How To Build A Career That Can't Be Replicated With Mike Maples, Jr.

Yeah, I guess one of the ways I think about it is I like to take risks where it doesn't feel like failure if it doesn't work out. And so, you know, one way to think about risk is, oh, what if I try this and I fail? What's the penalty cost going to be? Another way to look at it is to say, I'm going to start out with such a small risk that it doesn't feel like failure if it doesn't work out and I'm just going to double down if it does work. And so, I'm going to just escalate my commitments as I increase my certainty. And most of what I find in terms of things that work in entrepreneurship kind of feel that way. Usually, when I talk to founders and say, 'Why did you take this risk?' They look at me funny because it didn't feel like a risk. It felt like they were pursuing something interesting that became something. The way I got started, I knew that it was time to get the party started again on the internet. I was living in Austin, Texas. I'd just been involved with a company that went public and all the web 2.0 stuff was happening. That's what they called it back then, in Silicon Valley in San Francisco. So, I would fly out on Sunday nights to the Silicon Valley and just parachute in and then stay till Thursday because my kids were still in school. And I just thought, well, I'll just find something interesting in web 2.0. So, I went to all the conferences and hung out at all the birds of a feather kind of stuff and listened to all the podcasts and talked to all the opinion leaders and all that stuff. And it just through the course of doing that, I just started to find founders who wanted to raise only a million dollars instead of five million. By the time I started to think about fundraising, there wasn't any question in my mind that it was an opportunity, right? It was like my attitude was more like I just hope I'm not too late. I hope somebody else doesn't figure this out before I do. But there wasn't any question in my mind whether it was going to happen or not. And people sometimes say to me about that time, what would you have done if you couldn't have raised the money? How did you think about that? And I just didn't think that way. I thought I am going to raise the money because it's an obvious opportunity. I just hope I'm not slow and somebody beats me by out hustling me to the opportunity.

Yeah. And I think that this is where some of the ideas that you folks have about category design and niching down are kind of similar, right? One of the things I learned from my dad was that doing your best is not a platitude. There's only one you in this world. You're the only person in human history that's ever had your unique strand of DNA. And so therefore, there is a version of you that can show up in the world that's impossible to compete with. Part of success is figuring out what that version of you is. And I just felt like I looked at seed investing and I looked at what am I intrinsically motivated by? Where do I have good networks? Where do I have a reputation for knowing something? What am I willing to do for a very long time to learn and stay in a rabbit hole forever? I was like, I think I'm going to be hard to compete against in this seed investing arena and I don't know if I'm going to make more or less money than if I was a partner at one of the firms, but there's 500 or so. It's kind of like being a partner in a Sand Hill Road venture firm is a very lucrative job in the same way that being a basketball player in the NBA is. There's not that many spots, but if you want to be one of a kind, even that there's still I didn't think I could be the only among series A investors. And so I just thought, okay, I could do this seed thing and there's a lot to learn about it and there's a lot to pioneer about it and whether I make as much money or not is kind of like it just felt like that was the path I was meant to be on.

Yeah. I don't know. The reason it's important to do your best is not just for a success reason, but for gratitude reason, right? So, like you don't have much time. You don't know how much time you're going to get. You may get a lot of time, you may get not much time, but in the sweep of time, none of us has much. And so, the question then becomes, how do you want to honor the gift of your time? Because once today goes by, you're not getting today back. And so to me, the way you honor the gift of your time is to share the gift of your superpowers with the world in that time. And to not be defined by the expectations and status dominance hierarchy criteria of other people, but to kind of understand, you know, there's a Japanese term, I think it's called ikigai, where it's kind of the intersection of what you love, what the world needs, what you can get paid for, what you're good at. And you try to find your ikigai. And I think you just got to trust that if you do that authentically that things are going to work out. There's no better version of you than the best version of you, right? I think Peter Thiel's a genius and I think that Mike Moritz at Sequoia Capital is a genius. They may end up making more money than I do in the fullness of time. They may not, but I'm never going to be better at the things they're better than me at. And so all I can be is my best self. That's the best thing I can ever do in this world. Once you internalize that, what matters? People talk too much about competitive advantage when what they should focus on is comparative advantage. And you know, your comparative advantage is the unique set of traits you have that make you impossible to compete with in the area where people value the advantages that you have. And so that's to me what's all about finding your different. It's all about being a category where you stand alone in that category and it's about niching down. You know, they're all related, right? They're all theoretically converging on the same idea and too many people define success relative to the criteria that others set for them. So, they try to compare themselves with others. They try to compete with others and they don't realize that the way to be the best competitor is to turn inward and to have self-awareness of your superpowers and to unlock those to maximum effect because then if somebody wants to compete with me in seed investing they better really like it because if they don't I wish them luck right because I'm going to smoke their ass. I have a database of 200 seed companies where you would have made 100 times your money on the first check and I have a time capsule and I have an example of the seed deck and I've back tested it using AI to see how I would score it using the frameworks and do our frameworks still work and I've got a lattice of mental models for seed the way Charlie Munger did for value investing and it's like I don't just do that because I'm going to find the next deal next week. It's because I'm just interested in it and I just think about it all the freaking time. I wanted to have a job where it just didn't feel like work. It just felt like I can't believe I'm getting paid to do this stuff. That's kind of how I think you become hard to compete against. You know, if I'm talking to a startup founder, what I try to say sometimes is, okay, you got to decide who you work with next 10 years. Why don't you give each of us a pop quiz on Zero to One how to get product market fit? And in that arena, I'm just going to be next level, right? Compared to like most of these seed investors who just want to write checks for their buddies. And so that's kind of how I'm thinking about it.

It was never really a seminal event. When I first met Christopher, he was at Mercury Interactive. He said something that really stuck with me that this they invented the wheel 50,000 years ago and they've been optimizing it ever since. This kind of returns full circle to how we started the conversation. There's a couple ways to succeed at business, right? One is I call it the deep work perspective. You're discovering the undiscovered. You're inventing new knowledge. And I think that we would agree that that is becoming a relatively more important, valuable capitalist outcome than ever before. And then there's harnessing pre-existing knowledge. When a pilot lands an airplane, they're not inventing how to land airplanes, thankfully. And when they take off, they're not inventing how to take off in an airplane. They do their pre-flight checklist. Thankfully, a lot of jobs, even high-paying jobs, depend on credentialed knowledge that has a lot of depth to it. AI is going to commoditize that stuff, right? What the microprocessor did for computing, what the internet did for communications bandwidth, AI is going to do for cognition. You had mass computation, mass connectivity, and now you have mass cognition. The mass computation made computing transform from something expensive to something basically free. Mass connectivity made communications and connections something that was expensive and frictionful to basically free. AI is going to make intelligent cognition expensive and valuable and rare to basically free. And I'm not trying to pick on anybody. Let's take lawyers. There's a lot of things in the field of law where you need a lawyer and they're valuable because they understand the law. But the law isn't reinvented every time you write a contract. And so that would be an example of where I would assert that there will be aspects of the legal field that will be commoditized because they depend upon pre-existing knowledge. Now, if I'm trying to invent new laws for crypto stable coin tokens, okay, that's important. That's going to become massively more important in terms of your ability to appropriate value as a lawyer. So, I just tend to think that way. What does that mean for my own job? I have a tendency to approach problems saying there isn't that much new under the sun. Most business models have already been invented. Most processes have already been performed. I'm always trying to look for ways to understand what is the best practice for that. And that's really what Charlie Munger was doing with his mental models. He was saying there are ways to think about stuff that smart people have considered for a very long time and have found to be very practically useful in a certain set of circumstances very often. And so rather than try to reinvent all knowledge, why not pretend that they're your friends? They may not be alive, but you can read their books and you can understand how they thought about things and you can stand on the shoulders of giants, right? You can, they might as well be your friends, right? AI lets you do that on steroids. AI lets you all of a sudden the entire world of all knowledge in human history is accessible to you if you're a high agency person in terms of how you get it and apply it.

Yep. And I read that book when I was a teenager and I have felt ever since then that I know this person.

The interesting thing when you go pick your favorite AI and just say tell me about Viktor Frankl. You can actually have what feels very much like a conversation with Viktor Frankl then gets deepened in a way that just reading his book would never give you.

Yeah. So, I wanted a name like that. What you do is you just upload a pitch and there's on the left hand side there's this cartoon box and on the right hand side there's this egg with an atomic nuclear symbol on it and you click the egg and the thing spins and when it after it's done spinning it spits out an analysis. I got it tuned where I absolutely can have a good output. So I took Airbnb's original seed deck from 2008. I said, 'Okay, I want to run the pattern breakers insight stress test on Airbed and Breakfast,' which is what it's called at the time. So, here's what it says. Insight summary Airbed and Breakfast. Everyday people will rent their private homes to complete strangers. Pretty good insight description. In the future, people will open their private homes to strangers, creating an entirely new accommodation category beyond hotels. Inflections that enable it. Growing comfort with online transactions and peer-to-peer marketplaces. Rising consumer preference for authentic cultural experiences. Economic pressures making supplemental income attractive. Technological advancements in online payments verification. User-friendly interfaces. Future is non-consensus because traditional wisdom holds that people won't trust strangers in their private homes due to safety, privacy, and property concerns. I won't read the rest of it, but I think you see where I'm going. So then I was like, I could go further than that. Why don't I create a business model canvas for Airbnb? Why don't I create potential logo designs for Airbnb? Why don't I create a story spine for Airbnb? And this is something that I'd like to talk to you folks about. Why not create a category design, diagnosis, prognosis, call to action for Airbnb? And I got to a point where I can create those outputs from just the pitch and nothing else. So then I was like, okay, maybe I could do that for customer development. Maybe I could do that for Clayton Christensen's jobs to be done. Maybe I could do that for every one of my seed mental models. Turns out that I can. I've been working on this software now and it now it kind of goes beyond evaluation and into the realm of ideation. I started to realize, right, I could have some type of like an intellectual boot camp where it's like, okay, I need you to answer these questions the next 30 minutes and then it spits some output. It tells you where the output's strong and not so strong and then it's like, do you want to make it better? It'll aggregate a new set of questions, put you back in the boot camp. And I'm like, you know, it's just going to totally transform ideation. It doesn't take away the role of creativity, but what it lets you do is it lets you say wherever there's a best practice for something, apply the best practice. Wherever there's an opportunity to not reinvent the wheel, don't reinvent the wheel.

Yeah. And the thing that I think this kind of returns to what we were saying earlier about AI and new knowledge and stuff like that, for example, the way I got it to design a good logo is not by saying to the AI, 'Hey, make me a cool looking logo for this pitch deck.' I know that Paul Rand was a great designer, right, who did the logos for IBM and NeXT and UPS and stuff like that. And so I work with the AI to come up with a prompt that is going to be very very good at capturing Paul Rand's design sensibilities. I'm going to run that prompt against the pitch deck.

That's right. So I had to be curious, right? I had to care what good design is and what a good designer is. I can't just have the AI spoon feed me great stuff. But what AI does is it lets the system level thinker force multiply in an extraordinary way. Right? So AI rewards extremely high agency system level thinkers because AI effectively gives you an army of smart people for free. You have to know what to tell them. If you tell them stupid stuff, you'll get stupid stuff back. But if you tell them smart stuff, they'll do smart things for you at scale. Right? That's where it's so powerful, right? Like I used to say, man, what do I do about the fact that some of these venture firms are raising 5 to 10 billion funds and I want to stay raising $1 to $150 million funds? How am I going to compete when they have a thousand people and I have 10 people now? I would never want to trade places with them because they have to coordinate between all those people. They have to give them performance reviews and they have to make them feel good about their jobs. Whereas like I can ask an AI to go analyze stuff that I would never dream of asking one of my associates. It would have been too much of a rock fetch. When you internalize the idea that cognition is becoming asymptotically free. You no longer think of it as rare. You think of it as abundant. And you say, 'Well, what would I want to do if intelligence is too cheap to meter?' So that's how I treat it. Now I have my database and I see Clayton Christensen's jobs to be done theory and I say first of all is that a mental model because I have a canonical description of a mental model now right I've created a taxonomy of what a mental model is what it's useful for when it's not useful what are the boundaries of the territory I put Clayton Christensen's theory into it turns out there's a few gaps here and there but you can fill those gaps okay now you've got the canonical jobs to be done theory run that against all 200 companies. What Clayton Christensen jobs to be done did Slack primarily optimize for? Atlassian, Snowflake, you know, you just go through them. How about Hamilton Helmer's seven powers? How about Michael Porter's five forces? How about the business model canvas elements? How about Sequoia known problem hair on fire future vision problem type? Once you have a canonical description of that mental model, you run it against those 200 companies and then you create a gigantic spreadsheet of all those companies and all those outputs and then you say, 'Hey, smart AI, do you see any patterns? Does anything jump out at you?' And you know it's you see stuff that you would have never found? Right? It's like amazing. But you couldn't have just been thrust off the turnip wagon and like found that stuff, right? Like you had to have a system level view of what you were looking for and how to find it.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I'll give you an example of even probably kind of close to home. I read an article that I liked from you folks about languaging and I was like hm I wonder if you could do atomic eggs for languaging because you know when you think about it languaging you can do addition, subtraction, multiplication, division. There's like there's certain things that you guys describe and I was like, hm, first of all, is languaging a mental model? So, I took everything you folks wrote about languaging and I uploaded it into my mental model taxonomy and organized it as a mental model. Maybe we should return to mental models for a second because I think it's so important and it relates to what you said, Eddie. Reality is just really complex. Like, we don't even see all of reality, right? Because the eye doesn't see everything in the electromagnetic spectrum, right? So there's stuff going on around us right now that we do not see. We are not capable of seeing or sensing. And so nobody has a complete grasp of reality. Nobody does. So what mental models let you do is navigate the complexity of reality by compressing it in valuable ways. So, for example, if I want to go visit Christopher in Santa Cruz, I can use a flat map and it will get me there almost certainly. Now, the world isn't flat, but for the purpose of getting from me to Christopher, I don't need to capture all of the reality of the situation. I only need to capture enough of the reality that is practical for me getting where I want to get to. So, that's the point of a map. Now, if I want to go to Germany, a flat map is not a good mental model because it would look like a curved line on the map because, you know, we live on a globe. And so, every mental model, the key thing to ask is under what conditions is it actually more valuable than absolute objective reality? And under what conditions will it deceive you? Because the value of it, no, you've passed a boundary condition where you can no longer assume it to be valuable. Which is why you want to have a lattice of mental models, right? Like there is no one mental model that captures all reality. That's the it's the opposite is true. What mental models do is compress reality under certain conditions to be useful.

It becomes their ideology becomes.

The mental model works if it actually helps you end the fight early or whatever else it is, right? And that cycle time is kind of I mean it's quite different because what way of describing is that most people that you run into don't have one or if they have one it's just the one versus people who can cycle through multiple ones. And see if you do the taxonomy right what you start to realize is part of the taxonomy should be help me identify the orthogonal. So for example, if a flat map does not the map is never the territory, right? The map is only an approximation of the territory and sometimes it's a very good one. Sometimes it's better than reality. Other times it's not good at all. So for example, an opposite mental model, an orthogonal one from a flat map would be a global map. And when you exceed the limits of the flat map, the global map becomes more useful and vice versa. And so part of what you want in a lattice of mental models is for every mental model you ask under what conditions is it valuable and under the conditions that it's not what else in my lattice of models exists that is valuable that it's valuable complimentary opposite that's kind of the place I think you want to be right you're trying to have as many tools available to you to capture and frame the decision of the moment that needs to be made and you want to apply the right tool to that decision task, right? And the more tools you have, the more likely you are to get a robust.

Yeah. So, the thing I've been also thinking a lot about so to me like mental models help you understand what is part of why Buffett and Munger are so successful is because they believe the present will persist longer than most people do. So they buy Coca-Cola because they believe people are going to be drinking Coke in 50 years from now. What I realize is that mental models compress reality for understanding. So I started to work on this set of things I call generative models because I started to realize startup capitalists are different type of capitalist. Startup capitalists change the subject rather than persistently compound. So then what is a generative model where a mental model compresses reality for understanding? A generative model expands possibility for difference right and for new things. That's the other thing I've been working on that I'd be curious about some time to run some of these ideas by you all because I think they could apply to category design. I think that if you study creative processes, a lot of it is forming connections between the known and the new. Why shouldn't you be able to automate permutations and combinations of connections in ways that are highly directed and deliberate? I think you probably can. But to me, mental models help you understand what is better for decision-making. The generative models help you understand what could be through lateral thinking and sort of expansion of the potential realities.

Yes.

Mhm.

Defy the odds that way.

And in order to generate new ideas, you got to be willing to be wrong most of the time. You got to be willing to look foolish and run ideas up the flag pole that don't work and not being attached to being impressive in that regard. And.

But you know the funny thing Eddie is people making these career transitions and stuff. This is where I kind of return back to this idea of doing your best. Like when you realize that doing your best is always available to you. It's always there. There's always a transition. Like there's always an answer to what the transition can be and how you can succeed and win. And it's within you and it's there. When you realize that, it's kind of inspiring in some ways. So, it's like people don't need to be afraid of the change. They just need to return back to the true north of who they are and how to be the best version of themselves in the face of the new realities. Right? But that option is always there because there's only one you as long as that's true. There will always be the path to greatness available to each and every one of us at all times. Right? And so like that's what I think is the magic of it all. And that's what makes having the time that we get to have such a gift.

Yeah. And one thing that I think would be useful to maybe drill into a little bit is about comparative advantage. So one of the things that Ricardo and Adam Smith used to talk about is this idea of comparative advantage. So let's say that Christopher and I are roommates and he's better at programming than I am and he's better at washing the dishes than I am. He might be better at everything than I am.

So, but what comparative advantage says is that even if that was true, both of us can do well. And the reason is that if Christopher gets paid more for programming, he's going to let me do the dishes, even if I'm not as good at it as he is, because there's an opportunity cost of his time. And so I can find a niche where I create unique value and then I could get paid more than theoretically somebody might think I should. What you realize is that everybody because as long as everybody's different, everyone has a comparative advantage by definition. And so given that that's the case, everyone has a chance to be prosperous. Everyone just has to find their ikigai.

Yeah. And it's like, and maybe this is what you mean when you say the world needs you, like another way to look at that is everybody's here for a reason. That's provable by the fact that everybody's different. So like.

And so rather than wishing, you know, George Bell could have said, 'Hey, I wish I wasn't 7 feet, whatever, wish I was 6 feet.' Well, that option isn't available to him. And so you might as well say, given that I have the traits that I have, they're probably people who still called him a freak. But screw those people. They're not going to change their minds. And it's not your task to change them. It's your task to figure out how to unlock the advantage of your uniqueness. And you know, not everybody's going to love you. That's fine. Don't spend time with those people. Spend time with the people that you can impact positively. But don't wish for something that can't be changed or lean into the fact of your uniqueness and be grateful for the fact that nobody can be exactly like you.

Right? And so like that's the thing, right? And that's why when you realize like too many people talk about like everybody's special like you know like your mom would say you're special you know you're all that actually being unique it's not a feel-good platitude. It requires you to do the work. It requires you to do the work to figure out the value of your uniqueness that only you can deliver your way that's impossible to compete with. That requires work. That requires courage. That requires letting go of things. But it's available to everybody.

Yeah. Yeah. But it is interesting. A lot of people they misunderstand what Adam Smith and Charles Darwin were saying. They think of competition as this cutthroat dog eat dog survival of the fittest. But survival of the fittest doesn't mean survival of the strongest or the toughest or the meanest or the fastest. It means survival of the best fit. And being the best fit means being the best version of you. Because if you're the best version of you, you're going to be perfectly fit to the thing that you pursue relative to everybody else. And so like that's to me comparative advantage is the much better lens to think about it through because it causes you to avoid the trap of mindless competition and comparing yourself to others.

Right? When you and I go out to dinner, we make a calculation that says going out to this restaurant is worth more to us than our money.

That means they did a thing that created value. That's the source of ownership. And when you build your career on that, there's nothing like it. There's nothing that touches it. The personal level of satisfaction and the difference you can make with others and for others is unmatched when you do exactly what you're describing. And yet much of our world today has it up, which is they want the trappings of it. But when you have just the trappings of it and you didn't actually do what you're describing, what we're calling achieve the earnership of it, you're not you're what in the old days we used to call a poser. You're a fake. And when you actually do it, nobody can touch you because you did it.

Yeah. Well, and the bad advice I see out there is usually related to attempts to grab attention any way possible. It's kind of a little bit of a zen-like paradox, but if you show up in the world as the best version of yourself, all you have to do is syndicate the truth to get the attention you care about, right? Because the people who value your advantage will be naturally attracted to the value that you provide. You won't have to do any of these goofy man bites dog kind of stories to get attention. You build awareness by syndicating the truth. And I think that that's a lot of the people that I really respect who've done well seem to have figured out how to do that naturally.

Well, that's cool. And it's really an extension of the stuff you all have been talking about all along, right? About niche down and like it's just sort of taking the full implications of what that really means.

I agree. Thank you so much, Mike.