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- Floodgate’s Mike Maples on the best way to come up with startup ideas
Floodgate’s Mike Maples on the best way to come up with startup ideas
“Most people think that the way you come up with good startup ideas is to try and think of a startup. And I like to say, No - that’s exactly wrong. What you do to come up with great startup ideas is you live in the future and notice what’s missing.”
Mike - an early investor in companies like Lyft and Okta - continues:
“If you’re living in the future, there will be unbuilt missing things because if it was all built, you’d be living in the present. And so if you’re living in the future and notice what’s missing, your intuition about what to build is far more likely to be right.”
He gives Marc Andreessen inventing the Internet browser as an example:
“Andreessen didn’t do the Mosaic browser because he thought there was a market for browsers. He was trying to make the internet immediately more useful for him and his team, and his intuition about what to build was very good because he was building the thing he wanted that was missing in the world.”
Maddie Hall, founder of Living Carbon, is another example:
“She was working at Zenefits, and at first she tried to think of a startup and she had ideas that weren’t that good… But then she decided to go follow Sam Altman for a year and be his chief of staff. And Sam Altman visits the future multiple times a day with people. And so that’s what led her to this idea for Living Carbon, which does genetically modified trees… She saw Microsoft - and a bunch of other companies - about to spend a lot of money on carbon takeout. She saw that genetic engineering technology was getting good enough that you could engineer these trees. She married the inflections with the need, and then off she went.”