Mike Maples: ?You Have to Be Willing to Throw it all away? [Video]

If you are a entrepreneur-- especially a first time entrepreneur or an entrepreneur outside of Silicon Valley-- you need to stop what you are doing and watch this video. Yes, it is 45 minutes long. But it's worth it.

Last night at a Founder Institute event, super angel Mike Maples gave a talk about what he calls "pivots" and "thunder lizards." Thunder lizards are startups born from atomic eggs that "emerge with attitude" want to disrupt and chew up their competition-- both new world and old. They are big, chaotic, relentless and when successful, become huge companies. What helps make a thunder lizard successful is something Maples calls the "pivot."

This isn't about product iteration-- the pivot has to do with business model. Business model shouldn't be confused with "business plan," Maples says. A business plan is a static thing, a business model charts money flowing out to create a product and money flowing back in from that product. A startup's entire reason to exist is to have �more arrows going back in than arrows going out, and it's always changing.

To some corners of the business world that may seem obvious, but in today's build-a-product-throw-it-out-there-and-flip-it startup culture it is actually contrarian. A big reason? Pivots are really hard and painful to do.

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