Mitchell Hashimoto: How Solving His Own Problem Sparked HashiCorp

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1. 

   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…

2. 

   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…

3. 

   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…

4. 

   E105 · 4 Aug 2025 · 41 min

   Eric Schmidt: The Implications of Superintelligence

5. 

   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…

6. 

   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,…

7. 

   E101 · 15 Apr 2025 · 39 min

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

8. 

   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…

9. 

   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…

10. 

    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…