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Starting Greatness

Mike Maples

Host Mike Maples Jr from venture capital firm FLOODGATE offers lessons from the startup super performers—BEFORE they were successful—featuring interviews with some of Silicon Valley’s most l...

Episodes

20 of 114 episodes

Max Mullen: How Instacart Solved the Problem of Grocery Delivery

When Max Mullen was a teenager, he used his mother’s credit card to order some candy and soda off the internet from the online company Kozmo...

00:43:05Jul 21, 2026

James Beshara: How a Dangerous Problem Led to a Magical Solution

For most of his 20s, James Beshara tried to go big as a startup founder in a hot category where he burned tons of money in hopes of getting...

00:45:47Apr 27, 2026

Immad Akhund: How Mercury Saved The Day For Startups

When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed over 48 hours in March 2023, it marked the third-largest bank failure in United States history and the la...

00:39:38Mar 16, 2026

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

Lyft co-founder John Zimmer helped spark a movement to revolutionize transportation, but the road was never a smooth one. Zimmer and co-foun...

00:42:09Feb 9, 2026

Spenser Skates: How Perseverance Paid Off for Amplitude

When Amplitude launched in 2012, the analytics market looked crowded, and the company spent more than a year struggling to find any traction...

00:44:55Jan 5, 2026

Wade Foster: Why Zapier is Built for the AI Revolution

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 entrepreneursh...

00:42:16Nov 18, 2025

Howie Liu: Building Airtable to Feel Magical

Spreadsheets were originally designed for finance people. But when Howie Liu and his co-founders started Airtable in 2012, they had a deeper...

00:46:05Sep 29, 2025

Joe Liemandt: The AI-Powered School Rewriting the Future of Education

Long before he attended Stanford, founded software giant Trilogy, or became the youngest member of the Forbes 400, Joe Liemandt wrote a high...

00:42:33Sep 9, 2025

Mårten Mickos: Essential Lessons From A Legendary Tech CEO

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 M...

00:41:24Aug 25, 2025

Eric Schmidt: The Implications of Superintelligence

Best known as the CEO who helped transform Google from a promising startup into one of the best businesses in human history, Eric Schmidt ha...

00:40:35Aug 4, 2025

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

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 c...

00:43:19Jun 30, 2025

Mitchell Hashimoto: How Solving His Own Problem Sparked HashiCorp

The most successful founders don't usually chase startup ideas. Instead, they're pulled toward problems they can't ignore. Back in 2009, Mit...

00:39:27Jun 16, 2025

Jake Knapp: The Founder’s Guide to Product-Market Fit

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 ent...

00:41:10May 5, 2025

Amjad Masad: Resolve, Persistence, and the Rise of Replit

Amjad Masad's journey is defined by relentless persistence. Born and raised in Jordan, he borrowed computers to teach himself coding, and th...

00:39:28Apr 15, 2025

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

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...

00:40:49Mar 31, 2025

Guillermo Rauch: The Product Visionary Fueling Vercel and Millions of Developers

Guillermo Rauch didn’t find success by accident. He began working on computers as a kid growing up in Argentina and was hooked immediately,...

00:39:36Mar 17, 2025

Zach Perret: The Survival Story of a Fintech Giant

Long before Plaid became a $13.4 billion fintech juggernaut, it was just another struggling startup. Co-founders Zach Perret and William Hoc...

00:38:17Feb 25, 2025

Baiju Bhatt: First Robinhood, Next …. Outer Space?

As the co-founder of Robinhood, Baiju Bhatt didn't just help launch a company. He sparked a movement that fundamentally shifted the dynamics...

00:40:43Jan 28, 2025

Josh Reeves: How Gusto Took The Pain Out Of Payroll

When Josh Reeves, Tomer London and Edward Kim founded Gusto in 2012, roughly 40 percent of the employers in the United States were still doi...

00:38:34Dec 16, 2024

Breakthrough Lesson: RIP To Old-School Marketing

Most startups stick to traditional methods of getting their message out. Pattern Breakers, however, don't follow the old rules of marketing....

00:10:29Oct 7, 2024