How to Build A Startup, From an Early Lyft, Twitch Investor [Video]

Even though there’s a .00006% chance that a startup will reach a $1 billion valuation, Silicon Valley investor Mike Maples Jr. has placed early bets on more than one startup that beat the odds.

Across his nearly two-decade investing career, Maples found that startups he invested in early that are now worth over a billion dollars, like Twitch, Twitter, and Lyft, shared one thing in common — they broke patterns. Instead of competing in a crowded space, successful startups defined the future on their own terms.

“Most people, when they saw the iPhone 4S, didn’t realize that the thing in their hand or in their pockets could change the future, but the Lyft guys and the Uber guys did,” Maples said on a Thursday episode of the Masters of Scale podcast with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.

Maples added: “I have to break the pattern in order to escape the gravitational pull of the present, right? And so, I …