Top Silicon Valley Investor to Entrepreneurs: ‘Stop Copying Zuckerberg’

Mike Maples, the founder of Silicon Valley-based venture firm Floodgate Capital, has warned young entrepreneurs to watch the language they use when describing their ideas and to stop copying industry figures such as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Maples, the founder of the extremely successful Silicon Valley venture firm Floodgate Capital, has some tips for young tech entrepreneurs — stop trying to be Mark Zuckerberg and stop trying to invent catchy hooks and lines for new technology. According to Maples, terms like “Move fast and break things,” “Robots are eating the jobs,” and “Software is eating the world” do not have the same impact as they used to.

“On the one hand, ‘Move fast and break things’ is a great rallying cry to go fast, to cut through the BS and get things done,” Maples tells Business Insider. “But ‘moving fast and breaking things’ is the same thing that causes fake news to happen on your platform.'”

Maples complaint seems to be a well known one across Silicon Valley, the popular HBO TV series also titled Silicon Valley follows a group of young entrepreneurs trying to break into the tech scene. A running joke throughout the series is tech CEO’s using the term “we are changing the world” when describing frivolous new ideas such as a pizza delivery drone service.

“The tech industry uses immature language in society,” Maples says. “‘Move fast and break things,’ ‘Software is eating the world,’ ‘Artificial intelligence’ — whatever that means — ‘Robots are gonna eat the jobs,’ ‘We’re going to disrupt this or that…’ This type of language is problematic. It’s pervasive.”

Maples claims many of the popular phrases used throughout Silicon Valley inspire fear: “We need to do a better job of helping people see the future through a lens of optimism and hope rather than insecurity and fear,” Maples said. “Imagine if Thomas Edison said, ‘I’m disrupting kerosene oil lamps.’ That’s not leadership — I don’t know what you’d call that. The tech industry will succeed if the way we describe abundance is so exciting that people want to get in line and wait for it, the way they get in line for a new iPhone.”

Maples discussed how influential tech has become saying: “Tech used to be an industry of counterculture folks who ‘raised the pirate flag. That works when you’re in the counterculture. But tech has become incredibly embedded in the culture at large, so it’s time for the industry to take on responsible language. You can’t talk like a pirate if you’re the one running the pirate show.”