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 fundedTwitter, Twitch, and Okta, for exampletook 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 Universitys Peter Ziebelman discovered contradicts accepted wisdom and upends todays 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 pointsevents that offer the potential for new empowering capabilitiesare 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. With intriguing and entertaining storytelling based on a lifetime of experience, PATTERN BREAKERS vividly illustrates what differentiates breakthrough ideas from those that initially seem promising but that meet with mediocre results, and why others that initially seem unworthyeven idioticend up radically changing how people live.