Mike Maples

Maples recalls that an HP-35 calculator topped his wish list for his seventh birthday and that by third grade his father had taught him to take it apart and understand how circuits worked; in high school he wrote video games for the original Apple II and IBM PC. He went to Stanford University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering, discovered the magic of Silicon Valley, and met Hewlett-Packard co-founder David Packard; he later earned an MBA at Harvard Business School.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1]

Maples was a member of the startup team at Tivoli Systems, serving as director of product marketing; the company went public in 1995 and was acquired by IBM in 1996. He then co-founded the Austin, Texas, software company Motive Communications, serving as chief marketing officer; Motive went public in 2004 and was acquired by Alcatel-Lucent in 2007.⁠[1][1][2]

Maples says that in 2004 he realized ubiquitous connectivity, open-source software, and variable-cost web services would change how companies get started, creating a chance to build a new type of venture firm, and Floodgate was born as one of the very first seed funds. From around 2005 he invested “as a hobby” under the name Maples Investments, first with his own money, then raising a $10 million fund in 2006 and a second $35 million fund in 2008, backing companies including Twitter, Digg, Chegg, Gowalla, ngmoco, and Smule and selling some of his stakes in secondary rounds. In 2008, Ann Miura-Ko, formerly an analyst at CRV, joined as a co-founding partner.⁠[1][1][1][3][3][3][3][2]

He invested in textbook-rental company Chegg in 2007, two years before Kleiner Perkins came in, and cites it as an example of a “non-consensus right” investment. Floodgate believed in Twitter before it was Twitter and invested in Lyft when it was Zimride, Okta when it was Saasure, and Twitch when it was Justin.tv; Justin.tv founder Justin KanJustin KanJustin Kan is an American internet entrepreneur and investor who rose to prominence in 2007 with Justin.tv, which broadcast his life around the clock from a head-mounted camera. He went on to co-found the game streaming platform Twitch, which Amazon acquired for about $970 million in 2014; he also founded the legal technology company Atrium and co-founded the gaming payments platform Stash.Open the full entry pitched in 2007 with a camera on his hat, describing a reality show livecasting his life, and Floodgate was unsure about the idea but sure about the team.⁠[3][3][4][5][5]

In March 2010, Maples renamed Maples Investments as Floodgate, marking his move to full-time professional venture capitalist while keeping the same strategy of finding disruptive startups that don’t need a lot of cash to win. He calls the startups he seeks “Thunder Lizards,” a Godzilla metaphor for the tiny number of wildly disruptive companies that devour their competitors, and stresses backing ideas that everyone else thinks are ridiculous, which gives them room to grow before competition arrives. He and Miura-Ko explained that the name Floodgate is about opening the floodgates rather than being one.⁠[3][3][3][3][1][3]

In March 2011, Maples said on a TechCrunch program that Floodgate was out of step with the prevailing “super angel” movement: he did not believe money could be made by a spray-and-pray-and-flip approach and did not want to disrupt the existing venture capital ecosystem but to be part of it; he still considered a $1 billion exit the measure of success and said that, however many companies get started, statistically only about 15 end up worth $500 million. A big reason he turns down deals is that he likes the entrepreneur but thinks the idea “isn’t worthy” of them. The program also noted that he had popularized the startup term “pivot” in 2010, and he distinguished a true pivot from a failed idea grasping at straws.⁠[6][6][6][6][6][6][6]

In July 2012, Floodgate’s fourth fund closed at $75 million, with the same size and investor group as its third fund and no new investors solicited. Floodgate positioned itself to bridge the gap between angel investing and traditional venture capital; its portfolio then included Chegg, Circle of Moms, Formspring, ModCloth, SolarWinds, TaskRabbit, and Twitter, and it had exited Kongregate (acquired by GameStop), Playdom (sold to Disney), and Dasient (acquired by Twitter). In December that year, Maples invested in the $300,000 first close of a seed round for Blueseed, which planned a sea platform off Half Moon Bay, California, where foreign founders facing immigration limits could work near Silicon Valley.⁠[7][7][7][7][7][8][8]

In February 2017, Floodgate Fund VI filed a Form D with the SEC for $131 million raised from just eight investors, with Ann Miura-Ko and Michael James Maples as managing members. The fund was markedly larger than its three predecessors (the third at $73.5 million, the fourth at $75 million, and the fifth, closed in 2014, at $76 million). Floodgate was then based in Palo Alto, California, backing very early-stage companies in the Bay Area and Austin; new investments included supplement-testing startup LabDoor, legal discovery startup TextIQ, and Mexico City delivery startup Rappi, and exits included Xamarin, acquired by MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry, and Demandforce, acquired by Intuit for about $420 million in cash, while Twitter had gone public in late 2013.⁠[9][9][9][9][9][2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2]

In October 2021, Floodgate Fund VII filed a Form D for a planned $130 million offering, and in April 2026 Floodgate Fund VIII filed a Form D for another planned $130 million; both filings list Ann Miura-Ko and Michael James Maples Jr. as managing members and reported no amount sold at filing. As of October 2026, Floodgate is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, focuses on pre-seed and seed investing, and its partners are Maples, Ann Miura-Ko, Iris Choi, and Mike Heller.⁠[10][10][10][11][11][11][12][13][13][13][13]

On July 9, 2024, PublicAffairs published “Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future,” a 288-page book by Maples and Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer Peter Ziebelman. The book argues that companies such as Twitter, Twitch, and Lyft achieved extraordinary success despite disregarding “best practices,” while highly promising startups often failed even when they seemed to do everything right, and that breakthrough success demands a different mindset and actions. It became a USA TodayUSA TODAYUSA TODAY is a national general-interest daily newspaper and news brand in the United States. Founded under the leadership of Allen Neuharth and first published on September 15, 1982, it is known for its color pages, short stories, and abundant graphics. It is now published by USA TODAY Co. (formerly Gannett) and is the national flagship brand of the USA TODAY Network, and its brands also include the sports brand USA TODAY Sports.Open the full entry bestseller, and Lean Startup movement co-creator Steve Blank called it the most important startup book of the last ten years. Maples also hosts a podcast of the same name.⁠[14][14][14][14][15][14][14][1]

In October 2025, Maples published “Languaging: The Software of Belief,” arguing that language works like software for human minds and that breakthrough companies install new beliefs in their markets through deliberate wording, such as Salesforce’s “No Software,” Figma’s “Design is multiplayer,” and Airbnb’s “Belong anywhere.” In January 2026 he published “Reality Doesn’t Negotiate,” using Jeffrey Katzenberg’s $1.75 billion short-video bet Quibi, which shut down eight months after launch, to argue that founders should seek reality rather than validation. In June 2026, Sam Beskind, his chief of staff for nearly two years, wrote an essay likening Maples to a “magician” who listens and lets the entrepreneur take the stage.⁠[16][16][16][16][17][17][17][18][18][18]

On October 9, 2026, Maples was listed as the founder of Floodgate among the public speakers at the Network State Conference in Singapore.⁠[19][19]

Investments Floodgate lists for Maples include Twitter, Twitch, Clover Health, Okta, Outreach, Chegg, Demandforce, and Applied Intuition, and Floodgate says the companies it has backed are collectively worth more than $100 billion. He has been named to the Forbes Midas List eight times, was named a “Rising Star” by Fortune, and was profiled by Harvard Business School for his lifetime contributions to entrepreneurship. His interests include calligraphy, cinematography, cars, and sporting clays.⁠[1][4][1][1]

Floodgate: Official website: https://www.floodgate.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[20]

Pattern Breakers (book website): https://www.patternbreakers.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[15]

X: Public account: https://x.com/m2jr (opens in a new window)⁠[21][1]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maples/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]