A New Book of the Startup Bible

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The average business book is a blog post stretched to 250 pages by an underpaid ghost writer who hates what their life has become.

That said, there are some that really do matter. A select few books pass the sniff test either by a.) offering robust data analysis that can be analyzed by outside experts, such as The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen, or b.) relying on case studies from the author’s unique experiences and putting forward a genuinely novel business idea, such as High Output Management by Andy Grove. By my count, the number of books that satisfies either of these conditions is fewer than 30.

Today, I’m excited to announce that there is a new book that deserves to be added to that painfully short list of required reading: Pattern Breakers: Why Some Startups Change the Future by Mike Maples, Jr. and Peter Ziebelman.

In Pattern Breakers, the venture-capitalist authors tackle a core conundrum of startups: Many of the most successful startups pivoted from their original business idea. Slack started as a video game company before conquering at-work communication, Pinterest began as a mobile shopping app called Tote before turning to image-sharing and social media, and YouTube was initially a video dating site with the slogan “Tune In, Hook Up.”

The book is almost entirely written in Maples's voice and from his perspective as a successful seed investor at the venture capital firm Floodgate, whose winners include Lyft, Twitch, Okta, and Chegg. A few years ago, Maples noticed that “something like 80 percent of [his] investment profits had come from pivots”—those companies that started by doing one thing and then found success doing something tangentially related or altogether different.

This was an uncomfortable realization for Maples. If his biggest winners were pivots, does that mean he just got lucky? Or did he invest in the wrong companies but the right people—those self-aware enough to pivot? As for the rest of us: If this is what a successful investor looks like, what does that mean for everyone else looking to start or pick the next great startup? It could be that we are doing the whole startup thing wrong.

Maples and Ziebelman (who works a different fund from Maples and lectures at Stanford Business School) teamed up to figure this conundrum out. Their answer is to propose a new theory of startup formation they call inflection theory, which has wholly shifted my perspective on company building—and I think it can do the same for you.