Mike Maples Jr. is a partner at Floodgate, a pre-seed and seed-stage venture capital firm he co-founded in 2006 with Anne Miuro-Ko. He has been on the Forbes Midas list eight times in the last decade and backed Twitter, Lyft, Twitch, Okta, and many others in their earliest stages. Attempting to understand if he had been lucky or skillful, Mike studied venture winners and created a framework to describe startup capitalism, which he writes about in his recently released book, Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future.

Our conversation covers Mike’s path to venture capital and the curiosity that led to writing this book. We dive into his discovery of inflection theory and discuss components of the framework, including the power of incumbents, inflections that change the future, insights to capitalize on inflections, pivots, founder-future fit, creating a movement from misfits to the mainstream, and points of failure along the way.