💥 4 Rules For Seizing Opportunity like Presidents, Investors, Gold Miners, and more

Maples: I think the tech business is just fundamentally characterized by—Darwin had a term for it in evolution, “punctuated equilibrium”—where the world is evolving a certain way and then bam, it changes completely and fundamentally. You can even see this in the fossil records. Where the fossils progress at a certain rate, and then bam, there is a

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A decade ago, I was only a couple of years into my venture career. I believed that growth and progress were synonymous – in an industry where scale was the ultimate target, platforms that achieved it were glorified. A decade later, I have learned that success is more nuanced, and we have to take accountability for the outcomes we encourage. New dom... See more

Earlier this year we met with our Limited Partners. Their top question was “will the AI transition destroy your existing cloud companies?”

We began with a strong default of “no.” The classic battle between startups and incumbents is a horse race between startups building distribution and incumbents building product. Can the young companies with coo... See more

One result of this past tech cycle was a view that companies needed to build hyper complex ponzi schemes of ambition in order to accumulate capital and be valued. This led to a variety of shooting stars that never realized their main goal.

Another view was an insane amount of value ascribed to hyper-narrow features masquerading as companies, leading... See more

We are in an age of noise.

The frameworks that got us here, of jobs-to-be-done or product-market fit, will be insufficient going forward. For founders to have extraordinary outcomes, they will have to find alpha in markets that aren’t easily understood.

Which is to say, technology alone won’t be enough. The other essential ingredient will be taste.... See more

-To analogize, think of the iPhone in 08. To see the opportunity, you had to imagine 1) that weaknesses get mitigated (it gets faster, service gets better), and 2) entrepreneurs will take new features (like GPS) and create new ideas with them

We are in an age of noise.

The frameworks that got us here, of jobs-to-be-done or product-market fit, will be insufficient going forward. For founders to have extraordinary outcomes, they will have to find alpha in markets that aren’t easily understood.

Which is to say, technology alone won’t be enough. The other essential ingredient will be taste.... See more