Mike Maples Jr. says founders need to be driven by a real problem, not the romance of startups. The best ones feel they couldn't do anything else but build their company. Investors can spot the difference.
Being on Forbes Midas List, you must be a lightning, you know, attraction for a lot of entrepreneurs, most of them being here. How do you decide where to spend your time listening to them pitching to you?
Well, I think that the trickiest part is that a lot of founders are excited by the romance of a startup. And so one of the things that we say is don't just do a startup. It should be something fundamentally meaningful and disruptive and worthy of the entrepreneur's time and sacrifice. So that's our number one thing. There's a whole lot of other reasons that we invest, but we just— kind of our number one filter-out criteria is, is this person just doing a startup or are they doing it because they could do nothing else?
How do you gauge that?
It's, it's really hard to know, but, but authenticity is pretty easy to find usually. So When Evan Williams started Twitter, he had started Blogger before, and he cared about microblogging, had a point of view. Susan Koger, when she started ModCloth, had been thrifting for clothes since she'd been 13 years old. Erin McKean started Wordnik when she was the Oxford English lexicographer for a dictionary. And so most of the companies that we invest, it turns out that the founders have some type of authenticity to the opportunity.
