Niels Hoven: Teaching Two Year-Olds to Read Like Second Graders

More from Pattern Breakers All episodes →

1. 

   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…

2. 

   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…

3. 

   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…

4. 

   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…

5. 

   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,…

6. 

   E93 · 5 Aug 2024 · 44 min

   Daphne Koller: Changing Lives With Coursera

7. 

   E92 · 29 Jul 2024 · 37 min

   Pattern Breakers: Which Startups Change the Future?

8. 

   E91 · 9 Jul 2024 · 40 min

   A Sneak Peek at Pattern Breakers

9. 

   E90 · 1 Jul 2024 · 40 min

   Maddie Hall: A Different Path to the Future

10. 

    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.