Pattern Breakers

Pattern Breakers

Host Mike Maples Jr. from venture capital firm Floodgate offers lessons from the rare startup super performers — BEFORE they were successful. Pattern Breakers features interviews with some of Silicon Valley’s most legendary entrepreneurs and thought leaders, including Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Kreiger, business maverick Mark Cuban, and Shopify co-founder Tobi Lütke.

Episodes

John Zimmer: Pink Mustaches, Rideshare Wars, and the Legacy of Lyft

February 9, 2026 • 42 mins
Lyft co-founder John Zimmer helped spark a movement to revolutionize transportation, but the road was never a smooth one. Zimmer and co-founder Logan Green had to outmaneuver entrenched taxi monopolies and rewrite the rules of urban mobility on the fly, all while scaling a business model that many experts insisted was a logistical impossibility and battling Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick for market supremacy. In this episode, Mi...
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Spenser Skates: How Perseverance Paid Off for Amplitude

January 5, 2026 • 44 mins

 When Amplitude launched in 2012, the analytics market looked crowded, and the company spent more than a year struggling to find any traction. But co-founder and CEO Spenser Skates prioritized truth seeking over narratives. He studied the outcomes of past Y Combinator batches and noticed a simple rule: Most companies died before they even learned enough to make something that people want. All Amplitude had to do was survive.

In this...

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Wade Foster: Why Zapier is Built for the AI Revolution

November 18, 2025 • 42 mins
When Wade Foster was a kid growing up in Jefferson City, Missouri, there weren’t many models for how to carve out a career in entrepreneurship. But when he and his friend Bryan Helmig developed an easier way to help users connect web-based applications, they ushered in what would eventually become Zapier, a remote automation giant that’s now worth an estimated $5 billion and is ideally positioned for the AI era. In this episode, ...
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Howie Liu: Building Airtable to Feel Magical

September 29, 2025 • 46 mins
 Spreadsheets were originally designed for finance people. But when Howie Liu and his co-founders started Airtable in 2012, they had a deeper insight that a spreadsheet-database hybrid could be used by anyone for just about anything, including project management, content calendars, recipes, and even travel itineraries. Now the company is valued at an estimated $4 billion, and it’s a prime example of why showing a real difference wi...
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Joe Liemandt: The AI-Powered School Rewriting the Future of Education

September 9, 2025 • 42 mins
Long before he attended Stanford, founded software giant Trilogy, or became the youngest member of the Forbes 400, Joe Liemandt wrote a high school paper about the potential for a futuristic technology called Artificial Intelligence. Four decades later Liemandt sits in the principal’s chair at Alpha School, an AI-powered private school founded in Austin, Texas with a revolutionary approach to learning and ambitious plans for the fu...
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Mårten Mickos: Essential Lessons From A Legendary Tech CEO

August 25, 2025 • 41 mins
Mårten Mickos isn't the kind of CEO who tries to dream up world-changing ideas or invent brand new markets. Perhaps best known for leading MySQL to becoming a $1 billion success story that powered Facebook, Google, and YouTube, Mickos also led teams at Eucalyptus and HackerOne and has consistently shown an ability to convert the potential energy of an idea into the kinetic energy of execution. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr. of ...
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Eric Schmidt: The Implications of Superintelligence

August 4, 2025 • 40 mins

 Best known as the CEO who helped transform Google from a promising startup into one of the best businesses in human history, Eric Schmidt has recently become one of the most important voices in the global conversation about artificial intelligence. He’s co-written two books on the subject including the New York Times bestseller Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit, co-written with longtime friend Henry Kiss...

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Pedro Franceschi: Lessons from an Evolving Entrepreneur, from Hacking iPhones to Building Brex

June 30, 2025 • 43 mins
At just 13 years of age, Pedro Franceschi was one of the first to jailbreak the iPhone. By the time he was 15 he had co-founded a payments company that would process over a billion in transactions. And by the time he was in his early 20s, helped transform a last minute YC pivot into Brex, one of the most iconic fintech breakout stories of the decade. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr. of Floodgate speaks with Franceschi about how h...
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Mitchell Hashimoto: How Solving His Own Problem Sparked HashiCorp

June 16, 2025 • 39 mins
 The most successful founders don't usually chase startup ideas. Instead, they're pulled toward problems they can't ignore. Back in 2009,  Mitchell Hashimoto set out to fix what frustrated him by hacking nights and weekends, open sourcing the tools he wished had existed for over a year. His quiet persistence and commitment to fixing the problem ignited one of the decade's most influential cloud companies: HashiCorp. In this episod...
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Jake Knapp: The Founder’s Guide to Product-Market Fit

May 5, 2025 • 41 mins
For startups in the zero to one phase, finding product-market fit isn't everything. It’s the only thing. And there are few people in the entrepreneurial world better at solving the product-market fit puzzle than Jake Knapp, who helped build Microsoft Encarta and Gmail, co-founded Google Meet, and has advised teams at Miro, Slack, LEGO and NASA on product strategy and time management. Knapp also wrote the New York Times bestseller ...
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Amjad Masad: Resolve, Persistence, and the Rise of Replit

April 15, 2025 • 39 mins

Amjad Masad's journey is defined by relentless persistence. Born and raised in Jordan, he borrowed computers to teach himself coding, and then earned money building software for local internet cafes. He applied to Y Combinator again and again, finally gaining acceptance on his fourth try. His constant drive fueled continuous improvement, culminating in the breakthrough success of Replit, the $1.1B company focused on empowering the ...

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Aaron Levie: The Restless Founder Plotting the Future of Cloud Storage and AI

March 31, 2025 • 40 mins
When the team behind Box first went looking for funding back in 2005, they tried just about every trick in the book. They sent Bill Gates a fax. They dropped a prospectus off at Paul Allen’s house in Seattle. And they took a shot at convincing Mark Cuban to join two ambitious college kids  with a hunch the way businesses stored and collaborated around information was about to change. Two decades later Box is a cornerstone of the cl...
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Guillermo Rauch: The Product Visionary Fueling Vercel and Millions of Developers

March 17, 2025 • 39 mins
Guillermo Rauch didn’t find success by accident. He began working on computers as a kid growing up in Argentina and was hooked immediately, eventually falling in love with programming and open source before moving to Silicon Valley. Since then his blend of technical foresight, audacious ambition and obsessive attention to detail in products has made him the successful CEO of Vercel, the cloud platform service company used by over ...
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Zach Perret: The Survival Story of a Fintech Giant

February 25, 2025 • 38 mins
Long before Plaid became a $13.4 billion fintech juggernaut, it was just another struggling startup. Co-founders Zach Perret and William Hockey burned through cash and pivoted from one failed idea to the next, ultimately getting turned away by roughly 100 VCs during seed round funding. But Plaid persevered, and eventually revolutionized how financial data moved through the internet, eventually boasting customers like Robinhood, Coi...
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Baiju Bhatt: First Robinhood, Next …. Outer Space?

January 28, 2025 • 40 mins
As the co-founder of Robinhood, Baiju Bhatt didn't just help launch a company. He sparked a movement that fundamentally shifted the dynamics of investing, and created a new path for everyday people to participate in the markets. But can the man who changed the way people think about money do the same for energy? In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr. of Floodgate speaks with Bhatt about the origins of Robinhood and how hands-on research...
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Josh Reeves: How Gusto Took The Pain Out Of Payroll

December 16, 2024 • 38 mins
When Josh Reeves, Tomer London and Edward Kim founded Gusto in 2012, roughly 40 percent of the employers in the United States were still doing their payroll by hand. Thousands of small business owners spent their time reading up on various federal and local tax codes or buried in late-night paperwork, drained of the energy to truly chase their dreams. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr. of Floodgate speaks with Reeves about how Gusto...
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Breakthrough Lesson: RIP To Old-School Marketing

October 7, 2024 • 10 mins
Most startups stick to traditional methods of getting their message out. Pattern Breakers, however, don't follow the old rules of marketing. Instead they ignite a movement where they ultimately rise to the top, uncontested, while others later scramble for the leftovers. In this Breakthrough Lesson, Mike Maples Jr. of Floodgate examines three lessons learned from the recent viral breakout of the educational technology company Mentav...
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Niels Hoven: Teaching Two Year-Olds to Read Like Second Graders

September 23, 2024 • 34 mins
The team behind the educational technology company Mentava is a small one, but its product idea is extremely ambitious: An app that teaches two year-olds to read at a second grade level. The idea is the brainchild of founder Niels Hoven, a father of four committed to accelerating K-12 education and helping high-achieving kids reach their true potential. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr. of Floodgate speaks with Hoven about the orig...
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Daphne Koller: Changing Lives With Coursera

August 5, 2024 • 43 mins

Few startup founders follow a path to success like Daphne Koller, a polymath whose academic career in machine learning, computer vision, and computational biology make her a force far beyond the business arena. Koller left her academic career at Stanford in 2012 to co-found Coursera, the world’s largest platform for massive open online courses (MOOCs). After building the company into a global phenomenon she left Coursera in 2016 to...

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Pattern Breakers: Which Startups Change the Future?

July 29, 2024 • 36 mins

On this special episode of Pattern Breakers, host Mike Maples Jr. of Floodgate joins LinkedIn founder and legendary investor Reid Hoffman for a conversation on Hoffman’s podcast Masters of Scale, where iconic business leaders share lessons and strategies that have helped them grow the world's most fascinating companies. Mike discusses the insights he’s gathered from decades of investing, inflection theory, what the latest AI sea ch...

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