Floodgate Insights

In Florence, one of Galileo’s telescopes is on display. It’s a simple leather tube with scratched glass and optics that look primitive today. Yet it was enough to overturn a conviction that had guided human thought for centuries: Earth was not the fixed center of the cosmos but just another planet in motion.

Throughout history, technological inflections have fundamentally altered how we live and work. In venture capital, we're constantly searching for inflections—external forces that propel startups beyond what they could achieve through effort alone. As my partner Mike Maples defines it, an inflection is "an event that creates the potential for radical change in how people think, feel, and act."

Most startups try to win by being better than what already exists or leapfrogging their competitors. But real breakthroughs aren’t just step-change improvements. They’re rewritings of the rules.

“We invest in people.” 

This phrase is the VC industry’s most common refrain - yet it often masks a simple truth: most VCs are investing in resumes. They seek out the senior engineer from Stripe, the researcher from OpenAI, or the ML engineer from DeepMind. It’s less about the individual and more about the institutional validation they bring.

The potential of an inflection must be converted into a pattern-breaking product that changes how people think, feel, and act in the future.

The insight is what connects the two; without it, the inflections that surround you will not be harnessed effectively to create a breakthrough.

Startups like Twitter, Twitch, and many others achieved extraordinary success while often seeming to disregard the usual "best practices." In contrast, many other startups I thought were highly promising often failed, even when they seemed to do everything right.

I became fixated on knowing why. Years of hard questioning drove me to a truth that surprised me. Underneath a breakthrough startup idea were powerful forces at work—forces more crucial to success than the idea itself.