is not. Any powerful startup idea pre-supposes an exponentially different future, which means your startup MUST change the way the people think about the future rather than incrementally improve on the products they already use. Different forces a choice rather than a comparison. And different sticks, while better gets lost in the noise. In this lesson of greatness, we cover the specific steps involved in applying category design to your startup.

Keith Rabois (@rabois), partner at Founders Fund, joins Erik on this episode to discuss:

- Why he decided to move to Miami and why it’s made him 30-40% happier.

- The benefits of clustering when you’re at the earliest stages of building a company, and why remote works better for a later-stage company.

- Why he suggests you don’t visit a place you’re considering moving to for just a weekend and instead you go for a full Monday to Friday cycle.

- What he’s learned from people organizing digitally to make change in the physical world.

Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. 

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Business Lunch with Roland Frasier

Podcast Notes Key Takeaways

• Every week at dinner, Sara Blakely’s father would ask her to share one thing she failed at that week. Her father wanted her to know failure was okay and that when you take risks, you’re going to come across failure.
  • “What he was doing was just reframing our definition of failure…The only failure for me is not trying” – Sara Blakely
• As a salesperson, Sara listened to several motivational speakers including Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, Tony Robbins, and many more
  • From listening to all these speakers, Sara learned about the value of visualizing your success and the power of positive thinking
• What you don’t know can be your biggest asset in business
  • Sara didn’t get Spanx into Neiman Marcus by doing trade shows, she simply called them and asked if she could get 10 minutes to present her product to them   
• How does Spanx decide what products to work on?
  • “It’s really just based on need and listening to people and hearing where I see opportunities to make something better” – Sara Blakely
• How does Sara define success?
  • For Sara, it’s following your passion, doing something that makes you feel alive, and helping other people along the way

Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.org

Sara Blakely took on a declining industry and ended up changing the way women dress. She is the Billionaire Founder of SPANX and was named by Time magazine on their list of the 100 most influential people in the world (2012).

Two years ago, we aired part of Roland Frasier's conversation with Sara Blakely. You can hear that here. Today, we're sharing some of the conversation that we held back: More questions that we think Entrepreneurs (and our business-minded listeners) will want to hear. Whether you're growing a successful business, dreaming up ideas, or struggling to navigate challenging times, this episode will encourage you on your Entrepreneurial journey. 

 "What he was doing was just reframing our definition of failure...The only failure for me is not trying" – Sara Blakely.

Listen For How Sara Blakely -

• Stays Motivated (and who inspired her to break through the ceiling)?

• Wrote a profound (and very specific) goal in her journal two years before she had her billion-dollar idea.

• Continues to get great ideas (by making her 5-minute commute last an hour).

"I think a lot of my next inventions and ideas in the car" – Sara Blakely.

Plus, Sara Answers...

1. How Spanx's customer acquisition channel has changed over the years.

2. Her strategy for maximizing customer lifetime value.

3. How she expanded Internationally.

4. Which Book has she gifted the most.

5. Does she ever take time off and recharge?

Today's Top Takeaway

What you don't know (in business) can turn out to be your biggest asset.

Did You Know?  

March is an extra special month for the podcast. We've also lined up the release of Roland's interviews with Sir Richard Branson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Marcus Lemonis, and a special International Women's Day episode too.

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