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

More from Pattern Breakers All episodes →

1. 

   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,…

2. 

   E101 · 15 Apr 2025 · 39 min

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

3. 

   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…

4. 

   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…

5. 

   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…

6. 

   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…

7. 

   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,…

8. 

   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…

9. 

   E93 · 5 Aug 2024 · 44 min

   Daphne Koller: Changing Lives With Coursera

10. 

    E92 · 29 Jul 2024 · 37 min

    Pattern Breakers: Which Startups Change the Future?