Podcast · Business

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 Andree

New episodes: Monthly
Typical length: 41 min
Latest: 21 Jul 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

21 Jul 2026 · 43 min

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.com. Less than an hour later his order arrived, and Mullen was hooked on grocery delivery as a breakthrough idea that could make people's lives easier. But by the time Mullen became a startup founder years later, Kozmo, Webvan, and their peers were buried in a Dot-Com graveyard, and investors were skeptical that grocery delivery would ever resonate beyond San Francisco. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr. of Floodgate speaks with Mullen about co-founding…

Play episodeWhatsApp Download

Earlier episodes 29 most recent

E113 · 27 Apr 2026 · 46 min
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 big fast. Instead, he ended up with a heart condition and a fire sale. So he decided to radically rethink his approach, and start with a problem that he actually had. With coffee off the menu due to his medical condition, he began asking what he could use to stay alert throughout the day. Suddenly, the idea for Magic Mind was born. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr. of Floodgate speaks with Beshara about his early days founding the fintech company Tilt…
E112 · 16 Mar 2026 · 40 min
Immad Akhund: How Mercury Saved The Day For Startups
E111 · 9 Feb 2026 · 42 min
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-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, Mike Maples, Jr. of Floodgate speaks with Zimmer about a variety of different essential lessons from Lyft’s journey, including his ability to spot anomalies and create…
E110 · 5 Jan 2026 · 45 min
Spenser Skates: How Perseverance Paid Off for Amplitude
E109 · 18 Nov 2025 · 42 min
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 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, Mike Maples, Jr. of Floodgate speaks with Foster about his early days in Missouri and his first impressions of Silicon Valley, the concept of seed-strapping and how…
E108 · 29 Sep 2025 · 46 min
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 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 with your product is vital for achieving breakthrough success. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr. of Floodgate speaks with Liu about the original idea behind Airtable…
E107 · 9 Sep 2025 · 43 min
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 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 future. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr. of Floodgate speaks with Liemandt about what an average school day looks like at Alpha School, why kids can still excel…
E106 · 25 Aug 2025 · 41 min
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 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 Floodgate speaks with Mickos about the essential lessons he’s learned from being a CEO, the importance of developing curiosity in the startup world, and why it’s…
E105 · 4 Aug 2025 · 41 min
Eric Schmidt: The Implications of Superintelligence
E104 · 30 Jun 2025 · 43 min
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 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 he made headlines and found startup success in his native Brazil, why he traded it in for stints at Stanford and YC, how mental burnout can destroy a business, and…
E103 · 16 Jun 2025 · 39 min
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, 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 episode, Mike Maples, Jr. of Floodgate speaks with Hashimoto about those early days, building Vagrant to streamline dev setup, the dawn of HashiCorp, and the tough…
E102 · 5 May 2025 · 41 min
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 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 Sprint, and he’s a guest instructor at Harvard Business School. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr. of Floodgate dives into the details of Knapp’s new book Click,…
E101 · 15 Apr 2025 · 39 min
Amjad Masad: Resolve, Persistence, and the Rise of Replit
E100 · 31 Mar 2025 · 41 min
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 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 cloud era with $1 Billion in revenue, but co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie is as restless as ever. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr. of Floodgate speaks with Levie…
E99 · 17 Mar 2025 · 40 min
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, 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 a million developers each month, from small companies to tech giants like Netflix and Scale AI. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr. of Floodgate speaks with Rauch…
E98 · 25 Feb 2025 · 38 min
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 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, Coinbase and Venmo. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr. of Floodgate speaks with Perret about the company’s austere early days, convincing the banking industry to…
E97 · 28 Jan 2025 · 41 min
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 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 in the Stanford cafeteria helped the company find product-market fit, and how Bhatt’s new renewable energy company Aetherflux could make science fiction ideas a…
E96 · 16 Dec 2024 · 39 min
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 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 identified pain points for small business founders everywhere, what it took to turn payroll from a grind into a tool that freed entrepreneurs to focus on what…
E95 · 7 Oct 2024 · 10 min
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. 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 Mentava, and why true Pattern Breakers don’t depend on the media or outside voices to shape their narrative. Instead, they speak for themselves, directly and boldly,…
E94 · 23 Sep 2024 · 35 min
Niels Hoven: Teaching Two Year-Olds to Read Like Second Graders
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 origins of Mentava, how one very online critic gave the company an unexpected sales boost, and why Hoven has found himself engaged in a much bigger story about the…
E93 · 5 Aug 2024 · 44 min
Daphne Koller: Changing Lives With Coursera
E92 · 29 Jul 2024 · 37 min
Pattern Breakers: Which Startups Change the Future?
E91 · 9 Jul 2024 · 40 min
A Sneak Peek at Pattern Breakers
E90 · 1 Jul 2024 · 40 min
Maddie Hall: A Different Path to the Future
E89 · 24 Jun 2024 · 12 min
Breakthrough Lessons: Founder-Future Fit
What are the traits of a great founder, or a great founding team? People tend to answer with general traits like tenacity, adaptability, or attention to users. But Founder-Future Fit can play an equally vital role and it varies from startup to startup. In this Breakthrough Lesson, Mike Maples Jr. of Floodgate describes the concept of Founder-Future Fit. He explains how it propelled Justin Kan's success with Justintv and Twitch; and how its absence made his later journey with Atrium much tougher.
E88 · 10 Jun 2024 · 42 min
Justin Kan: Pattern Breaker Personified
E87 · 3 Jun 2024 · 11 min
Breakthrough Lessons: The Value of a Superbuilder
E86 · 27 May 2024 · 39 min
Kyle Vogt: A Problem Solver With A Purpose
Kyle Vogt has always been fascinated with designing robots and machines. From his youngest days, he retrofitted his father's car to drive itself along the highways of his home state of Kansas. Later, he dropped out of MIT and became a wildly successful startup founder, playing a crucial role in the development of Justin.tv and Twitch. With Cruise Automation, he returned to his roots, making robotaxis a reality rather than science fiction. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr. of Floodgate speaks with Vogt about his career and the lessons learned from a lifetime of solving problems.
E85 · 20 May 2024 · 12 min
Breakthrough Lessons: Learning to Savor Surprises
The ability to notice and savor surprises is a key overlooked skill of the greatest founders. It allows you to narrow in on the types of capabilities that will lead to breakthroughs. In this Breakthrough Lesson, Mike Maples, Jr of Floodgate calls on the lessons learned by Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear to discuss why founders should seek surprises instead of validation, and how positive surprises can be a key source of greatness.

About Pattern Breakers

Pattern Breakers is a English business podcast from Floodgate. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Floodgate
Language: English
Category: Business
New episodes: Monthly
Typical length: 41 min
Latest episode: 21 Jul 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1488560647

RSS feed Apple Podcasts

More English business

Take it with you

The Melo app keeps playing with the screen off, works in the car and on your watch, wakes you to your station, and browses the whole catalogue offline. Free, no ads, no account.