# Pattern Breakers: the investor podcast, by episode

> Pattern Breakers: A seed investor on the founders and ideas that break the pattern, and why they work. 114 episodes, each linked to the investors in it.

Source: https://millionrounds.com/podcasts/pattern-breakers (Millionrounds; every figure on the page links to its filing or article)

Investors · new episode 21 Jul 2026

# Pattern Breakers

Hosted by **Mike Maples, Floodgate**

A seed investor on the founders and ideas that break the pattern, and why they work.

Follow on Apple PodcastsBrowse the episodes

**114** episodes

**31** investors heard as guests

**27 min** an average episode

6 in the last 12 months

## The regulars

Investors named as guests in the most episode titles on Pattern Breakers.

[AR *1* **Andy Rachleff** Benchmark](https://millionrounds.com/person/andy-rachleff)[AD *1* **Annie Duke** First Round Capital](https://millionrounds.com/person/annie-duke)[AH *1* **Anu Hariharan** Avra](https://millionrounds.com/person/anu-hariharan)[BB *1* **Baiju Bhatt** Robinhood](https://millionrounds.com/person/baiju-bhatt)[BS *1* **Blake Scholl** Boom](https://millionrounds.com/person/blake-scholl)[CL *1* **Christopher Lochhead** 1 episode](https://millionrounds.com/person/christopher-lochhead)[DE *1* **Daniel Ek** Prima Materia](https://millionrounds.com/person/daniel-ek)[DK *1* **Daphne Koller** Coursera](https://millionrounds.com/person/daphne-koller)[HL *1* **Howie Liu** Friends & Family Capital](https://millionrounds.com/person/mr-howie-liu)[JK *1* **Jake Knapp** 1 episode](https://millionrounds.com/person/jake-knapp)[JL *1* **Joe Liemandt** Trilogy](https://millionrounds.com/person/joe-liemandt)[JZ *1* **John Zimmer** Lyft](https://millionrounds.com/person/john-zimmer)

## Every episode 114 · page 1 of 4

- 114 **Max Mullen: How Instacart Solved the Problem of Grocery Delivery** 21 Jul 2026 · 43 min [Max Mullen](https://millionrounds.com/fund/max-mullen) About this episode 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… ▶Show page
- 113 **James Beshara: How a Dangerous Problem Led to a Magical Solution** 27 Apr 2026 · 46 min [James Beshara](https://millionrounds.com/fund/james-beshara) About this episode 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… ▶Show page
- 112 **Immad Akhund: How Mercury Saved The Day For Startups** 16 Mar 2026 · 40 min [Immad Akhund](https://millionrounds.com/fund/immad-akhund)[Ripple](https://millionrounds.com/fund/ripple) About this episode When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed over 48 hours in March 2023, it marked the third-largest bank failure in United States history and the largest since the 2008 financial crisis. But the fintech company Mercury was willing and ready to save the day for startups in need, landing $2 billion in new deposits in five days.… ▶Show page
- 111 **John Zimmer: Pink Mustaches, Rideshare Wars, and the Legacy of Lyft** 9 Feb 2026 · 42 min [John Zimmer](https://millionrounds.com/person/john-zimmer)[Travis Kalanick](https://millionrounds.com/fund/travis-kalanick)[Logan Green](https://millionrounds.com/person/logan-green) About this episode 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… ▶Show page
- 110 **Spenser Skates: How Perseverance Paid Off for Amplitude** 5 Jan 2026 · 45 min [Spenser Skates](https://millionrounds.com/person/spenser-skates)[Y Combinator](https://millionrounds.com/fund/y-combinator) About this episode When Amplitude launched in 2012, the analytics market looked crowded, and the company spent more than a year struggling to find any traction. But co-founder and CEO Spenser Skates prioritized truth seeking over narratives. He studied the outcomes of past Y Combinator batches and noticed a simple rule: Most companies… ▶Show page
- 109 **Wade Foster: Why Zapier is Built for the AI Revolution** 18 Nov 2025 · 42 min [Wade Foster](https://millionrounds.com/person/mr-wade-foster)[Revolution](https://millionrounds.com/fund/revolution)[Bryan Helmig](https://millionrounds.com/person/bryan-helmig) About this episode 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… ▶Show page
- 108 **Howie Liu: Building Airtable to Feel Magical** 29 Sept 2025 · 46 min [Howie Liu](https://millionrounds.com/person/mr-howie-liu) About this episode 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.… ▶Show page
- 107 **Joe Liemandt: The AI-Powered School Rewriting the Future of Education** 9 Sept 2025 · 43 min [Joe Liemandt](https://millionrounds.com/person/joe-liemandt) About this episode 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… ▶Show page
- 106 **Mårten Mickos: Essential Lessons From A Legendary Tech CEO** 25 Aug 2025 · 41 min [Google](https://millionrounds.com/fund/google-assistant-investments) About this episode 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… ▶Show page
- 105 **Eric Schmidt: The Implications of Superintelligence** 4 Aug 2025 · 41 min [Google](https://millionrounds.com/fund/google-assistant-investments)[Henry Kissinger](https://millionrounds.com/person/henry-kissinger) About this episode Best known as the CEO who helped transform Google from a promising startup into one of the best businesses in human history, Eric Schmidt has recently become one of the most important voices in the global conversation about artificial intelligence. He’s co-written two books on the subject including the New York Times… ▶Show page
- 104 **Pedro Franceschi: Lessons from an Evolving Entrepreneur, from Hacking iPhones to Building Brex** 30 Jun 2025 · 43 min [Pedro Franceschi](https://millionrounds.com/person/pedro-franceschi) About this episode 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… ▶Show page
- 103 **Mitchell Hashimoto: How Solving His Own Problem Sparked HashiCorp** 16 Jun 2025 · 39 min [Mitchell Hashimoto](https://millionrounds.com/person/mitchell-hashimoto) About this episode 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… ▶Show page
- 102 **Jake Knapp: The Founder’s Guide to Product-Market Fit** 5 May 2025 · 41 min [Jake Knapp](https://millionrounds.com/person/jake-knapp)[Google](https://millionrounds.com/fund/google-assistant-investments) About this episode 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… ▶Show page
- 101 **Amjad Masad: Resolve, Persistence, and the Rise of Replit** 15 Apr 2025 · 39 min [Amjad Masad](https://millionrounds.com/fund/amjad-masad)[Y Combinator](https://millionrounds.com/fund/y-combinator) About this episode Amjad Masad's journey is defined by relentless persistence. Born and raised in Jordan, he borrowed computers to teach himself coding, and then earned money building software for local internet cafes. He applied to Y Combinator again and again, finally gaining acceptance on his fourth try. His constant drive fueled… ▶Show page
- 100 **Aaron Levie: The Restless Founder Plotting the Future of Cloud Storage and AI** 31 Mar 2025 · 41 min [Aaron Levie](https://millionrounds.com/fund/aaron-levie)[Bill Gates](https://millionrounds.com/fund/bill-gates)[Mark Cuban](https://millionrounds.com/fund/mark-cuban) About this episode 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… ▶Show page
- 99 **Guillermo Rauch: The Product Visionary Fueling Vercel and Millions of Developers** 17 Mar 2025 · 40 min [Guillermo Rauch](https://millionrounds.com/fund/guillermo-rauch) About this episode 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… ▶Show page
- 98 **Zach Perret: The Survival Story of a Fintech Giant** 25 Feb 2025 · 38 min [Zach Perret](https://millionrounds.com/person/zach-perret)[William Hockey](https://millionrounds.com/person/william-hockey) About this episode 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… ▶Show page
- 97 **Baiju Bhatt: First Robinhood, Next …. Outer Space?** 28 Jan 2025 · 41 min [Baiju Bhatt](https://millionrounds.com/person/baiju-bhatt) About this episode 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… ▶Show page
- 96 **Josh Reeves: How Gusto Took The Pain Out Of Payroll** 16 Dec 2024 · 39 min [Josh Reeves](https://millionrounds.com/person/josh-reeves)[Edward Kim](https://millionrounds.com/person/edward-kim)[Tomer London](https://millionrounds.com/person/tomer-london) About this episode 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… ▶Show page
- 95 **Breakthrough Lesson: RIP To Old-School Marketing** 7 Oct 2024 · 10 min About this episode 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… ▶Show page
- 94 **Niels Hoven: Teaching Two Year-Olds to Read Like Second Graders** 23 Sept 2024 · 35 min [Niels Hoven](https://millionrounds.com/person/niels-hoven) About this episode 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… ▶Show page
- 93 **Daphne Koller: Changing Lives With Coursera** 5 Aug 2024 · 44 min [Daphne Koller](https://millionrounds.com/person/daphne-koller) About this episode Few startup founders follow a path to success like Daphne Koller, a polymath whose academic career in machine learning, computer vision, and computational biology make her a force far beyond the business arena. Koller left her academic career at Stanford in 2012 to co-found Coursera, the world’s largest platform for… ▶Show page
- 92 **Pattern Breakers: Which Startups Change the Future?** 29 Jul 2024 · 37 min [Reid Hoffman](https://millionrounds.com/fund/reid-hoffman) About this episode On this special episode of Pattern Breakers, host Mike Maples Jr. of Floodgate joins LinkedIn founder and legendary investor Reid Hoffman for a conversation on Hoffman’s podcast Masters of Scale, where iconic business leaders share lessons and strategies that have helped them grow the world's most fascinating… ▶Show page
- 91 **A Sneak Peek at Pattern Breakers** 9 Jul 2024 · 40 min [Steve Blank](https://millionrounds.com/fund/steve-blank) About this episode Today is a huge day for Pattern Breakers, the book. Co-written with Peter Zeibelman of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Pattern Breakers has been dubbed “the most important start-up book of the last ten years” by legendary entrepreneur and co-creator of the Lean Startup movement Steve Blank. Pattern… ▶Show page
- 90 **Maddie Hall: A Different Path to the Future** 1 Jul 2024 · 40 min [Maddie Hall](https://millionrounds.com/person/maddie-hall)[Sam Altman](https://millionrounds.com/fund/sam-altman) About this episode There is no single path to becoming the founder of a pattern-breaking startup. For Maddie Hall, her journey began with a crucial choice: to brainstorm startup ideas or to spend time with people already shaping the future. She chose the latter, following Sam Altman at OpenAI as his Chief of Staff. This experience,… ▶Show page
- 89 **Breakthrough Lessons: Founder-Future Fit** 24 Jun 2024 · 12 min About this episode Check out the Pattern Breakers Blog at patternbreakers.substack.com for even more Pattern Breaking content from Mike. Mike's book Pattern Breakers is available now wherever you buy books. Follow Mike on X! ▶Show page
- 88 **Justin Kan: Pattern Breaker Personified** 10 Jun 2024 · 42 min [Justin Kan](https://millionrounds.com/fund/justin-kan) About this episode If pattern breaker was a term in the dictionary, you just might find an image of Justin Kan. From his attempts as a teenager to send a camera to outer space, to selling his first company on Ebay, to strapping a camera to his head to play the starring role on Justin.tv, Kan has always been a man with uncommon ideas and… ▶Show page
- 87 **Breakthrough Lessons: The Value of a Superbuilder** 3 Jun 2024 · 11 min [Kyle Vogt](https://millionrounds.com/fund/kyle-vogt) About this episode In the early days of a start-up, the superbuilder can be as important to greatness as the start-up leader, and they’re often not the same person. But what are the traits of a great superbuilder, and why do they play such a crucial role in the zero to one phase of a company? In this Breakthrough Lesson, Mike Maples, Jr… ▶Show page
- 86 **Kyle Vogt: A Problem Solver With A Purpose** 27 May 2024 · 39 min [Kyle Vogt](https://millionrounds.com/fund/kyle-vogt) About this episode 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… ▶Show page
- 85 **Breakthrough Lessons: Learning to Savor Surprises** 20 May 2024 · 12 min [Emmett Shear](https://millionrounds.com/fund/emmett-shear) About this episode 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… ▶Show page

## Who the show talks about

Firms named in its episodes, and people named in descriptions: talked about, rather than on the show.

[**Google** *6*](https://millionrounds.com/fund/google-assistant-investments)[M **Mark Leslie** *4*](https://millionrounds.com/fund/mark-leslie)[**Reid Hoffman** *4*](https://millionrounds.com/fund/reid-hoffman)[**Steve Blank** *4*](https://millionrounds.com/fund/steve-blank)[**Mark Cuban** *3*](https://millionrounds.com/fund/mark-cuban)[**Y Combinator** *3*](https://millionrounds.com/fund/y-combinator)[C **Christopher Lochhead** *2*](https://millionrounds.com/person/christopher-lochhead)[D **David Filo** *2*](https://millionrounds.com/person/david-filo)[D **David Sacks** *2*](https://millionrounds.com/fund/david-sacks)[E **Emmett Shear** *2*](https://millionrounds.com/fund/emmett-shear)[**Jerry Yang** *2*](https://millionrounds.com/fund/jerry-yang)[J **Justin Kan** *2*](https://millionrounds.com/fund/justin-kan)

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