Where have the heretics gone?
In our latest letter, Mike Maples Jr. and I explore what apostasy means in the age of AI.
Friends,
Where have the heretics gone?
There is a feeling in the venture landscape at the moment of intense, ferocious orthodoxy. Everyone agrees that AI is a significant technology. The question of its impact is only one of degree. Does it count as heresy to simply pay more for the same company everyone agrees is compelling? Equally, is there any originality in sniffing that prices are too high?
AI is not the only example. To a lesser extent, the same can be said of sectors once considered untouchable. With the exception of contrarians like Founders Fund, VCs of the 2010s balked at backing defense and industrial companies. Now, they are in fashion. The result is that the space for heresy has shrunk.
Of course, this is very good news, for it is usually in periods of fervid homogeneity that a new paradigm emerges. Only when everything looks dull and solved is it possible for an idea to emerge and flip the perspective.
Floodgate founder Mike Maples, Jr. has made a career out of finding unlikely ideas, primed for major impact. More than many other VCs, he has made a concerted effort to uncover what it takes for an idea to be truly “different.” And so, in this edition of “Letters to a Young Investor,” I asked for his thoughts on what constitutes a true heresy and where investors might find them in the age of AI.
You’ll find an honest appraisal of the difficulty of thinking differently and what it takes to translate that into investing decisions.
What you’ll learn:
The three ingredients of heresy. Heresy isn’t just about inverting the consensus position. To find a truly heretical idea, Mike argues that a founder needs to have gone through (i) a different life experience that allows them to (ii) see something others don’t, and then must (iii) have the courage to act on it.
Using AI to solve a problem. Many of the companies gaining attention in AI are using the technology for its own sake, not to solve a real problem. Mike is increasingly excited by founders from the material sciences and drug discovery spaces that have been able to leverage modern AI to solve problems they’ve thought about for years.
Finding “new scarcities.” Every new technology creates a new scarcity. As Mike explains, when computation became cheap, software became scarce, given how important and useful it had suddenly become. Similarly, AI has commoditized some forms of cognition while others remain unsolved.
Investing in the “capability cycle.” Rather than trying to time the hype cycle, Mike recommends focusing on how the underlying capabilities are progressing. Then, find the entrepreneurs who have waited their whole careers to build something that new capability unlocks.
Recognizing heresy. It is difficult to summon heretical ideas unbidden. However, Mike has learned to recognize it when he sees it, noticing the mix of excitement and discomfort such ideas tend to produce.
As a refresher, “Letters to a Young Investor” is a series designed to give readers like you an intimate look at the strategies, insights, and wisdom of the world’s best investors. We do that via a back-and-forth correspondence that we publish in full – giving you a chance to peek into the inbox of legendary venture capitalists. Here’s a selection of previous correspondences:
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Mario’s letter
Subject: AI Heresies
From: Mario Gabriele
To: Mike Maples, Jr.
Date: Tuesday, October 28, 2025 at 5:00 PM GMT
Mike,
The English writer Graham Greene addressed the matter well: “Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.” Greene spoke from experience. His novel The Power and the Glory, chronicling the struggles of a Mexican “whisky priest,” was viewed as so heterodox by the Catholic Church that it considered issuing a blanket ban.
In a previous conversation, you mentioned the topic of “heresy” and its role in the context of startups. That immediately intrigued me. It is, after all, an emotive, laden word. Reading your last letter, I began to see how it might fit into your model of investing. This notion seemed to be embedded in your recollections of Airbnb, Figma, Twitter, Applied Intuition, and Twitch; that a kind of profound dissidence is not merely intriguing, but required for a truly outlier outcome.
In one sense, venture investors have articulated a version of this wisdom for some time. A good student of startups now knows that it is not enough to be right – you must be contrarian and right. If your company advances a consensus view of the world, even in success, it will struggle to make a big enough impact. But from your work, it’s clear that you think about heresy at a deeper level, taking inspiration from historical figures like Galileo. I’d be keen to hear what this word means to you as an investor, and what distinguishes authentic heresy from mere originality.
More concretely, I’d be interested in hearing how you think about heresy in the context of AI. On the one hand, the AI world remains roiled by disagreements. Deeply felt philosophical differences animate pockets of the industry. On one end of the spectrum are accelerationists who believe human flourishing and national competitiveness require us to hit the gas; on the other end are “doomers” who believe the end is nigh. In the middle sit a wide range of builders and researchers who see both real risk and immense possibility.
While this debate plays a critical role in the zeitgeist, it doesn’t especially seem to perturb the direction of capital allocation. Seemingly without exception, venture investors are keen to invest in the current wave, even as technological breakthroughs appear to slow and valuations inflate. A grand financial consensus has appeared to form in the private markets, with the only real discussion being the degree to which AI will change everything.
Over the past six months in particular, this seems to have created a culture of orthodoxy and replication. Every few days, we see a new prompt-to-code product or browser agent released. Each week, an “AI for X” vertical takes the stage. Nearly all seem to receive backing from credible investors ready to believe that this one, this umpteenth iteration, will be the winner. (From stage right, Peter Thiel shouts “mimesis!”) Some of these startups will undoubtedly work, and a sparse few may succeed outlandishly. But when creative homogeneity seems to have taken so firm a hold, where is the space for heresy? Amid glossy uniformity, what does “different” look like today?
As you know better than I do, true heresy is not merely the repudiation of the old model. There is little value in simply declaring AI to be moribund. The real breakthrough will come from introducing a new paradigm; by arriving orthogonally, carrying a strange truth. Where might this come from? It is usually not the job of investors to come up with heresies, but the best tend to be gifted at knowing where it might originate. What dynamics are you heeding? As greater sums are ploughed into escalating an existing paradigm, where have you started directing your attention?
It is a kind of market parlor game to compare eras. But given that you lived through the dotcom boom and bust as an entrepreneur, I wonder what rhymes with that era you hear today. Does this remind you of the late-90s or do the comparisons obscure rather than reveal?
More tactically, how have you sought to play the AI revolution at Floodgate? What is the kind of risk you’ve been happiest buying? You’ve written about the importance of timing in startup success. How much do you think about timing technological cycles as you deploy capital? Is it useful to have a sense of this in your head, or does the game return, unerringly, to listening and paying attention to special people when you come across them, regardless of the market’s machinations?
With gratitude,
Mario
Mike’s response
Subject: AI heresies
From: Mike Maples, Jr.
To: Mario Gabriele
Date: Thursday, November 13, 2025 at 12:24PM PT
Dear Mario,
Your letter about heresy arrived at a weird moment for me. Or, maybe it’s not weird at all. Maybe you chose these questions because all of us are in a weird moment.
I’ve been sitting with your Graham Greene quote and your questions for more than two weeks now. (Sorry about that.) One reason is that something keeps bothering me: If heresy is freedom of thought, then do I actually have any heresies left in me?
Or, do I just have a bunch of sophisticated-sounding opinions that I’ve convinced myself are heresies because they buy me status at dinner parties and keynote pitches?
I keep feeling that there’s a bigger question behind your questions. Am I, or the broader VC industrial complex I’m part of, actually spotting genuine heresy anymore? Is it possible that “seeming contrarian” has become the new orthodoxy?
The honest answer is that I don’t know.
And that’s scary to say because they tell me my job is to spot non-consensus futures. Let me see if I can work through this honestly, including the parts where I’m confused.
What heresy actually is
Here’s how I think about it: Contrarians say everyone thinks A, so I’ll say B. That’s still playing the same game, and just taking the opposite position. Heretics are saying something different. They’re saying the whole A/B way of thinking about the problem is broken. Usually it’s because they’ve seen an anomaly that the old pattern can’t explain.
With Airbnb, Brian, Joe, and Nate didn’t start by thinking about hospitality. They were broke friends trying to pay next month’s rent. Renting their apartment to strangers seemed like an easy way to make fast money. But when they offered their apartment to guests, they noticed something surprising: if you make staying with strangers feel meaningfully human, people will choose it. That insight didn’t fit any existing pattern.
This is what I’m trying to figure out: is heresy a cognitive difference (seeing something others don’t see) or a courage difference (acting on something others won’t act on) or a life experience difference (seeing something because you experienced something a whole bunch of other people are about to see?)
And actually (this is where I think I’ve been wrong) maybe genuine heresy requires all three. You need the perceptual difference to notice something meaningful, the relevant experience to know when that perception matters, and the courage to act on it. Which might explain why heresy is so rare.
You can see all three in the Airbnb story: You notice what others overlook. You act before anyone else believes or cares. Your life circumstances exposed you to this truth first.
What’s happening right now
There’s far less room for heretical insight in AI than most people admit. Most debates, like big vs. small models, open vs. closed source, and agents vs. assistants, are just different moves inside the same game. If history rhymes, the real opportunities will emerge from somewhere surprising, from a place or anomaly everyone has dismissed.
Something else is happening too. The founders raising money aren’t necessarily the ones who’ve noticed something true about the world. They’re the ones who can tell a good story about platform shifts and timing. That part sounds like 1999 all over again.
Here’s the scary part: a well-told story can sound exactly like an insight. It has the same structure and words. But real insight comes from noticing something specific about reality. Story increasingly comes from noticing what gets funded.