“Only Grand Slams Matter”: Mike Maples on Surviving the Power Law and Building a Fund That Actually Wins

Mike Maples on why your fund will fail—AND the video tool we discovered that lets us make videos that LPs actually click 50% more 👆[we got the numbers to prove it]

Venture capital is full of second-order consequences most fund managers never see coming.
Mike Maples does.

As a founding partner at Floodgate, he’s been early to breakout companies like Twitter, Twitch, and Okta—and even earlier in spotting the structural patterns that separate luck from repeatability.

I’ve watched Floodgate’s rise with deep interest—not just because of their returns, but because I’ve known Anne Miura-Ko, Maples’ co-founder, since I was ten. That long-standing proximity gave me a rare lens into how she and Maples think—and why their approach fundamentally rewires the mechanics of early-stage investing.

This conversation starts with a deceptively simple question:
What does your fund size actually mean?

Maples puts it plainly:

“Your fund size is your strategy. What it really is… is a commitment to your limited partners of the magnitude of the size of your largest exit.”

Let that land.

“If you raise a $100M fund and want a 5X return, one company needs to return $320M on its own …