#167: Pattern Breakers — 7 Laws Behind Category-Defining Companies

Most founders obsess over ideas.
Breakthrough companies obsess over inflections, conviction, and structure.

This episode unpacks Pattern Breakers by Mike Maples Jr.—a book that quietly explains why most startups never break out… and why a small minority reshape entire categories.

But this isn’t a book summary.

It’s a thinking upgrade for founders, operators, board members, and investors navigating the most fragile phase of company building: Series A to IPO, where timing, conviction, and structure matter more than features or pitch decks.

Across seven tightly structured lessons, this episode explores how pattern-breaking companies are built before the world is ready for them—and why success is rarely about genius ideas, and almost always about seeing the future early and designing for it deliberately.

You’ll hear why:

• breakthroughs start with external inflections, not internal brainstorming
• winning companies are non-consensus and right, long before they’re popular
• movements outperform products when markets get noisy
• MVPs test interest, but prototypes test desperation
• productive disagreeableness protects insight when pressure rises
• corporate success quietly creates biases that kill innovation
• and why structure—not culture—is the hidden lever behind breakthroughs

Each lesson is grounded in real company examples, translated into today’s market reality, and finished with coaching questions you can use immediately—in leadership meetings, boardrooms, or investment decisions.

Key Takeaways

Inflections Beat Ideas
Breakthrough timing comes from external change, not creativity.

Non-Consensus Is the Signal
If everyone agrees, upside is already gone.

Movements Outrun Products
Identity compounds longer than features.

Test Desperation, Not Interest
Scalability starts with craving, not curiosity.

Protect Conviction
Consensus feels safe. It rarely creates breakthroughs.

Design for Breakthroughs
Small, protected, fast teams outperform bureaucracy every time.

Timestamps

(00:00) Intro
(02:58) The Big Idea Behind Pattern Breakers
(05:19) Who Is Mike Maples — and Why His Perspective Matters
(07:35) Lesson 1: Start With Inflections, Not Ideas
(12:36) Lesson 2: Be Non-Consensus and Right
(17:31) Lesson 3: Prototype the Future, Not the MVP
(21:31) Lesson 4: Recruit, Lead, and Scale Through Movements
(26:20) Lesson 5: Master Productive Disagreeableness
(30:04) Lesson 6: Break the Corporate Biases That Kill Breakthroughs
(35:00) Lesson 7: Structure for Breakthrough Execution
(39:41) Key Takeaways — The Lenses and Habits That Matter
(42:21) Personal Reflection & Critique 

Why Listen

• Learn how category-defining companies are built before markets open
• Upgrade how you evaluate startups, strategies, and leadership teams
• Replace product thinking with inflection, conviction, and structure
• Walk away with questions that immediately sharpen decisions

Found this valuable?
Like, share, and follow.

Every signal helps grow the show—and brings you more thinking frameworks from people and companies who didn’t follow patterns… they broke them.

Transcript

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:19:20

Christian Soschner

Let me start this episode with a problem. Almost every founder and invest time. It eventually runs into you do everything right. You hire strong people. You build solid technology. You raise capital, you execute. And yet the company starts.

00:00:19:20 - 00:00:28:08

Christian Soschner

Not because the team is bad. Not because the idea is stupid, but because something deeper is missing.

00:00:28:08 - 00:00:33:07

Christian Soschner

Most billion dollar companies did not start with a great idea.

00:00:33:09 - 00:01:14:00

Christian Soschner

They started with something that looked strange, inconvenient, even utterly wrong, until suddenly it wasn't over. Looked absurd. Airbnb looked unsafe. Facebook looked like a toy for college students. Nvidia's Cuda project looked like academic nonsense. Em RNA vaccines. They looked like science fiction. And yet those companies reshaped entire industries. The uncomfortable truth is this breakthrough companies don't win by being better.

00:01:14:03 - 00:01:27:12

Christian Soschner

The win by breaking patterns everyone else accepts has fixed. And that is the core idea behind Mike Marples book Pattern Breakers. And the reason I wanted to review it here.

00:01:27:12 - 00:01:39:00

Christian Soschner

My suspect companies like Twitter, Twitch, Okta and Lift long before they were obvious in this book. It finally lays out the logic behind those bets.

00:01:39:00 - 00:01:49:04

Christian Soschner

Not motivation, not hustle, but a repeatable way of thinking about timing, insight, structure, and conviction.

00:01:49:06 - 00:02:21:17

Christian Soschner

So if you're building or investing in companies between series and IPO, this book matters because this is the phase where execution pressure increases, ports expand, noise gets louder, and many teams quietly slide from bold to incremental without even noticing. Here is how to listen to this episode. If you only have 10 to 15 minutes, the first part will give you a clear understanding of what this book is about and whether it's worth your time.

00:02:21:17 - 00:02:39:03

Christian Soschner

If you have more time and want to stay longer, I will share what actually resonated with me. After more than 25 years of building, advising and investing and why I think these ideas matter right now for builders and investors.

00:02:39:03 - 00:02:58:20

Christian Soschner

And if you listen to the end, you believe if a small practical playbook you can apply immediately. So let's start where Pattern Breakers begins. Not with ideas, not with markets, but with the forces outside the building that quietly make new futures possible.

00:02:58:20 - 00:03:17:21

Christian Soschner

So what's the big idea behind this book? If you strip away every story, every example and every framework in the book, Pattern Breakers boils down to just one sentence. Breakthrough companies do not compete inside the present.

00:03:17:21 - 00:03:26:10

Christian Soschner

They are built from the logic of the future. Long before the rest of the world can see it. And that is the entire book.

00:03:26:12 - 00:04:00:24

Christian Soschner

Everything else. Inflections, insights, desperation, movements, disagreeable ness, skunkworks is simply the operating system for that single idea. Most founders in boards spend their days optimizing the world as it is. Current metrics. Current competitors, current board expectations, current fears. And that feels responsible. It is also the fastest path to incrementalism. The moment you raise a real series, say you enter what I call the drift zone.

00:04:01:06 - 00:04:32:23

Christian Soschner

Risk suddenly feels real. Governance grows and a quiet voice starts whispering. Play a little safer. You have something to lose now. Safer. Road maps. Safer. Higher. Safer stories. And it feels so prudent. It is actually the beginning of the ordinary pattern. Breakers is the antidote for founders and executives. It is a manual for staying uncomfortable when everyone else is begging you to be reasonable.

00:04:33:00 - 00:04:45:14

Christian Soschner

For investors, it becomes a new due diligence filter. Instead of asking how big is that total addressable market today? You start asking, what inflection makes this inevitable? Tomorrow?

00:04:45:14 - 00:05:00:13

Christian Soschner

what non consensus inside does this founder actually own. It is a product or the beginning of a movement. So if you remember only one thing from this entire episode remember this one.

00:05:00:15 - 00:05:04:09

Christian Soschner

Breakthrough companies don't predict the future.

00:05:04:09 - 00:05:19:11

Christian Soschner

They positioned themselves at the exact moment a new future becomes possible and then built relentlessly toward it. Everything we cover in the next 25 minutes is simply how you turn deadlines into action.

00:05:19:11 - 00:05:26:24

Christian Soschner

So before we dive into the seven lessons, a quick word on why Mike maples is worth listening to.

00:05:26:24 - 00:05:45:21

Christian Soschner

He is not a theorist. He is not an academic, and he is not someone writing about startups from the outside. Mike Maples is one of Silicon Valley's most consistently successful early stage investors, someone who has repeatedly backed companies long before they looked obvious.

00:05:46:00 - 00:06:16:01

Christian Soschner

He is a founding partner at Flood Gates, a seed stage firm known for writing the first check into companies that later reshaped entire industries. Here is a short, incomplete list. He backed Twitter when it was still a struggling podcasting company called Odeo, also Twitch, but it was just in TV. An awkward 24 seven reality experiment. Lyft when ridesharing was illegal in most cities.

00:06:16:03 - 00:06:29:16

Christian Soschner

October 20th, 20 was considered a boring enterprise problem and ricchetti. When quantum computing still felt like academic theory, what matters is not the names. It's the pattern

00:06:29:16 - 00:06:47:06

Christian Soschner

makers consistently invested when ideas looked too early to narrow or too uncomfortable, and when consensus set, it's not good to come back later. And that is not luck. That is simply pattern recognition.

00:06:47:08 - 00:07:10:10

Christian Soschner

Pattern breakers is the first time Ables has written that pattern down in a single coherent framework. This book is not a victory lap. It is a distillation of how he thinks about infractions, conviction, structure, and timing, including the mistakes, near misses, and false positives. The chart and his model over decades.

00:07:10:10 - 00:07:31:12

Christian Soschner

So when maples talks about why breakthroughs happen and why most companies miss them, he is not speculating. He is reverse engineering the decisions he actually made when the future still looked unclear. And with that context, we can now move to the playbook itself.

00:07:31:16 - 00:07:38:01

Christian Soschner

Here is the first lesson from the book. Start with inflections and not ideas.

00:07:38:01 - 00:08:04:14

Christian Soschner

Consider this. In 1901, the chief engineer of the US Navy declared that human flight is a useless dream, and two years later, the Wright brothers prove him wrong. They didn't start with the idea of an airplane. They started with inflections like the engines, new material, and the deep understanding of balance and control.

00:08:04:16 - 00:08:35:19

Christian Soschner

The same pattern repeats in modern technology. Overt didn't win because it built a better taxi app. It won because a small, almost invisible shift happened. First, chips, a currency on smartphones, suddenly became good enough to coordinate strangers in real time. And that distinction matters more than most founders realize. Here is the core insight. Early in Pattern Breakers, Mike maples defines an inflection like this.

00:08:35:21 - 00:08:45:19

Christian Soschner

An inflection is an event that creates the potential for radical change in how people think, feel, and act.

00:08:45:24 - 00:08:55:24

Christian Soschner

And then comes the uncomfortable part. Inflections aren't caused by startups. They happen externally to startups.

00:08:55:24 - 00:09:11:08

Christian Soschner

Most founders still start with an idea. Breakthrough founders start with a change in the world, and that single choice determines whether a company creates a new category or competes inside an old one.

00:09:11:13 - 00:09:42:16

Christian Soschner

The big question is why do ideas trap companies? Humans default to patterns. Companies do the same. Maples writes, the ways we go about our daily lives tends to crystallize into stable, repeatable patterns. And when a startup begins with an idea, it unconsciously accepts the rules of the existing market. Another line from the book puts it bluntly

00:09:42:16 - 00:09:54:09

Christian Soschner

by adopting this perspective, a startup unknowingly conforms to the established rules for failing its primary opportunity to create a true breakthrough.

00:09:54:11 - 00:10:13:13

Christian Soschner

In other words, starting in the present traps a company in the present from series onward. That trap becomes dangerous. Scaling begins before a certainty exists that the world is actually moving into the company's directions.

00:10:13:13 - 00:10:32:11

Christian Soschner

So what breakthrough founders do differently is this breakthrough companies reverse the sequence over started with an inflection. Real time location sharing became reliable enough to coordinate drivers and riders.

00:10:32:13 - 00:10:50:04

Christian Soschner

Twitch did the same. It wasn't a website for gamers. It was the first company to write two inflections at once. Broadband cable of life HD streaming and multiplayer games. Turning into a spectator culture.

00:10:50:04 - 00:11:00:08

Christian Soschner

Quibi followed the trend, while Twitch rode a structural shift in the market. And that difference decides outcomes.

00:11:00:08 - 00:11:05:22

Christian Soschner

Here is the mental shift. Maples captures it cleanly.

00:11:05:24 - 00:11:26:15

Christian Soschner

Inflection theory is the best way we have found to test whether an idea is worth the time and sacrifice. Founders need to dedicate to the job. The question changes from is this a good idea to what changed in the world that makes this inevitable? Now?

00:11:26:15 - 00:11:33:15

Christian Soschner

Here are some operational questions that you can apply immediately to your business. The first one.

00:11:33:23 - 00:11:44:14

Christian Soschner

What recent technological, societal, or regulatory shift makes the current strategy inevitable? Not just possible.

00:11:45:01 - 00:12:26:04

Christian Soschner

Here is the second one. If this product had launched five years earlier, why would it have failed? And the third one is the board reacting to features or aligned around the inflection being written. And the fourth one. Which said the organization is responsible for tracking inflections? And how do those insights shape decisions? Breakthrough companies do not force ideas into the world.

00:12:26:06 - 00:12:30:04

Christian Soschner

They position themselves where the future has already arrived.

00:12:30:11 - 00:12:36:17

Christian Soschner

When the inflection is real, the idea almost writes itself.

00:12:36:17 - 00:12:57:20

Christian Soschner

Here is the second lesson. Build insights that are non consensus. And of course right. Why is it physically painful to be misunderstood? Evolutionary biology gives the answer for millennia. Leaving the herd meant literally death.

00:12:57:20 - 00:13:02:18

Christian Soschner

We have a survival instinct that screams to what everyone else is doing.

00:13:02:19 - 00:13:10:21

Christian Soschner

Be safe. But here is the hard truth. Your survival instinct is killing your startup

00:13:10:21 - 00:13:36:09

Christian Soschner

in venture capital, herd mentality and consensus. I trust fancy words for average. So if you're doing what everyone else agrees is a good idea, you are already too late. Maples writes, the first rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the maturity to build a pattern breaker.

00:13:36:10 - 00:14:14:03

Christian Soschner

You have to overwrite 200,000 years of parallel programing, and you have to be non consensus. And of course right here is the core thesis. Most founders try to be better. They look at their competitor and say we are faster cheaper or have a nicer user interface. Maples calls this the comparison trap. Better invites a comparison matrix, and in a comparison matrix, the incumbent with the brand and budget and huge teams will simply crash you.

00:14:14:05 - 00:14:22:01

Christian Soschner

The goal is not to be better. The goal is to be different. Steve Jobs said already a few decades ago,

00:14:22:01 - 00:14:43:23

Christian Soschner

maples arks the power of different favors to startup because it forces a choice and not a comparison. And that's fundamental. You don't want to be the best apple in the basket. You want to be the world's first and only banana.

00:14:43:23 - 00:14:47:24

Christian Soschner

Here is the evidence. Nvidia and their Cuda project.

00:14:47:24 - 00:15:19:00

Christian Soschner

This is the question what does this look like in the real world? It looks like being misunderstood for decades. Look at Nvidia today. They are a mighty trillion dollar inevitability. But go back to 2006. That was when Jensen Huang launched Cuda and at the time, using a gaming chip, a TPU for general computing was considered weird.

00:15:19:02 - 00:15:56:10

Christian Soschner

It was niche. It was deeply non consensus. Wall Street hated it because it hurt margins. Developers found it hard to use. The consensus view was that CPUs, especially those from Intel, would handle computing while GPUs were just for pixels. But Jensen had a non consensus inside. It was this parallel computing would eventually eat the world. He didn't try to build a better CPU to beat Intel.

00:15:56:12 - 00:16:08:20

Christian Soschner

He redefined the physics of computing. He was misunderstood for 15 years. And then today he owns the future.

00:16:08:20 - 00:16:13:20

Christian Soschner

The lesson here is to decouple your self-worth from external approval.

00:16:14:02 - 00:16:37:17

Christian Soschner

Neighbors rights being non consensus and right is the path with the highest odds of achieving a breakthrough. If you are right, but consensus, you just compute your profits away. And if you are non consensus and wrong you simply fail. The alpha is found only in the lonely work of being right. When everyone else thinks you are completely crazy.

00:16:37:17 - 00:17:06:03

Christian Soschner

Here are a few questions to audit your own conformity and ask these four questions to your team this week. The first one what belief about the future? What most smart peers in the industry currently disagree with? The second. If that belief became true at scale. How would behavior change in five years?

00:17:06:05 - 00:17:31:01

Christian Soschner

The third and the third one? Is that insight being protected or diluted to sound reason? They were in boardrooms. And the fourth. Which part of the strategy still feels slightly uncomfortable to say out loud, and that discomfort is often the signal that the insight actually matters.

00:17:31:05 - 00:17:47:15

Christian Soschner

And here we are with lesson number three prototype the future and not the MVP. There is a paradox that breaks most founders brains to be on time. You usually have to start 3 to 10 years earlier.

00:17:47:15 - 00:17:55:10

Christian Soschner

If you start building when the demand is obvious, you are already too late. You are building for the present.

00:17:55:17 - 00:18:25:07

Christian Soschner

Maples writes that relying on the rules of the present leads to ideas with limited upside. To catch your wave. You have to be paddling long before the swells visible. Most founders talk about the product market fit, but Pattern Breakers talks about timing, market fit. Heuristic Cortez's. This lesson challenges the holiest grade in Silicon Valley. The minimum viable product or card.

00:18:25:07 - 00:19:09:08

Christian Soschner

The MVP may asks that people confuse an implementation prototype with an MVP. Minimum Viable Product asks does this feature work? And implementation prototype asks are people desperate for this future? Desperation is the metric. Mappers defines it not as hopelessness, but as a strong positive craving, the kind of needs that once recognized, becomes an irresistible must have. If you aren't validating desperation, you are just burning cash on a nice to have.

00:19:09:12 - 00:19:42:09

Christian Soschner

Here is the evidence. Look at BioNTech. They didn't start working on RNA vaccines in 2020. They started in 2008. Way back for 12 years, they built a capability the market thought was niche. But when the Covid 19 infection hit, they were the only ones ready to scale. They didn't react to the future. They pre it. I look at Facebook through the lens of friction before 2007.

00:19:42:11 - 00:20:00:02

Christian Soschner

Sharing a photo was a nightmare. Digital camera. Cable. Computer upload. Mark Zuckerberg builds the social graph before the mobile explosion. When the iPhone launched with a decent camera that friction collapsed overnight.

00:20:00:02 - 00:20:16:24

Christian Soschner

Facebook was positioned to catch the inflection because they were already waiting for it. Contrast that with Quibi. They had $1 billion but failed. Maples notes they didn't offer something people desperately wanted.

00:20:17:01 - 00:20:20:04

Christian Soschner

They offered a trend, not a breakthrough.

00:20:20:04 - 00:20:42:06

Christian Soschner

Here is the takeaway. The goal is to build what maples calls a minimum viable future. He points to the Tesla Roadster. The original Roadster wasn't just a minimum viable product, it was a minimum viable future. It wasn't practical, but it validated that people were desperate for a new identity.

00:20:42:06 - 00:20:45:07

Christian Soschner

So stop asking if your product works.

00:20:45:09 - 00:21:16:12

Christian Soschner

Start asking if your timing works. The first question is about the desperation audit. If we shut down our products tomorrow, would customers panic? I just switch to a spreadsheet. The second is the time travel track. Have we been building a capability that is just about to meet its inflection point, or are we reacting to a trend? Everyone sees.

00:21:16:14 - 00:21:31:15

Christian Soschner

And the third one, the friction test. What specific external event like the iPhone camera are we waiting for to unlock our true growth? Built for desperation and to wait for the wave.

00:21:31:15 - 00:21:38:14

Christian Soschner

And lesson number four recruit, lead and scale through movements.

00:21:38:14 - 00:22:06:17

Christian Soschner

There is a comforting myth in tech. If we build it, they will come. But in the noisiest information environment in history, nobody, literally nobody, finds you by accident. Most deep tech founders believe the science should speak for itself. It simply won't. This is why Maple's rights, a breakthrough company, is not a product.

00:22:06:19 - 00:22:40:01

Christian Soschner

It is a movement. Think beyond tech. Dwayne Johnson didn't just sell tequila. He sold A Tribe built for his followership. Conor McGregor, the famous mixed martial artist, didn't just sell his whiskey brand. He sold an identity that he has built with his followership. They understood that if you build a movement engine, you can plug any product into it and it will scale.

00:22:40:03 - 00:22:52:04

Christian Soschner

So the core thesis here is this Maple's defiance and movement is a group of people with a shared belief in moving together to what a different future.

00:22:52:04 - 00:23:10:04

Christian Soschner

note the words shared belief not shared interest in a product feature. So if you're curing cancer by building rockets, you aren't just a company, you are a cause fighting the status quo.

00:23:10:04 - 00:23:23:08

Christian Soschner

And one of the best examples is Elon Musk, who believes that making humanity multi-planetary will save humanity in the end. That's the movement.

00:23:23:08 - 00:23:42:17

Christian Soschner

Causes don't just have customers. They have co conspirators. Matrix gives a strict narrative playbook to engineer exactly this movement mentality. First, the hero is not. You may persuade the hero in your story is not you, the founder.

00:23:42:19 - 00:24:13:14

Christian Soschner

You instead play the role of mentor to your coconspirators. Think like Star Wars. You are not Luke Skywalker. You are all the Ben Kenobi. Your early believer is Luke. Your job is to give them the lightsaber, your product to defeat the evil empire. Second, define the enemy. Your story must also have an enemy. The enemy is not your competitor.

00:24:13:16 - 00:24:42:15

Christian Soschner

It's the status quo. For BioNTech, the enemy was not Moderna. The enemy was the virus. And the old slow way of making vaccines. So when Covid hit, they didn't just sell a drug. They led a movement to save the world with speed. And that purpose aligned investors and governments faster than any business plan ever could. Third force a choice, not a comparison, may proceed.

00:24:42:16 - 00:25:08:06

Christian Soschner

Why is this force a choice and not a comparison? You need to be different. Not America better than your competition. So if you use the industry's language, you invite comparison. If you invent new language like ridesharing instead of taxi app or Nvidia teamed with TPU, you create literally a new category and you are the only one in that because you're the first one.

00:25:08:08 - 00:25:24:10

Christian Soschner

Here is the key takeaway. May quotes Plato. Those who tell stories, rules, society products, satisfy needs, movements satisfy identity and attentive to beats. Everything

00:25:24:10 - 00:25:38:00

Christian Soschner

To turn your startup into a movement. Answer these three questions. Make the enemy audit. If I asked every employee who our enemy is, what's the name of a competitor?

00:25:38:02 - 00:26:11:07

Christian Soschner

Which is the wrong answer? Or this specific status quo behavior? We are here to destroy? Second, make the hero check in your paycheck. You the person, the CEO, the hero. Saving the day. Or are you positioning the customer as the hero who uses your tool to change the future? And the third one is the language test. Are you using the industry's old vocabulary?

00:26:11:09 - 00:26:21:08

Christian Soschner

Are have you invented new terms that force a binary choice? Don't just be the product. Recruit and hobby.

00:26:21:08 - 00:26:48:11

Christian Soschner

And here we are with lesson number five. Master productivity. Secret goodness. If you want to make friends, you can go to any country club. If you want to change the future, get ready to be disagreeable. Maples writes this agreeableness enables non consensus ideas, breakthrough ideas that are right even when others think they are wrong and discard against human nature.

00:26:48:13 - 00:27:24:15

Christian Soschner

Humans are herd creatures. For millennia, survival meant agreeing with the tribe. But in venture capital and deep tech, this survival instinct is a death sentence. If you find yourself nothing in a board meeting just to keep the energy pleasant, you are not leading. You are capitulating. So here's the core physics. Maples calls this situation the conformity trap. The conformity trap lures you into aligning with societal expectations to the detriment of pursuing a divergent path.

00:27:24:17 - 00:27:30:18

Christian Soschner

And the problem is that humans usually confuse agreeableness with kindness.

00:27:30:18 - 00:27:54:22

Christian Soschner

Almost everybody thinks compromising on product vision to produce an investor makes the company look great, and the founders look like good leaders. But May it's called this out as a form of dishonesty, excessive agreeableness is not authentic when you agree just to get along. You lied about your true conviction.

00:27:54:24 - 00:27:59:11

Christian Soschner

You let the status quo exploit your desire for acceptance.

00:27:59:11 - 00:28:17:11

Christian Soschner

the solution is productivity. Agreeableness. Maples notes transformative leaders often steer the pot instead of calming the waters. Your job is not to calm the waters. It is to navigate the storm you created. But there is a critical nuance. This is not permission to be a jerk.

00:28:17:13 - 00:28:22:03

Christian Soschner

Maybe response. Excessive weirdness is not authentic either.

00:28:22:03 - 00:28:48:12

Christian Soschner

to if you disagree just to show how smart you are, that is contrarian theater, true productive disagreeable ness has three dimensions. The first one, it is principled. It protects the future and not the ego. The second one, it is resilient. The more disagreeable you are, the lonelier is your existence.

00:28:48:14 - 00:28:59:20

Christian Soschner

And the third one? It is liberating. This agreeableness buys freedom. It buys the freedom to pursue the remarkable unburdened. But it needs to conform.

00:28:59:20 - 00:29:18:21

Christian Soschner

Ultimately, you must choose your master. May persuades. You need to decide which master to serve the mission you want to make your life's work or the approval of others and approval feels safe. The mission builds the future for humanity, and you cannot serve both masters at the same time.

00:29:18:21 - 00:29:25:05

Christian Soschner

So to master this, audit your leadership style this week, use the peacekeeper audit.

00:29:25:07 - 00:29:59:01

Christian Soschner

Where is the team agreeing to a strategy just to keep the peace? Even though the gut says it's a regression to the mean, the authenticity check is the second one. Is this disagreement coming from a fight for the mission? Adjust from stress. Is this conviction or just compassion? And the third one? The freedom test. If the board's to it didn't matter for 30 days, what decision would be made immediately?

00:29:59:03 - 00:30:04:08

Christian Soschner

Disagreement is the price of admission for the future. Pay it willingly.

00:30:04:08 - 00:30:36:02

Christian Soschner

So here is lesson number six. Break the corporate biases that kill breakthroughs. The big question is why to dominant companies almost never invent the future that replaces them. Kodak invented the digital camera but went bankrupt. Nokia owned mobile phones but missed the smartphone. We usually blame incompetence, but media argues the opposite. These companies don't fail because they are broken.

00:30:36:04 - 00:31:09:07

Christian Soschner

They fail because they are working perfectly. The paradox of scale is that the very things that make you great series B companies or IPO companies. Efficiency, predictability and process. The Six Sigma mindset are the exact things that kill your ability to ever create a breakthrough again. May prospects the very strengths that fueled a company's success can also make it less adaptable to change, and new opportunities.

00:31:09:09 - 00:31:46:14

Christian Soschner

Maples introduces a proxy trough. Success creates bias. The accumulation of experiences from past successes encourages corporations to build on what works. Unfortunately, the patterns create biases that hinder fresh and innovative perspectives. As you scale from series eight to IPO, your organization develops an immune system. Its job is to protect what works. The core business and tech, what is risky, the future and new opportunities right?

00:31:46:16 - 00:32:19:13

Christian Soschner

Here are my five biases. And he calls it five specific poisons that seep into scaling companies. The first one is biased towards existing value. You optimize the cow instead of inventing an entirely new animal. The second one is bias against risk taking. You equate risk with danger and not opportunity. The third one bias toward punishing fear.

00:32:19:16 - 00:32:29:14

Christian Soschner

Executives avoid big swings because failure hurts their career more than inaction. And the fourth one bias toward agreeableness.

00:32:29:14 - 00:32:44:12

Christian Soschner

You have a culture fit rather than divergent thinking. And the fifth one is bias against new approaches. You reject ideas that don't fit the way we do things here. And the result?

00:32:44:16 - 00:32:58:18

Christian Soschner

As we note, Khosla famously put it, such companies reduce the risk of failure so much that the consequences of success are inconsequential. You become a company that never fails, but Oslo never matters.

00:32:58:18 - 00:33:12:10

Christian Soschner

To escape this, you must build parallel systems teams that operate outside the immune system. Look at that slow. The automotive industry had a century of best practices.

00:33:12:12 - 00:33:47:20

Christian Soschner

Dealerships. Distributed supply chains. Critics said Tesla would fail because they ignored all these rules that work well. But Tesla did not just build the car. They broke the bias. They owned the supply chain. They owned the stores. Maybe it's notes. Tesla was not just building a car. Tesla was redefining the roads in every aspect. And my addition is Elon Musk built a movement around Tesla that led to saving the planet and all the climate change discussions.

00:33:47:24 - 00:34:18:20

Christian Soschner

Neighbors. Contacts. Avoiding failure will not lead to break for success. Innovation is not blocked by lack of creativity. It is blocked by a surplus of certainty. You must consciously design an environment when you approaches are protected from the logic of the core business. So if you are sitting on a board or leading a scaling team and the spouse is down, first ask the consequence test.

00:34:18:22 - 00:34:24:21

Christian Soschner

Are we working on projects where if they succeed, the outcome is irrelevant?

00:34:25:04 - 00:34:37:11

Christian Soschner

Are we optimizing for safety or impact? The second point is the career risk audit in our company. What happens to a leader who takes a big swing and misses?

00:34:37:16 - 00:34:54:09

Christian Soschner

If the answer is they get sidelined, you have already decided to stop innovating. It's the third one. The best practice trap. Which industry standard are you following just because everyone else does it?

00:34:54:09 - 00:34:56:24

Christian Soschner

What if the opposite were true?

00:34:56:24 - 00:35:00:09

Christian Soschner

Success is dangerous. Don't let it make you soft.

00:35:00:11 - 00:35:07:12

Christian Soschner

And the final lesson. Number seven. Build skunkworks for the future. What it is you will learn soon

00:35:07:12 - 00:35:33:14

Christian Soschner

to kill a breakthrough idea in a large company. The method is simple. Give it a huge budget. A massive team and extensive executive oversight. Standard management theory teaches that more resources equals more speed. But in the early stages of a patent break, resource sources are gravity.

00:35:33:16 - 00:36:07:12

Christian Soschner

They bring complexity meetings and reports to build a future inside a scaling organization. A bigger army is not the answer. A pirate ship is in engineering. This is called a skunkworks. The term comes from Lockheed Martin. In 1943, the US needed a jet fighter to counter the Nazis. Lockheed didn't build it in the main factory. They put a tiny team in a circumstance next to a plastics factory that smells terrible.

00:36:07:13 - 00:36:44:11

Christian Soschner

Hence the name skunkworks. LED by Kelly Johnson. They operated in total secrecy with 0% accuracy, and delivered the check in just 143 days. Mike Maples are excited to break a pattern today. Recreating this structure is mandatory. He writes eight principles are powerful for any team wishing to build a breakthrough. This is not just culture. It is architecture. The problem is that as companies scale from series eight to IPO, they built machines designed to prevent risk.

00:36:44:13 - 00:36:56:24

Christian Soschner

To add middle management and to add dotted lines, maples warns. Stay away from outsiders. Keep the project under wraps to prevent executive interference.

00:36:57:02 - 00:37:10:18

Christian Soschner

So why does this matter for new projects? Because outsider, even internal vice presidents will ask for efficiency before the breakthrough is found to ask for roadmaps when the team is still hunting for the inflection.

00:37:10:18 - 00:37:15:13

Christian Soschner

Maples outlines eight principles to shield a breakthrough team.

00:37:15:13 - 00:37:20:06

Christian Soschner

Here are the three most critical ones to implement tomorrow in your company.

00:37:20:06 - 00:37:23:07

Christian Soschner

The rule number one is the dictator.

00:37:23:09 - 00:37:59:20

Christian Soschner

Appoint one master of all clarity and responsibility. The team leader is responsible and he or she alone is responsible. Consensus kills speed. A single leader with full control must report only to the CEO. No committees in between. The second one is the pizza rule. Viciously minimize the team. Small teams move fast. Big teams negotiate. If the team cannot be fed with two pizzas, it is too big to create a breakthrough.

00:37:59:22 - 00:38:24:07

Christian Soschner

And the third one is to step for located somewhere small and stay away from outsiders. If the team sits in the main HQ, it gets poured into main HQ. Politics. A separate room, a separate slack channel or even a separate building is required. The goal is to fly under the radar until the results are undeniable.

00:38:24:07 - 00:38:32:03

Christian Soschner

Maple's insight is that reward performance, not status, drives clean execution.

00:38:32:05 - 00:38:36:19

Christian Soschner

Teams don't rise to the level of their impatient. They fall to the level of their structure.

00:38:36:19 - 00:38:59:14

Christian Soschner

If a structure is optimized for safety, it produces safety. If a ten outcome is the goal, a10x structure is required to implement this. Look at current innovation projects and ask. The first one to strike is the team to pick.

00:38:59:16 - 00:39:38:02

Christian Soschner

If half the people on this project were fired, would it actually move faster? The answer is almost always yes. The second one, the cover audit. Who does the project lead? Report two. If it's anyone other than the CEO. Had it been crushed by middle management processes and politics. And the third one, the stealth test. Can this team go 30 days without producing a status report for an outsider, allowing them to focus purely on their prototype?

00:39:38:04 - 00:39:41:03

Christian Soschner

Break the pattern by breaking the org chart.

00:39:41:07 - 00:39:45:03

Christian Soschner

And here we are. Section number five. The key takeaways.

00:39:45:03 - 00:40:01:10

Christian Soschner

In this episode we covered a lot of ground, but complexity is the enemy of execution. To wrap up here is the pattern breakers philosophy, distilled into freelances for Seeing the World and three Habits for acting on it.

00:40:01:10 - 00:40:12:11

Christian Soschner

The first lens inflections matter, not ideas. Breakthrough timing comes from external change, not internal creativity.

00:40:12:13 - 00:40:44:24

Christian Soschner

Stop asking, is this a good idea? Start asking what external change makes this inevitable? No lens. Number two insights and not consensus. Building for the present produces incrementalism to create outsized value. Be right when everyone else is wrong. Every time a strategy is diluted to make a board member comfortable, the alpha dice and deferred lens movements are not products.

00:40:45:01 - 00:41:15:16

Christian Soschner

Products are bought. Movements are joint. Think about Red bull. Is it really just an energy drink? Or is Red bull a movement, a product? Correct. It solves a problem and movement source and identity crisis. And to scale. Stop selling features and start arming a rebellion against the status quo. Like the Jedi in Star Wars. Here are the three habits and how to act in this world.

00:41:15:18 - 00:41:47:24

Christian Soschner

The first habit test for desperation. Throw away weight. The minimum viable product. Metric of interest. Interest is polite. It is kind. It doesn't cost anything. Desperation is a business model. If users are panicking at the thought of losing the prototype, keep iterating. The second habit choose mission over harmony. Agreeableness is a luxury. Startups cannot afford practice productive, disagreeable ness.

00:41:48:01 - 00:41:57:17

Christian Soschner

Decide today how you optimizing for a pleasant board meeting or a legendary company. And the third habit built parallel structures.

00:41:57:17 - 00:42:09:16

Christian Soschner

Do not innovate inside the machine. Designed to prevent risk. Build a skunkworks. One leader. Small team. Ocracy protects the future from the logic of the present.

00:42:09:16 - 00:42:15:20

Christian Soschner

Breakthroughs happen when you see the future early. Build from conviction. Test for desperation.

00:42:15:24 - 00:42:21:22

Christian Soschner

Rally a movement and design a structure capable of producing non-linear results.

00:42:22:03 - 00:42:51:24

Christian Soschner

I really enjoyed reading this book and what resonated most with me is this reading pattern breakers didn't just provide a toolkit. It forced a reflection on 25 years of building and investing. Free, specific insights stood out as absolute truths. First, the brutal honesty about timing. I have seen perfect teams with perfect execution fail simply because they were two years early.

00:42:52:01 - 00:43:05:16

Christian Soschner

Maples admits what most VCs want. The world decides the timing, not you. Your job is simply to be relevant. Inflection arrives. The second is the structural clarity of skunkworks.

00:43:05:16 - 00:43:14:21

Christian Soschner

This is the missing link for Start series B companies. Innovation is not a personality trait. It is an architectural decision.

00:43:14:24 - 00:43:24:12

Christian Soschner

If a protected structure. Small team, one leader zero politics is not built, a breakthrough will never happen inside a scaling company.

00:43:24:16 - 00:43:59:06

Christian Soschner

However, there is one area that requires a caveat. This agreeableness I think May is right. Conformity kills startups, but you must be willing to be misunderstood. And in my experience, coaching founders, there is a fine line between conviction and chaos. Some founders use this agreeableness as an excuse to break people, not just patterns. My view for 2025 is this great leaders break patterns without breaking their teams.

00:43:59:08 - 00:44:08:08

Christian Soschner

Courage must be paired with emotional discipline. Otherwise, the result is not the movement. It is a revolving door.

00:44:08:08 - 00:44:31:14

Christian Soschner

Ultimately, this book reinforces by the series A to IPO stage is so critical. It is the moment where a company has enough reality to matter, but enough fragility to die. And Pattern Breakers is the manual for navigating that fragility. It reminds the reader that breakthroughs are created by people who refuse to accept the world as it is,

00:44:31:14 - 00:44:34:21

Christian Soschner

and have the discipline to build the world as it could be.

00:44:34:24 - 00:44:58:04

Christian Soschner

If this resonates, the full book is highly recommended. The link is in the show notes. I also want to hear from you. Which of the seven lessons are you implementing in your company? Are you building a skunkworks? Are you redefining your enemy? Send me a message on LinkedIn. I read every note. And next episode we are back with a guest who is living this reality right now.

00:44:58:06 - 00:45:03:13

Christian Soschner

Until then, stop optimizing the present. Start building the future.