Today I walk with Ann Miura-Ko, co-founding partner of Floodgate. Ann has spent almost 18 years building Floodgate around a deliberately small, non-consensus fund model, made early bets on companies like Lyft and TaskRabbit, and teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford, and now she's watching AI rewrite the lean startup playbook in real time. She gets into the AI agent inside one portfolio company that quietly caught millions of dollars in missed credit, and why she believes not losing is not the same as winning.
We get into:
• Why she waited nearly 18 years to grow Floodgate's fund size, and how staying small means a $1 billion exit still moves the needle for her investors
• Making debate opponents cry for a slice of pizza, and the permission that gave her to be disagreeable for the rest of her career
• SmarterDx, the company she couldn't get other investors to take seriously at Series A, that went on to exit for over $1 billion
• The math behind "founder friendly" investing, and why a $100M exit barely registers against a $1 billion fund
So much more!
TIMESTAMPS
(00:00) Ann Miura-Ko, Co-Founding Partner, Floodgate
(01:35) Making debate opponents cry for a slice of pizza
(05:41) Truth-seeking VS defending your ego
(11:12) How Mike Maples treated her as an intellectual equal from day one
(18:04) Being told she was "average" before finding her calling
(26:07) How AI is rewriting the lean startup playbook
(36:35) Floodgate's bet to stay small while other firms scale up
(39:53) The AI agent that caught millions in missed credits
(46:43) SmarterDx: the $1B exit no other investor wanted
(48:49) The real math behind a "founder friendly" investor
(53:55) Category design and why Lyft had to break the law to launch
(1:08:39) The Toyota Corolla he drove for 25 years to buy her a piano
(1:11:53) Being the only woman in her electrical engineering class
(1:16:37) Turning 50 and her year of saying yes
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