To Create the Future of Business, You Need to Break Patterns and See the Future

A review of Pattern Breakers — Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future, by Mike Maples Jr. and Peter Ziebelman, Public Affairs Hachette Book Group, 281 pp.

So, you want to be your own boss. Your mind is about to explode with a cutting edge, breakthrough business idea. Your passion is to change the world, and the means to do so is almost within your grasp.

If this sentiment with you resonates, if you have the soul of an entrepreneur, that’s great. Congratulations! Now stop. A hard stop in fact. Until you’ve read the seminal new book Pattern Breakers — Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future, by Mike Maples Jr. and Peter Zieberman. It’s without doubt one of the most original, insightful, and innovative books on entrepreneurship that I’ve ever read.

I know that’s a bold statement. In the United States, about a quarter million books on entrepreneurship, business, or economics will be published in the coming year. So why am I so high on this one? It’s because Pattern Breakers is only incidentally about business or economics. It’s about the mindset of creation and it creates a new language to think about entrepreneurship. Therein lies its unique power.

Don’t get me wrong. In the canon of business books there are many great and indispensable works. My list would include Clayton M. Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, on the reasons mature companies struggle to create breakthrough innovations and therefore create opportunities for startups to enter their market with a disruptive technology or business model. I insist every aspiring entrepreneur read Christopher Lochhead’s Play Bigger, on why the game is to create new “categories” of commercial endeavor; it’s required reading here at data.world and we have our own Point of View, which we were inspired to create after reading the book. When you’re ready to go deep on the ecosystem of venture capitalism, The Power Law by Sebastian Mallaby is the Bible, Torah, or whatever religious or meditative text you would like to compare it to. I’ll humbly include my own book, The Entrepreneur’s Essentials, which is essentially about the inner journey of the entrepreneur, the search for meaning in business, and a few tips on the outer experience as well.

But Pattern Breakers, well.., it breaks the pattern. It’s less of a business book than a kind of cultural anthropology of the social, historical, and cultural dynamics that make for successful startups. Among his contributions in this volume, Mike (who full disclosure is a good friend and long-time investor in me) creates a new language and a grammar to understand these dynamics.

The authors don’t come to the gestalt of startups casually. Entrepreneur and investor Mike is co-founder and partner at Floodgate, a Silicon Valley venture firm that has backed such icons as Twitter, Twitch, Lyft, Okta, Cruise Automation, and Bazaarvoice (plus data.world). Ziebelman, his co-author, is co-founder of Palo Alto Venture Partners and teaches entrepreneurship at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

“Founders don’t create outlier start-ups by mastering established recipes or best practices,” Mike writes. “Instead, they embrace pattern-breaking as a core part of their job description and start-up journey.”

Every entrepreneur will nod their head in agreement with that. And best practice, analytic techniques, and management tools are critical, as I know Mike would agree. But often, even with hard work and discipline, we beat the odds to break patterns by luck, hit or miss, good timing, or just serendipity. Mike suggests a fuller view of the entrepreneurial forest if we want to better nurture and select the venture trees with which to build breakthrough businesses.

As Christopher Lochhead — mentioned above (and also a friend) — put it in this conversation with Mike in his Follow Your Different podcast: “It’s a masterclass in visionary thinking.”

Broadly, this sphere of wisdom and experience that Mike and his co-author Zieberman share to illustrate the zen of pattern-breaking can be considered in two hemispheres: First is the nature and criticality of social and economic inflection points; second, he articulates the imperative for entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs to live — emotionally and intellectually — in the future, and not in the present.

Inflection, insights, ideas, and movements

Let’s begin with the hemisphere of inflection points, the currents in society and the economy that he likens to the waves that surfers must find, capture, and navigate to propel themselves toward shore. To carry the metaphor, the entrepreneur captures the inflection wave with his or her insights, connects the insights with their specific ideas, and then powers the ideas forward by creating movements of investors, partners, and ultimately customers who are in fact desperate for innovations that are truly breakthrough. Keep those four notions in mind: obvious inflections, non-obvious insights, inventive ideas, and popular, even revolutionary movements.

Inflections are the big waves of change: Gutenberg’s movable type that birthed the Reformation, or the federal government’s creation of the internet. Other notable inflections would include the telegraph, radio and television, smart phones, and now of course that tsunami — artificial intelligence or AI. Social or political inflections would include the American revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Bolshevik revolution, the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the global financial crisis. A natural inflection, of course, is climate change.

But the waves, these inflections, are not what carry us to a new future. The inflections are generally obvious to most people, if not everyone. It’s the non-obvious insights of possibility enabled by the inflection that count: Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible into German and its distribution on the printed page that followed the printing press inflection; or Marc Andreessen’s first Mosaic browser that — along with Tim Berner-Lee’s World Wide Web — made the internet a global network of commerce and communication. A thousand innovations now unfolding in medicine, education, governance, and environmental protection are being carried along on the river of inflection that is AI.

As with Andreessen’s browser, the next steps beyond an inflection are the unique, inventive ideas grounded in those inflection-driven — but non-obvious — insights which lead to new products or services. Just one fascinating example of this continuum starts with the iPhone, born of Steve Job’s “insight” that the inflection point of ubiquitous connectivity and more powerful cellular and WiFi networks created space for a new kind of phone, the smartphone — both an idea and an inflection. One subsequent “idea,” separately hit upon by Uber and Lyft, was that the GPS chip that Jobs rolled out as part of iPhone 4s in 2011, would allow individuals with such a device in hand to be geo-located remotely down to within a meter. Suddenly a century-old model of taxis and municipality-rationed license medallions was obsolete. The spectacular success of both companies followed on the ridesharing “movement” as millions of people realized they were no longer trapped by the fickleness of cabs.

I won’t try and list the many other examples that abound in this book, including Airbnb, Tesla, Netflix, SpaceX, Twitter (now X), and more. And I emphasize that this is not another recipe or a four-step guide to replicate those successes. But along with the inspiration of those case studies, and Mike’s’ high-altitude overview of how the entrepreneurial ecology actually functions, he includes a number of exercises and “stress tests” to scrutinize your own perceptions and ideas.

Your insights must be non-obvious. Others may be on the scent, he writes, but you must be uniquely early on the trail to innovations. Insights must be true; falsehoods don’t count. Insights must harness the power of inflections, and if they harness several inflections all the better. The ideas that will succeed must be at the convergence of inflection and insights. Transient novelties don’t count. Ultimately, your inflection-embedded idea must answer the question, “Why now?” and your insight and ideas must be tethered to the future. Critically, insight and ideas must create a movement of believers, in the form of investors, co-founders, employees, and customers who will live in a different future created by your idea.

When you embrace this ethos and mindset, you are not incrementally making product or service improvements. You are forcing a choice — and not a comparison: When Apple introduced the iPhone, people didn’t ask, “How does that compare to the Blackberry?” When OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, people didn’t ask, “How does that compare to Google search?” And when Tesla introduced the Model S, people didn’t ask, “How does that compare to a Mercedes?”

As Mike framed in his conversation with Christopher Lochhead: “You have to depart from the consensus to be a radical outperformer. It’s true in every field of human endeavor. It’s true in science, it’s true in art. Take Picasso with cubism, nobody said, ‘How does that compare to Van Gogh’?”

The key is to stop trying to think up the business you want to create, but to better understand the inflection points surrounding us and where they will lead. This is the process leading to true innovation and radical breakthroughs.

“For founders who are in search of an idea, starting with inflections — rather than trying to think of a start-up — will increase their chances of landing on an idea with the potential to create radical change,” is Mike’s counter-intuitive counsel.

Exploring the terrain of the future

The second large hemisphere in this work makes the case that successful entrepreneurs must inhabit the future. They must be constantly tinkering with the latest technology, must be imagining the non-obvious thing that does not yet exist — and not just work and think on the obvious edges of the present.

“Lots of people deeply explore the territory of the obvious because it’s so easy for them to locate,” Mike writes. “Breakthrough ideas, however, come from exploring the unknown terrain of the future and discovering things that are likely to radically change how people live. This requires founders to live a radically different future. The more radically the future differs from the present, the more radically it departs from the way people currently live, and therefore the less obvious the truths about that future are likely to be.”

But he adds a note of caution: “Living in the future is not for everyone; very few have the confidence to take that path.”

There is so much more in this groundbreaking book, from the values and skills you should seek in your co-founders to the jargon and excessive detail you should avoid when pitching investors. “Treat every investor like a partner in crime,” he advises.

Don’t be discouraged by non-believers, who will only understand consensus ideas. They far outnumber the believers, and it’s the believers you must find and who will understand your non-consensus insights. Keep in mind that entrepreneurship is a hero’s journey, but that you are never the hero. Your provocative story is the hero. So is your vision of the future.

He offers wisdom and intuition from a broad cast of thinkers, from philosophers to new age authors to sages of African folk wisdom. I love his counsel from Rollo May, a psychologist who shared many of the ideas of one of my own great heroes, Victor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor who famously authored Man’s Search for Meaning.

“The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice,” Mike writes. “It is conformity.”

So if you are ready to embrace a future that will be radically different from today, particularly as the wave of inflections wrought by the advent of AI sweeps over us, then put down whatever you are reading, break the bounds of conformity, and grab a copy of Pattern Breakers. And I also recommend his conversation with Christopher Lochhead, a pioneer of the concept of “category design”, which he says is the essence of Mike’s book — a new category of entrepreneurial mindset.

“… in different ways, all of us unwittingly let our own self-imposed limits govern how we think and act throughout our lives. The trickiest part is that they can be so embedded in our assumptions that we fail to even realize they exist, not to mention how they hold us back,” Mike advises. “And by recognizing those limits, you can free yourself from them, which makes it far more likely you will become a pattern breaker and create a breakthrough that honors the gift of your time.”

Was Bazaarvoice a pattern breaker?

When Brant Barton and I started Bazaarvoice, many thought we were dumb to leave Coremetrics. Although I stayed on the Board of Directors at Coremetrics, Bazaarvoice was truly calling my soul. Close friends that I had known for six years in eCommerce told me that it would never work. “Are you serious, Brett? Customer reviews on websites? Amazon is crazy to do that! In our traditional retail business, we’ll get stuck with all of that inventory in our warehouses when our competitors bash our products online. You’ll face all types of pushback in allowing negative reviews on our site. And you are going to moderate it all? How will you know what we will allow? How will you scale that? How will you even project how many reviews you are going to get? The cost of that will crush you. You’ll have a low margin business!”

Only three retailers in the US had customer reviews on their websites at that time — it was 2005. To place that in a historical context, 2005 was two years before the iPhone came out, it was a time when Facebook was closed to the public (it was only a year old) and only existed for some college networks, and it was a time when Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram hadn’t even been invented. But Brant and I knew the social wave was coming — we could feel it in our bones. It was within the destiny of all of us. It had been with us since the earliest days of commerce, since the beginning of the bazaars. Hence we named the company Bazaarvoice, or the “voice of the marketplace”, symbolizing that word of mouth had always been the most powerful force. We named it after Chapter 4 of The Cluetrain Manifesto, “Markets Are Conversations” (a must-read chapter). It was an idea that was both non-consensus and right for its unique moment in history. And it was lucky in its timing that the social media wave was about to hit hard, causing brands and retailers alike to go scrambling to find their footing and catch the wave. Mike contacted me to invest in it, and the rest is history. From zero to over $100m in ARR, only raising $23 million of capital and having $13 million left in the bank when we went public in 2012 with over a billion-dollar market cap and served thousands of customers all over the world in over 30 international languages.