Pattern Breakers

Few startup founders follow a path to success like Daphne Koller, a polymath whose academic career in machine learning, computer vision, and computational biology make her a force far beyond the business arena. Koller left her academic career at Stanford in 2012 to co-found Coursera, the world’s largest platform for massive open online courses (MOOCs). After building the company into a global phenomenon she left Coursera in 2016 to become chief computing officer at Calico, and in 2018 she founded insitro, a drug discovery startup. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr. of Floodgate talks with Koller about the origins of Coursera and the challenges the company faced in its early days, as well as its lasting impact for learners worldwide. She also discusses what she sees in the future for insitro and why she believes so strongly in machine learning-driven drug discovery and development.

On this special episode of Pattern Breakers, host Mike Maples Jr. of Floodgate joins LinkedIn founder and legendary investor Reid Hoffman for a conversation on Hoffman’s podcast Masters of Scale, where iconic business leaders share lessons and strategies that have helped them grow the world's most fascinating companies. Mike discusses the insights he’s gathered from decades of investing, inflection theory, what the latest AI sea change means for the future of business, and ideas from his new national bestselling book, Pattern Breakers.

Today is a huge day for Pattern Breakers, the book.

Co-written with Peter Zeibelman of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Pattern Breakers has been dubbed “the most important start-up book of the last ten years” by legendary entrepreneur and co-creator of the Lean Startup movement Steve Blank. Pattern Breakers draws from decades of experience in entrepreneurship and venture capital from its co-authors to offer a radical set of new ideas for how entrepreneurs, investors, and corporate leaders can dominate the future.