Pattern Breakers

Pattern Breakers has its roots in the time when Mike Maples, a seasoned venture capitalist, was stumped, unable to get a grip on why some businesses he funded—Twitter, Twitch, and Okta, for example—took off, while others, some deemed "most likely to succeed," shut their doors despite doing everything right. Was it dumb luck that separated gold from dross?

What Maples and Stanford University's Peter Ziebelman discovered contradicts accepted wisdom and upends today's formulaic approach to entrepreneurship: that one should look for a big open market, talk to prospective customers to find their highest needs, their "pain points" in that market, and then build what is missing.

Rather, patterns are broken and the potential for breakthrough opportunity created when inflection points—events that offer the potential for new empowering capabilities—are harnessed, transforming how people think, work, feel, and act.

Uber and Lyft, for example, broke the pattern of transportation by harnessing the power of the GPS-enabled smartphone. The Covid pandemic spurred telemedicine. Pattern-breaking ideas like these unlock different powers and radically change the rules, driven by people with the independent-mindedness and courage to divert from the consensus.