Starting Greatness

By Floodgate

Technology Education Business

What's Starting Greatness about?

Host Mike Maples Jr from venture capital firm FLOODGATE offers lessons from the startup super performers—BEFORE they were successful—featuring interviews with some of Silicon Valley’s most legendary entrepreneurs and thought leaders, including Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Nextdoor co-founder Sarah Leary, Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Kreiger, and more.

5.0

258 ratings

Download our free app to listen on your phone

LAST EPISODE

Lessons of Greatness: Nail ...

06.12.2023

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 ...

Starting Greatness episodes:

06.12.2023 Lessons of Greatness: 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 ...
06.12.2023 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, ...
03.27.2023 Lessons of Greatness: 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 ...
03.27.2023 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 ...
12.15.2022 Lessons of Greatness: 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, ...
12.15.2022 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 ...
08.22.2022 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 ...
08.22.2022 Lessons of Greatness: 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 ...
08.01.2022 Lessons of Greatness: 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 ...
08.01.2022 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 ...
05.16.2022 Lessons of Greatness: 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 ...
05.16.2022 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 ...
02.28.2022 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 ...
02.28.2022 Lessons of Greatness: 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 ...
12.20.2021 Lessons of Greatness: “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 ...
12.20.2021 Qasar Younis and Peter Ludwig of Applied Intuition: A Startup Designed to Win
11.15.2021 Lessons of Greatness: How to Defeat "We're F*cked, It's Over" (WFIO) Moments Your startup will face multiple WFIO moments on the path to greatness...COUNT ON IT. But that doesn’t mean you should let these moments get inside your head. In this lesson of greatness, Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE discusses how every ...
11.15.2021 Ben Horowitz: “The IPO From Hell” and Other REAL Lessons from the Startup Crucible Startups are romanticized AFTER they win. But it takes extraordinary grit to have what it TAKES to win. Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of Andreessen-Horowitz, is the perfect guest to tell it like it is, as he has for many years ...
11.01.2021 Lessons of Greatness: The future is DESIGNED, not predicted Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel understands that the task of a revolutionary startup is to manifest a radically different future, and not merely settle for a marginal improvement. But how did he make that future a reality with messenger RNA Therapeutics, ...
11.01.2021 Stephane Bancel of Moderna: $5B and 10 years on the path to changing humanity What’s it like to run a startup that has achieved its goal of impacting humanity at a time of desperate need? Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel joins Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE to discuss the power of taking offensive risks to ...
09.21.2021 Lessons of Greatness: Apply Game Design to Business Software Rahul Vohra shows us how game design can be used to make business products far more engaging and contribute to a state of flow. Since future success in business software and services is increasingly driven by product-led growth and bottoms-up ...
09.21.2021 Rahul Vohra of Superhuman: How to create business products people enjoy using 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 ...
08.23.2021 Lessons of Greatness: The Myth of TAM The conventional thinking is that a big total available market (TAM) is one of the most important factors in startup success. But Julia Hartz's success at Eventbrite shows the limits of this thinking. In this Lesson of Greatness, Mike Maples ...
08.23.2021 Julia Hartz: From Zero to One to IPO and Beyond Eventbrite CEO Julia Hartz didn't start out life thinking she would be a tech founder, but she has achieved a feat that's very rare: Starting a great startup and going the distance, even past IPO. She also navigated one of ...
08.02.2021 Lessons of Greatness: Price Before You Build Most startups postpone pricing decisions until after the product is developed. They HOPE they can make money rather than KNOW they will at the outset. In this Lesson of Greatness, pricing guru Madhavan Ramanujam shows us that without a price, ...
08.02.2021 Pricing Guru Madhavan Ramanujam: How Smart Startups Design Their Products Around the Price New startups fail for many reasons. Perhaps the most obvious is they can't get people to pay the necessary price for their products. Madhavan Ramanujam's book Monetizing Innovation, is the foremost guide in the industry for startups who want to ...
07.19.2021 Lessons of Greatness: Find your wave before your market The best startups almost always ride a wave that represents a sea change. Such waves give the founders the power to show up with a radically different idea that changes the subject -- and the future. In this lesson of ...
07.19.2021 Jerry Yang: How Yahoo went from a hobby to the early King of the Internet Before Google or Facebook; prior to the days of snapping, tweeting, and texting....Yahoo was the original King of the Internet. But in the early days, Jerry Yang and David Filo weren't sure if it was even a valid business. In ...
06.28.2021 Lessons of Greatness: Hire like your life depends on it Many startup founders would agree that team building is the most important part of startup success. But very few startups actually live it. The founders of Cloudflare offer key lessons in how to start with the right founding team, how ...
06.28.2021 Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn of Cloudflare: How to build a better Company as well as a better Internet 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 ...
06.01.2021 Lessons of Greatness: Why you must master risk-taking to seize greatness 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 ...
06.01.2021 Vinod Khosla: Your willingness to fail is what will let you succeed Vinod Khosla is a Silicon Valley legend, having achieved greatness as a founder with Sun Microsystems and as one of the best venture capitalists of all time. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr of Floodgate talks to Vinod about why ...
05.17.2021 Lessons of Greatness: Design your category 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, ...
05.17.2021 Christopher Lochhead: Why Legendary Startups create Categories Christopher Lochhead is a bestselling author, #1-rated podcaster, and one of the best marketing minds of our time. As one of the co-inventors of category design, Christopher offers valuable insights for startups wanting to stand out in an ever noisier ...
05.03.2021 Lessons of Greatness: DESIGN for network effects Many founders claim their startups contain network effects, but many of these claims only scratch the surface. Networks that achieve greatness are designed, with many trade-offs and factors in mind regarding the "nodes," how interactions take place, what causes people ...
05.03.2021 Anu Hariharan: How to think about network effects for your startup, from the beginning Anu Hariharan from YCombinator's Continuity fund is one of Silicon Valley's top experts on network effects and how they can be applied to all types of different businesses. In this interview, Mike Maples of Floodgate talks to Anu about how ...
04.19.2021 Lessons of Greatness: Start a Movement; not just a business David Sacks demonstrates how the best startup founders talk about causes much bigger than themselves or the companies they're building. Google was about organizing the world's information. Tesla was about moving the world to sustainability, not just selling cars. These ...
04.19.2021 David Sacks: Legendary Startup Product Expert David Sacks, known as one of the best startup product strategists and operators of the last 20 years, discusses key lessons learned from his tenure in the PayPal Mafia, where he was head of product, along with key takeaways as ...
04.05.2021 Lessons of Greatness: Be a Learn-it-All; not a Know-it-All Maybe you've struggled with needing to seem in charge or on top of a challenging situation, even when you're unsure of what to do. If so, you've likely heard the siren song that tempts you to be a know-it-all. But ...
04.05.2021 Matt Mullenweg: How a modest empire builder powered a huge chunk of the web Wordpress CEO Matt Mullenweg talks with Mike Maples Jr of Floodgate about his early successes, setbacks, and what founders can learn from his continued growth as a manager and leader.
03.22.2021 Lessons of Greatness: ALWAYS know your competitive edge Mark Cuban shows us that it's not enough to play by the rules as they are defined. If you are going to achieve greatness as a startup, you need to find your EDGE...which means you have to outmaneuver your competition ...
03.22.2021 Mark Cuban: You only have to be right once...if you take big enough swings along the way Mike Maples of Floodgate talks to Mark Cuban about a wide range of topics with a common theme...you have to go after opportunities where the stakes are high enough that when you win, you can win BIG. And as a ...
03.08.2021 Lessons of Greatness: Thinking in Bets Annie Duke shows us that making high-quality decisions is one of the most important skills we can build for improving our odds of success in startups and in life. It's also a skill that can be sharpened and improved over ...
03.08.2021 Annie Duke: Decision-making Secrets from a World Series of Poker Champion Once called "the Duchess of Poker" for her victories in the World Series of Poker, Annie Duke is also widely respected for her bestselling books "Thinking in Bets" and "How to Decide." In this interview, Mike Maples Jr of Floodgate ...
02.22.2021 Lessons of Greatness: Get REAL Tim Ferriss' success shows the value of building real things for real people rather than creating abstract approximations that represent what's real. The lessons of getting real apply directly to startups who want to avoid the trap of unshaped work ...
02.22.2021 How Tim Ferriss found product-market fit for “The Four Hour Workweek” From literal product placement at a bookstore to courting bloggers, Tim Ferris shares with Mike Maples of Floodgate the tactics he used to find product-market fit for his book “The Four Hour Workweek,” as well as how to build a ...
02.22.2021 Welcome to Season 2! In this opener for Season 2, Floodgate Co-Founder Mike Maples, Jr talks sets the agenda for a new season of Starting Greatness and plans for taking the show and content to the next level.
07.27.2020 Lessons of Greatness: You are Yoda, not Luke Nancy Duarte emphasizes that storytelling has been one of the most compelling tools of persuasion for centuries. But founders embracing the storytelling form often make a crucial mistake: They cast themselves as the protagonist in the hero's journey, rather than ...
07.27.2020 Nancy Duarte: Why storytelling is vital to entrepreneurship Nancy Duarte has helped people like Al Gore tell an inconvenient truth, as well as some of the most important tech execs, get their stories told. She has cracked the code in applying story patterns to business communication. In this ...
07.06.2020 Lessons of Greatness: Why the world needs breakthrough builders; How it can be you The future doesn't happen to us: It happens because of us. In this Lesson of Greatness, we introduce backcasting as a tool for entrepreneurs or people in any field who want to create a future that is meaningfully better and ...

Older episodes