20VC: How To Do a 10x Seed Fund in 2025 | Three Frameworks to Evaluate Startups an Founders | Lessons from Losing Billions Missing Airbnb and Pinterest & Investing Lessons from Charlie Munger with Mike Maples @ Floodgate
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 693 Ratings
🗓️ 6 January 2025
⏱️ 70 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mike Maples is one of the OG seed investors of the last two decades. As a co-founding Partner at Floodgate, Mike has been on the Forbes Midas List eight times in the last decade. Some of Mike's investments include Twitter, Twitch.tv, Clover Health, Okta, Outreach, Chegg, Demandforce, and Applied Intuition.
In Today's Episode with Mike Maples We Discuss:
04:02 Does Seed Even Make Sense as an Asset Class?
05:16 Fund Size and Strategy: How to Do a 10x Fund?
08:12 Follow-On Investments: Are they BS?
16:41 Finding Inefficiencies in the Market
26:31 Exit Strategies and Liquidity Events: When to Sell?
35:14 How Floodgate Lost Billions Missing Airbnb and Pinterest
35:43 3 Frameworks for Evaluating Startups
36:23 Case Studies: Zoom and Okta
43:34 How to Truly Analyse Product-Market Fit
45:22 Challenges with Overfunding Startups
50:02 2024 in Review: Company and Fund of the Year
54:25 Predictions for 2025
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | To me, in all investing, there's two, right? One is you got to get paid for the risk you take. |
| 0:04.8 | And the other is always play offense with your money. Our business is hard, in seed, but not complicated. |
| 0:10.1 | 5% of our checks need to be 100x cash on cash on the first check. 10 to 15% need to be 20x, |
| 0:17.2 | cash on cash on the first check. You achieve that, your 10x fine. You have to play the game |
| 0:21.2 | that's on the field, but you don't have to play the way everybody else plays. Ultimately, if you're |
| 0:25.5 | not finding inefficiencies in the game, you ought to be asking yourself, what am I doing? |
| 0:30.5 | What am I in this for? This is 20 VC in the first 20 VC of 2025. What a show we have in store |
| 0:37.2 | for today, going back to our roots of early stage venture. |
| 0:40.3 | And who better to join us than the true OG of seed investing, Mike Maples. |
| 0:45.3 | As a co-founding partner at Floodgate, Mike has been on the Forbes Midas list. Check this out eight times in the last decade. |
| 0:52.3 | Some of Mike's investments include Twitter, Twitch, Octa, |
| 0:55.9 | applied intuition, and more. I always love my discussions with Mike. I think he's the most |
| 1:00.4 | thoughtful seed practitioner in the business. But before we dive in today, it can be difficult to |
| 1:06.2 | build a team that's aligned on everything from values to workflow. But that's exactly what Coda was made to do. |
| 1:12.4 | Coda is an all-in-one collaborative workspace that started as a napkin sketch. Now, just five years |
| 1:19.4 | since launching in beta, Coda has helped 50,000 teams all over the world get on the same page. |
| 1:26.0 | With Coda, you get the flexibility of docs, the structure |
| 1:29.3 | of spreadsheets, the power of applications, and the intelligence of AI, all built for enterprise. |
| 1:35.4 | Coda's seamless workspace facilitates deeper collaboration and quicker creativity, giving you more |
| 1:41.0 | time to build. If you're a startup team looking to increase alignment and agility, |
| 1:45.5 | Coda can help you move from planning to execution in record time. To try it for yourself, |
| 1:51.4 | go to coda.io slash 20VC today and get six months free of the team plan for startups. |
... |
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