If you’re trying to understand the most successful startup founders, from Mark Zuckerberg to Brian Chesky, roll back the tape, says VC Mike Maples.
Find the earliest video interview of the founder that’s available and watch it. If you watch the founder in recent interviews, you’re seeing them after they’ve gained the glow of success, whereas the early interviews reveal how they were thinking about their company’s potential—back when it seemed crazy.
“What I find is that startups that are great are capitalist mutations that are wild,” said Maples. “It’s like finding the first version of the finch in the Galapagos Islands that’s never been spotted before. So, there’s this wildness—and magic to the wildness—that comes with the territory. But the stories that are told after the fact sanitize things a lot.”
Maples, the cofounder of Floodgate and an early backer of Twitter, has plenty of first-hand experience with startup founders. On Saturday, he took the stage at the South by Southwest festival in Austin to talk about breakthrough founders and his new book, Pattern-Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future.
Going back to the beginning is especially important for wildly successful founders, Maples says, because it helps counter narratives of inevitability.
“One theory I have is that better doesn’t matter when it comes to startups,” said Maples. “My theory is that startup capitalism is a different kind of capitalism. For a startup capitalist, better isn’t really better, because if you’re ‘better,’ you’re playing in somebody else’s sandbox. Then, your size is limited. The best startups I’ve found are radically different—somehow, they force a choice, and not in comparison.”
Maples was joined by Jim Breyer, who as a partner at Accel was an early backer of Facebook and Spotify.
“There’s an authenticity,” said Breyer about successful founders. “The founding team needs to have incredible passion and an understanding of how difficult the journey is. Sometimes I see a founding team of four or five. There are two who are exceptional, then there are a couple of red flags for some of the others. In some cases, I’ll make that investment, recognizing this is part of the material.”
Breyer said that there needs to be that deep passion, combined with a candor and clarity about what’s not working.
“I don’t need to hear the good news,” said Breyer. “I can figure that out… I want to know the bad news.”
