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Mike Maples

Co-founder of Floodgate, Floodgate

Search every verified Mike Maples interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Mike Maples, co-founder of Floodgate, discussed his investment philosophy and approach to startups in recent appearances. At an October 2026 event, he described his strategy of seeking "100x outcomes," noting that he expects to lose money on roughly 85% of his investments but aims for 20x returns on about 15% of first checks and 100x returns on about 5%. He also reflected on passing on Airbnb, saying he would have made 6,000 times his money had he invested, and attributed about 85% of his returns to unexpected pivots by portfolio companies. Maples stated that he looks for startups that are "radically different" rather than simply better, and that he avoids AI startups where he cannot see a clear advantage over incumbents like Sam Altman's OpenAI, though he described AI as a "force multiplier" for his small fund. At a Network State Conference in October 2026, Maples discussed his background as an early investor in Twitter, Twitch, Lyft, and Okta, noting that seed investing was not an established category in 2005. He also commented on California's governance, calling it "the logical conclusion of the unchecked lack of accountability and a government monoculture," and argued that institutions often shift from fulfilling their mission to perpetuating themselves, citing Microsoft and Facebook as examples. He encouraged audiences to honor people who "change the future" and described such individuals as "prime movers" who create futures that would not have happened otherwise.

Recent appearances

Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“I believe that startup capitalists win by changing the subject. So a startup capitalist doesn't win by being better. Better doesn't matter with startups. You have to be radically different to make a radical difference, right? And so I'm looking for that person who's not going to allow the premise of the current rules to define the competition. They refuse the rules, right? They show up out of seemingly out of nowhere”

“Probably about 85% because if I'm world class, I'm 85% likely to lose money. And so it's like what they call in statistics conditional probability, right? It's like given that it's 85% likely that I'm wrong, how big does it have to be in the case that I'm right? For me to be world class, I need to make 20 times my money on the first check about 15% of the time and 100 times my money on the first check about 5% of the”

“The thing that I'm seeing is that unfortunately California's governance has become the logical conclusion of the unchecked lack of accountability and a government monoculture. And so, you know, like there's that train that we've spent over 10 billion on less than a mile of track. And the weird thing about it is a lot of the folks in California politics don't think there's anything wrong with that because that money w”

“AI is going to commoditize that stuff. What the microprocessor did for computing and the internet did for communications, AI is going to do for cognition — making intelligent cognition asymptotically cheap/free.”

“By the time I started to think about fundraising, there wasn't any question in my mind that it was an opportunity. I just hope I'm not too late — I hope somebody else doesn't figure this out before I do.”

“People don't buy from startups for practical reasons because most startups go out of business; people buy from startups for aesthetic reasons — they buy because they believe what the founder believes.”

Other executives at Floodgate

The summary and quote tags on this profile are produced with AI assistance from verified, first-person interview transcripts, then checked by our team to confirm the speaker's identity and the accuracy of every quote. See how we verify →