Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Maples, Founder And Managing Partner, Floodgate (Part 5)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Mike: It’s interesting – and maybe you’ve experienced this, too – in a lot of ways, deal flow, if you’re not careful, becomes like messages in your e-mail inbox. And if you’re not careful, you find yourself becoming an efficient processor of things that don’t matter that much.

So, we try really hard to always come back to the central premise, which is how much of our day are we spending with really smart people? If we’re spending most of the time with really smart people in the emerging areas of technology that we think are going to have a difference, then usually, we judge ourselves as spending our time well.

And if we spend too much of our time processing inbound requests that we know aren’t going to lead to much, then we start to really question how we’re spending our time.

I keep track of what fraction of my time is spent with really smart people, and if it starts to decline below the ratio that I think is acceptable, I’ll start rearranging my calendar very aggressively.

Irina: What is the best way for entrepreneurs to reach you?

Mike: We highly encourage to reach us through a referral that we respect. And this is an interesting sticking point sometimes, because some people will say to me, Well, I’m just not networked and plugged in like that and I don’t know all the people who you know.

But my feeling, and this is somewhat controversial, but my feeling is that if you’re a really good entrepreneur, you’ll find a way to make a positive impression on somebody who we know. I have over 1,500 contacts on LinkedIn. So, my feeling is that in many ways, the ability to get a strong referral from somebody whom we respect is a first, early sign test of whether somebody really has entrepreneurial skills.

If you can’t find a single person whom I respect in my network whom you can make a positive impression on, what does that say about your ability to go sell your product? Sometimes I get a hard time for that, but what I also find is some entrepreneurs are like, Yes, this guy gets it. That makes sense.

One of the things I’ve learned is – I learned this as an entrepreneur – you can’t please everybody, so you just have to decide that you care about pleasing the right people.

Sometimes you have to polarize people. You have to repel the people whom you’re not going to work with, and you have to attract more strongly the people you do want to work with.

That’s going to mean that not everybody’s going to like you. Sometimes I find that the essence of great entrepreneurship, whether you’re a startup or a new venture firm, is you have to create that combination of attraction and polarization to have a clear identity with people.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Mike Maples, Founder And Managing Partner, Floodgate
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