Mike Maples: Three Frameworks to Evaluate Startups and Founders | E1242

Mike Maples of Floodgate explains why fund size is strategy, why seed follow-ons are mostly index investing, and how founder-future-fit beats pitch quality as a selection signal.

• Floodgate’s math: 5% of first checks must hit 100x cash-on-cash; 10–15% must hit 20x to return a 10x fund.
• Seed follow-on returns are so bad that if LPs tracked first-check vs. follow-on IRR separately, there would be ‘pitchforks in the street.’
• Floodgate missed Airbnb and Pinterest during a stretch when Maples was on 22 boards simultaneously and lost sharpness.
• Ann Miura-Ko bought Lyft at $5.5M post-money (750K check), then sold enough at ~$25/share in 2015 to return the entire fund before IPO.
• Twitter returned ~300x, Lyft ~205x, Twitch ~94x on first checks; Applied Intuition is approaching 100x.
• ‘Founder-future-fit’: the strongest seed signal is whether the founder is already living in the future the startup is building toward — used Okta’s Todd McKinnon and Andreessen’s browser work as examples.
• Maples predicts Bitcoin reaches $130K by end of 2025; Reed Hoffman said $200K.
• Overfunded pre-PMF startups become ‘culturally broken’ — they hire ahead of fit, never develop muscle memory for what an attractive customer looks like.

2025-01-06 · Watch on YouTube