Mike Maples Jr.

Mike Maples Jr. co-founded Floodgate over 20 years ago as one of the earliest pioneers of seed-stage investing, making early bets on Twitter, Lyft, Twitch, Okta, and Applied Intuition. He has been on the Forbes Midas list eight times and spent years studying the original pitch decks and origin stories of his portfolio's biggest winners. Their core argument: The best pivots are not random restarts -- they are driven by pattern-breaking insights (inflections) that make the new direction qualitatively different from incremental iteration. The evidence is specific: Justin.tv / Twitch: Justin.tv was a general-purpose livestreaming platform. The founders noticed gaming livestreams generated disproportionate engagement. They pivoted to focus exclusively on gaming, and Twitch was acquired by Amazon for $970M.. Furthermore, okta: Pivoted from reliability monitoring to identity management, finding a genuine inflection in the shift to cloud-based enterprise software.. Lyft: The Zimride founders noticed the inflection in smartphone-enabled real-time ride matching and pivoted from long-distance ride-sharing to on-demand urban transportation.. In Mike Maples Jr.'s own words: "The three are inflections, insights and then the founder future fit. Business is never a fair fight. What inflections let the founder do is wage asymmetric warfare on the present." (Introducing the three elements of breakthrough startup ideas.)