10 ms·

I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA

• dash2 4mo ago
  Do you have any policy recommendations for governments that could help public companies preserve their culture?
  • eries 4mo ago
    Right now, in most developed countries and especially in the United States, the defaults for corporate governance are set to a very extractive batch of so-called best practices. Organizations that want to have longevity, be mission-driven, and protect themselves have to proactively and at their own expense change away from the defaults. We could certainly imagine resetting those defaults to something more aligned to human flourishing.
• zelias 4mo ago
  Big fan of your work! Let's say this has already happened and ossified across large, formerly-innovative companies that now have so much size and inertia behind them that it might take decades for one to "fail" in a traditional sense. What can be done to reverse the process?
  • eries 4mo ago
    I won't sugar-coat this, for many companies this will be extremely difficult. but, as I wrote about it my previous book, sometimes conditions conspire to make radical transformation possible. it usually takes a crisis or an extremely bold leader to decide to take such a big swing. Unfortunately, a lot of leaders who do have the moral authority and power to attempt such a thing do not really know what structural changes to demand. in fact, they tend to focus on the typical management/leadership stuff: business model, org chart, strategy, vision. These things are important. But there is a deeper layer that tends to get overlooked or ignored: structure, governance, boards, the relationship with investors. In the new book, I try to tackle both topics in a new way, so that future leaders will know what to ask for when and if they have the opportunity to try.
    • andsoitis 4mo ago
      > sometimes conditions conspire to make radical transformation possible. it usually takes a crisis or an extremely bold leader to decide to take such a big swing. Example of a company where this has happened?
• eries 4mo ago
  For those that want to go deeper with _Incorruptible_, I've spent the past few months doing hundreds of interviews and events discussing its various themes and topics. I'm having Claude Code summarize this progress along the way at https://howisincorruptiblegoing.com/ https://howisincorruptiblegoing.com/ You can also see the various accolades, reviews, and awards that it's accumulated so far.
  • Jaauthor 4mo ago
    As an author, I'm navigating SO many angry people who are enraged at the idea of using AI tools in writing. How are you managing that?
    • eries 4mo ago
      As the old joke goes, "Very, very carefully." I used AI extensively in the research, editing, and promotion phases of creating the book (and even shared screen with a few podcast hosts who wanted to see the solveit platform from Answer.AI up close). To be clear, I never let the AI write for me; I am not a fan of "vibe creating" of any kind. Instead, I tried to use the AI to improve my own skills so that the final artifact was better than it would have been before. I know people are up in arms about this right now, but shouldn't at least some of blame for that fall on the tech industry itself, for how these tools are designed, promoted, and sold? I think in the long run, society will achieve a more healthy equilibrium. But in the meantime, it's gonna be a bit rocky.
      • Jaauthor 4mo ago
        Good points - I'm of the same mind. Thanks for reminding me that I'm not crazy!
      • wyclif 4mo ago
        shouldn't at least some of blame for that fall on the tech industry itself Is that you, Eric 'Otter' Stratton from "Animal House"? You know, "I'm pre-law." "I thought you were pre-med." "What's the difference?"
  • 4mo ago
• andsoitis 4mo ago
  What do you think are the hallmarks of a great company mission?
  • eries 4mo ago
    I want to distinguish between a mission and a mission statement. I will not help you wordsmith your mission statement. I frankly don't think it matters. But a great mission generally combines three things: 1. a long-term commitment to maximize some aspect of human flourishing (in the book I explain how this is the true definition of what it means to create a for-profit venture) 2. a set of values that include a determination to make principled decisions aligned with this goal, such that every decision the org makes is coherent 3. the strength to resist both the inner temptation and the outer pressure to defect, betray, or otherwise abandon the long-term goal In the book I go into a lot more detail about how to do this, including how to make fiduciary commitments to the human beings you'd rather die than betray.
    • gcheong 4mo ago
      "1. a long-term commitment to maximize some aspect of human flourishing (in the book I explain how this is the true definition of what it means to create a for-profit venture" How does this square with the widely taught business-school definition of a for-profit entity being something that aims to maximize shareholder value?
      • ptrott2017 4mo ago
        Not eries (obviously) but if you switch out shareholder for stakeholder i.e. maximise stakeholder value, you gain a wider set of responsibilities more aligned with Eric's comment. This is in itself not a new idea, it partly emerged out of the work of R. Edward Freeman. His original book on stakeholder management was published in 1984 and over the last decade has become at least a regular discussion topic at many business schools. However, the idea needs to gain far more momentum. Hopeful Eric Reis's new book also helps move the discussions forward - looking forward to reading it.
• akurilin 4mo ago
  Looking forward to reading this. Still have a signed copy of The Lean Startup from an event in Seattle from 15 years ago. The book had a big part in pushing me towards doing my own lean startup just a year later, so, thank you.
  • eries 4mo ago
    thank you! I appreciate you sharing. As an author, you never get tired of hearing stories likethis.
• mrdrqr 4mo ago
  What parts of The Lean Startup would you update for the AI era?
  • eries 4mo ago
    none of them, really. Watch this video about the development of Claude Code and tell me if it sounds familiar: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7470133219280191488/?originTrackingId=LwiHI%2BRVTxeaS0Teh0TRXg%3D%3D https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7470133... Of course, many of the tactics and examples in the book are now a bit dated, so if I did an "AI edition" I guess we would update it with new stories and new tips on how to use various AI-powered tools to accelerate. But I think the principles have stood up pretty well.
• fapi1974 4mo ago
  Are the lessons you have distilled applicable to other institutions in society which decline due to corruption? How is corruption different from your concept of financial gravity?
  • eries 4mo ago
    Yes. In the book, I do my best to explain how our current for-profit and non-profit labels don't really make sense, and that therefore these issues are pervasive in society (public/private sector has similar issues, as I discuss in the later chapters). Corruption = the symptom Gravity = the force that causes it In the book, I give the example of a bridge that collapses. If you ask an engineer "why did it collapse" you'll be annoyed if they say "gravity" even though that is technically correct. If we go examine the wreckage and notice that the metal bolts have been corroded beyond recognition, we can start to think through what went wrong and what to do about it going forward.
    • altairprime 4mo ago
      Only an engineer under severe pressure would snark about gravity to leadership about a bridge collapse, though. A good engineer would challenge the missing context instead. If you ask an engineer “why did it collapse” without the correct statement of context, then of course you’ll get an answer you dislike, because they’re going to (as is human norm) assume their own context rather than the none you provided. Instead, ask better questions. “Are we liable for this collapse?” is usually what I would expect a corporate leader to want answered, and so as a senior engineer I would reply to the context-free question “why did it collapse?” with a context clarification request: “Are you asking about the immediate cause, about the root cause, or about which company should be held accountable?”. There’s nothing quite like watching an exec choke out an admission of interest in legal liability rather than engineering factors after interrupting an engineer working on the collapse who knows full well not to write checks that will get them cashiered :)
      • eries 4mo ago
        All we have to do is apply this same parable to the "engineering" of organizations, and you'll be on the right track.
• k2xl 4mo ago
  Why did you decide to write this book?
  • eries 4mo ago
    I've just seen this problem up close and personal for a lot of years in a row. I'm sick and tired of helping people become rich and miserable, creating great companies only for them to be destroyed out of the gates. What is the point of all this carnage? Who is it for?
• Eridrus 4mo ago
  Is it realistic to make organizations that stay on mission long after the founder is gone? I listened to a podcast interview you did where you talked positively about the Novo Nordisk Foundation as a successful governance story, but when I think of long lived foundations, I think of the Ford Foundation and the Hewlet Foundation that have significantly drifted from the founders' visions despite being non-profits. Many people think it is better for foundations to spend down all their resources before the founder is gone to prevent this drift and loss of efficacy. Have you done any studies of what made long lived foundations drift on their mission despite no profit incentive?
  • eries 4mo ago
    I'm not an academic, so no, I have not done any of these studies, but good news, everyone: other people have. The specific structure of Nova Nordisk is not just a foundation. I think the two-entity structure, where a foundation oversees or governs a for-profit company, is uniquely suited to longevity of a mission precisely because it combines the stewardship orientation of the foundation with the performance orientation of the for-profit subsidiary. The data shows (for what it's worth) that such structures are five or six times more likely to live to year 50 compared to a standard for-profit company. I give examples in the book also of pure foundations that have lost this structure or have lost their mission integrity too. I really think you need both for it to endure.
    • ajb 4mo ago
      Do you have any thoughts on Mozilla? It has a two-entity structure, but there are a lot of complaints that it is not sticking to its mission (or, slightly differently, that it's not succeeding at it, due to poor strategic choices). (Apologies if you already addressed this somewhere. Thanks for doing this)
      • eries 4mo ago
        I know they are going through a big restructuring and I think these issues are part of why, but I am not close enough to the details to comment.
• tobiakinpeluyes 4mo ago
  Appreciate your book The Lean startup
• chairmanwow1 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  • turtlesdown11 4mo ago
    its funny bc anyone can just look at your submitted ads
• rdeboo 4mo ago
  Does "financial gravity" imply that noble missions are generally less profitable? Is there a way to align that (maybe by governments structuring the market with taxes / regulations)? Is that realistic?
  • eries 4mo ago
    You're going to find this hard to believe, but actually, mission-driven companies tend to outperform their conventional counterparts. The problem is that financial gravity tends to destroy them before they can become bona fide competitors. In the book, I mostly focus on what we as leaders can do to protect our organizations from this force. Of course, it'd be nice if the people who make market-related policy were busy trying to encourage and inspire and incentivize long-term thinking instead of short-term thinking. That would make all of our lives so much easier and so much better.
• zzsshh 4mo ago
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• officialchicken 4mo ago
  How are corruption and enshittification related?
  • eries 4mo ago
    I didn't want to be seen as trying to co-opt Cory's thesis or (very memorable) phrase. His critique is more focused on the tech industry and its particular illness at this time. I wanted a word that was much broader, capturing how this tech behavior is one symptom of a larger illness that has been afflicting our economy for some time. So I settled on the old-fashioned term "corruption"
    • throwaway132448 4mo ago
      Do you not think using a word in this way undermines its actual meaning?
      • eries 4mo ago
        Meanings are contested. The way I use the word is much closer to the way our grandparents used the word than our modern usage. How did it change? Could it change back? I think so.
• ixxie 4mo ago
  I've long been suspicious of the conflicts of interest induced by exit-orientated investment models. I'm curious if you think cooperative businesses leveraging non-voting preferred shares, community shares and other coop investment instruments are more resilient against this type of corruption. I'm wonder how you see the tradeoffs these models have against traditional LLC/VC models and how you would mitigate them.
  • eries 4mo ago
    I hate the word "exit" altogether. It's only the investors who are leaving Middle Earth; the rest of us are still try to make this thing work. I address your question in much more detail in the book, using examples as varied as Mondragon in Spain, John Lewis Partnership in the UK, and Vanguard and credit unions here in the US. We actually have pretty good evidence that these other structures are more resilient and more stable than the classic "best practices" we have all been indoctrinated into. Unfortunately, most of us have been told that these approaches are incompatible. You either go "big" and try to make a lot of money, have investors, have a grand vision, etc. Or you go "small" and do something "ethical" and non-extractive. So many of us have been taught that it is the fate of the small to be destroyed by the big, since they are more ruthless and more powerful. But the evidence doesn't really support this just-so story. My goal with the book is to help those who want to build mission-driven companies to realize that this is a source of strength, not weakness, and act accordingly.
    • ixxie 4mo ago
      Thank you, I'm happy to hear you address these models and will definitely be reading your book! I think we need a "middle path" culture that finds a good balance between these pressures and values.
    • brentjanderson 4mo ago
      > So many of us have been taught that it is the fate of the small to be destroyed by the big, since they are more ruthless and more powerful. But the evidence doesn't really support this just-so story. This is the comment I came here to read. Thank you, I already have a copy of the book and intend to dig in more on these themes specifically.
• i_like_waiting2 4mo ago
  Huge fan of lean startup. With being able to build MVP in hours with AI, has the "build-measure-learn" loop collapsed into something fundamebtally different? Or did the bottleneck moved elsewhere?
  • i_like_waiting2 4mo ago
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  • deleted 4mo ago
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  • eries 4mo ago
    Learning has always been and still is the bottleneck. You can't outsource it to another country. You can't outsource it to a machine. At the end of the day, the bottleneck exists between the ears, and that process is slow and painful.
• m_a_g 4mo ago
  Any examples of corrupted companies that you’d like to share? I’m especially curious about your thoughts on Meta and Google, the biggest startups of their time and how they evolved.
  • tonymet 4mo ago
    Neither of those have been corrupted . They both seem to be carrying out their long term strategy extremely well.
  • eries 4mo ago
    I write about both companies (briefly) in the book. I've noticed in the comments I get from readers that people still feel very tenderly towards Google, remembering that incredible sense of idealism they instilled in so many of us when they went public. So I had to be very careful what I wrote about Google; I actually mostly left the critique to ex-Google employees, by quoting a dataset of people who had been at Google 10+ years and then wrote about their experience after leaving. Put together, those essay are heartbreaking. By contrast, I can say pretty much anything about Facebook and nobody seems to care. Yet, if you go back and read their S-1, you can see how they very much wanted to be seen as the mission-driven good guys. It's all quite sad, really. There are plenty more stories of corruption in the book. To be honest, it was a challenge to avoid having the whole thing read as bleak given how pervasive this corruption is today. I did my best to balance it out. You'll have to let me know if you think I got it right.
    • m_a_g 4mo ago
      I think you’re spot on. Facebook employees have accepted its fate. It has become a company of mercenaries. I’m surprised they folded more quickly than Google.
    • Barbing 4mo ago
      > I write about … [Meta] in the book. This mean you are now under gag order as you rise on the bestseller list? :) Lean Startup is awesome, can’t wait to read your new. Excited to read about the ostensibly-not-evil Costcos of the world and hope the smartest & wealthiest amongst us grok it, that we win more when others win.
• zurfer 4mo ago
  Is LTSE working the way you hoped?
  • eej71 4mo ago
    I'm of the opinion that the LTSE was built by people who didn't understand market structure which is why it continues to struggle. I understand the idea that they were after, but it seems like they could have wrapped that up in an ETF.
  • eries 4mo ago
    it's funny, people constantly criticize LTSE because it hasn't made "enough" progress (you can see one such example already on HN below). But since nobody has ever done anything remotely like this before, I am not sure how we are supposed to judge how much progress it "should" have made by now. and since everyone widely agrees that what we are attempting is "impossible" I am pretty impressed that we've managed to make any progress at all :)
• caputchin 4mo ago
  I would love to know more example of good and bad companies
  • eries 4mo ago
    The book is loaded with examples, I promise. Let me clarify one thing, though, which is that when we call a company "good" or "bad" we can't mean something like absolutely good or evil. No human enterprise can ever be truly perfect. So, rather, we have to identify what an organization is trying to do and whether the means it has chosen are actually appropriate to that goal. Then we can judge if the goal is aligned with human flourishing (good) or not (bad), and whether the org is consistent in pursuit of that goal (good) or not (bad), and whether it has the strength to continue (good) or not (bad).
• foo-bar-baz529 4mo ago
  The only thing that can topple Patagonia is Pattie Gonia
• ernsheong 4mo ago
  Well, what does "lean startup" mean in this AI age? what changes? what stays the same?
  • eries 4mo ago
    You can just watch Lenny's Podcast and you'll see how those principles are alive and well :)
    • cj 4mo ago
      can you share a TLDL for the sake of the AMA?
      • webglfan 4mo ago
        By "Lenny's Podcast" I believe Eric means this 2 hour podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzebbzIntFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzebbzIntFc Eric did a more recent one about his new book as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoJ1vTdHpks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoJ1vTdHpks I'd also love to see a proper TLDL, since Youtube's own Gemini-powered summary seems a bit too brief: "This conversation features Eric Ries, the creator of the Lean Startup methodology, discussing his philosophy, the current state of the startup movement, and his vision for the future of business. Key Takeaways & Concepts: The Lean Startup Methodology (14:04 - 27:52): Ries reflects on how his methodology has evolved from a controversial, insurgent idea to the industry standard. He clarifies common misconceptions, noting that a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is not about low quality or" EDIT: Actual Gemini (not YT embedded) can do a proper summarization: https://gemini.google.com/share/f9e0a84b95be https://gemini.google.com/share/f9e0a84b95be
• Lionga 4mo ago
  You give advice on startups, yet the two Startups mentioned raised lots of money and have not achieved any real success. Those who can do, those who can't teach?
  • eries 4mo ago
    I know you meant this comment as a criticism, but it actually raises a really interesting point of what we mean by "real success." I hope you will elaborate.
    • Lionga 4mo ago
      [flagged]
      • eries 4mo ago
        I guess then the jury is still out, then
• coderintherye 4mo ago
  What do you think of the current efforts to go from quarterly to semiannual corporate reporting in the way it is playing out in the current administration?
  • eries 4mo ago
    Well, given that it was the company I founded, LTSE, that made the original petition at the SEC to try to move in this direction, you can guess. At the time, everyone said it was a fool's errand. Now that it seems likely to succeed, we've mostly been written out of the story. However, the details matter a great deal, and I don't know that much about what the actual proposal the SEC is going to adopt is going to be. The last draft that I saw left me pretty worried. What's interesting to me is that, in all the hubbub, neither the journalists nor the policymakers seem that interested in the actual evidence that we have amassed in academia on this question. For example, one important study suggested that moving from semi-annual to quarterly reporting costs companies something like 5% of their market cap. It's incredibly expensive, not because generating the reports is expensive, but rather the evidence seems to be that companies under quarterly reporting start to run the company for the benefit of the report rather than for customers. That this is bad for investors, I hope you will see as self-evident.
• 0xbadcafebee 4mo ago
  > how a handful of companies (like Costco[..]) have successfully been structured to resist gravity "I came to (Jim Sinegal) once and I said, ‘Jim, we can’t sell this hot dog for a buck fifty," Jelineck recalled[..]. "We are losing our rear ends.’ And he said, ‘If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you." That's not structure, that's leadership. They were about to change the price, but one guy at the top with authority and an opinion said no. You could say "it's structure" that there was one guy at the top with authority, but it still depends on him having the right opinion. You need both a good structure and an unwaveringly idealistic (and correct) leader.
  • elevation 4mo ago
    > That's not structure, that's leadership. [...] one guy at the top [...] said no. Yeah, there's no rule structure that can't be skirted and subverted by new owners with different objectives. The most resilient way to preserve your values is to: Only take care, and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life. Teach them to your children and to your children's children. Your successors don't need to be your literal children, but if you turn your company over to "strangers with money" you can't be surprised when they do what they want with their new possession.
    • eries 4mo ago
      It is true that most companies fail the test of succession. Even in the comment that you've made here, we've left unanswered the question of who will decide who should be chosen as the successor? That is something that can be influenced, but only at the institutional or structural level of an organization. Obviously, more details in the book.
  • genxy 4mo ago
    Are you using Vale? Or is this just default Fable?
    • eries 4mo ago
• hmokiguess 4mo ago
  I've read The Lean Startup during undergrad and it was a bible to me at the time, thank you for your work, you got me into startup culture in a place where everyone else did not support of it. One question I have for you is on finances, I think that still remains an afterthought in startup hustle culture, and perhaps even by design, I feel like the system is designed so that VCs keep winning and founders rarely get the exit they deserve. What is your take on that?
  • eries 4mo ago
    Thank you for saying that. When I wrote that book, people like you were very much in my mind at the time. I'm really glad to hear you found it useful, even if the people around you didn't understand or support what you were trying to do. You're quite right. There are many, many problems with the current "best practices" including that many founders wind up with nothing even if the organization succeeds. In fact, one study I cite in the book found that something like 80% of founders of venture-backed companies will no longer be CEO even three years after an IPO.
    • ai_slop_hater 4mo ago
      > In fact, one study I cite in the book found that something like 80% of founders of venture-backed companies will no longer be CEO even three years after an IPO. Why? Is there something that inherently prevents founders to remain in control after IPO?
      • eries 4mo ago
        Yes, it's called today's governance "best practices." Many of them are actually quite value-destroying, and founders should run for the hills every time they hear that phrase.
  • jojopinli 4mo ago
    When starting a company, perhaps it’s best to consider something you love doing so much that staying there and nurturing the business is more important than exiting. That and, don’t accept money from strangers. :)
• throwaway132448 4mo ago
  Why do you anthropomorphize companies? Is it to absolve individuals of responsibility? > We've all experienced watching a company we love or admire be warped and broken beyond recognition; until it's a husk of its former self, or worse. I wanted to understand why. And I wanted to know what all of us can do to stop that from happening.
  • eries 4mo ago
    I happen to think that organizations are literally alive. They are superorganisms. To be more scientifically accurate, they are examples of the class of beings which are "emergent intelligence." I don't think there's any way to talk about this without running into the problem of anthropomorphization. So I tried to be really careful with it in the book. You'll have to judge for yourself if you think I got it right. And I'm especially sensitive to the question of accountability because you're right: today we mostly want to see these problems as being done by individual villains, because at least we can hold individuals accountable. How well is that going? It seems like we are breeding a class of people that are completely above accountability. I don't think that's tenable. I think in the long run, this system will collapse if it cannot hold the people responsible for atrocities accountable. Personally, I think the best way to do this is to understand the systems that are causing these behaviors today so that we can locate responsibility in the right place.
    • throwaway132448 4mo ago
      I think conflating emergent behaviour with life (let alone intelligence) as we had typically defined it, is unfortunate and obliterates a lot of nuance. I’d much rather we let things burn more quickly - there’s nothing sacred about these companies and no reason to believe they should not be transient. When you try to halt every small forest fire, like we have done since 2008, then uncontrolled destruction becomes inevitable. You’re too emotionally and financially invested in the status quo to be an instrument of change.
• tonymet 4mo ago
  HR has been receiving a lot of positive and negative attention over the last 8 years, culminating lately with some CEOs notably eliminating the HR org entirely. Do you see HR as a positive , negative or mixed force for driving “Incorruptibility “ ?
  • eries 4mo ago
    There's a whole chapter on this. I actually hate the phrase "human resources," because of course part of the problem with our modern world is that we are treating human beings as a resource to be mined. If people had paid more attention to the pioneering management theorist, Mary Parker Follett, who wrote more than a century ago, we wouldn't be in this mess. But of course, her work was almost entirely erased and forgotten, only rediscovered in the 1990s. Don't worry, I have a whole chapter about this in the new book.
    • tonymet 4mo ago
      thanks for the lead I'll read more.
  • nicksbg 4mo ago
    When it comes to this I think that the main problem is with hiring practices of people opa. If you do not have people with education either in legal/economy psychology you are not getting good People Ops team. You need to have a maximum value team. Also, an HR that has a right education can and will pushback against decisions that do not make sense such as removing employee that has essential know-how knowledge and that brings a value to the team. The problem is that a lot of people in management do not want to hear feedback and only want to be surrounded by positive thinking and people that they can micromanage (even while the ship is sinking). Hiring people that do not have right education is basically a way to avoid any feedback and criticism, while having people that will do work that they are not really educated for, but happy because of the salary. Another problem is gender disproportion in this field. You can't expect a literature major in HRBP role to understand micro and macro organization of the business and how it is affected by various stuff.
• axegon_ 4mo ago
  Thoughts on the modern trend of "AI tokens used" as a metric for performance, growth and efficiency by both startups and multi-national giants alike?
  • eries 4mo ago
    Vanity metrics strike again. Danger, Will Robinson!
    • axegon_ 4mo ago
      Glad to see there are people recognizing it! Thank you!
• rndnfmtk 4mo ago
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• Jaauthor 4mo ago
  Thanks for doing this - I'm an author, and my working theory is that every author is a one-person startup, so I try to think about lean startup principles when I think about the business of being an author. How do you think Lean Startup principles could be applied to ordinary families looking to navigate the existing economic stresses we're experiencing?
  • eries 4mo ago
    Re: your point about being an author, that has always been my approach, too. For this new book, I took in a metric ton of customer feedback (I had over 600 test readers generate more than 10,000 comments) and it really helped the final product. The challenge, of course, is always how to take in external feedback without losing your vision I've been a bit reluctant to over-generalize from my own theories, and so am not sure I would want to speculate about how to apply them in a family context.
    • Jaauthor 4mo ago
      Gotcha; good call. Thanks for getting back. :)
• pluc 4mo ago
  Book recommendations?
  • eries 4mo ago
    I've heard there's this new one that just came out. It's really good.
• saadn92 4mo ago
  How do you use AI on a daily basis, and are there times when you don't?
  • eries 4mo ago
    Yes, I use AI quite a lot, and I worry a lot about the effect that technology is having on me. Luckily, I have the advantage of using a tool called Solve It from the company I helped found called Answer.ai with Jeremy Howard that is explicitly designed for human-in-the-loop creation of artifacts and the development of human skills even while you use AI. Otherwise, it's likely that LLMs will cause your own skills to atrophy. You can learn more at solve.it.com
• habosa 4mo ago
  How much of the "financial gravity" do you attribute to VCs? I've noticed that VCs try very hard to separate the world into "VCs + founders" and "everyone else" and that the more time a founder spends in the VC+founders bubble the more distorted their worldview can become.
  • eries 4mo ago
    Unfortunately, that is not unique to VC but happens at every layer of the capital stack for reasons I explain, I hope you'll find convincingly in the book. The sad fact is that most VCs are not even consciously aware that they're doing this. They are simply the agents of a deeper force.
• dmofp 4mo ago
  Thanks for doing this, Eric. I'm about halfway through Incorruptible and loving it so far. Do you have any recommendations for entity formation infra that caters to mission driven companies? Something like Stripe Atlas that can form the more complex structures? Forming a PBC is becoming more standard but tthe other structures seem more esoteric (and expensive).
  • eries 4mo ago
    I got so frustrated that this is so difficult for people at the early stages to do with most law firms that I actually helped start a new law firm (called Virgil) to do it properly. Virgil is an AI-powered law firm, but it doesn't let the AI do the legal work for you. It actually hires and trains human lawyers to become AI-powered superhumans. It handles lots of the really unpleasant back-office crap that early-stage companies absolutely hate dealing with, from payroll to compliance and a lot of finance stuff. Of course it also does full-service legal work. Because I'm involved, it is specialized in setting up mission protective structures for startups. We have worked really hard to drive the cost of such structures down. In fact, many of the implementation guides that you can access from the book if you scan the various QR codes were developed in partnership with Virgil. If you want to DIY it, I think we've given you enough information to do so, including sample templates, term sheets, documents, etc. If you prefer a low-cost, flat-fee subscription, Virgil is also there to help you at any time. The URL is tryvirgil.com. (And you are welcome to use Virgil alongside your established high-prestige high-cost firm, too, if you prefer to do that. It will still save you considerable amounts of money)
    • dmofp 4mo ago
      Thanks a ton! I have called several local firms about these structures and it hasn't been very successful (note; i have complex requirements in addition to wanting the protections in your book). One other thing i've grappled with while reading the book is this: Some of the internal issues you describe seem to come from companies growing too big. The Founders who lose control, weakening culture etc. The size of a company seems to correlate with so many issues (not all related to financial gravity). I wonder how much pain can be avoided by just staying small (employee count). Thanks again for the book(s). It feels very mission driven which perfect.
• johongo 4mo ago
  I am a few chapters into the book, so maybe this is answered later. Don’t most people who play a part in corrupting companies get away with it? You mention Jack Welch and James McNerney, but it feels like explicit examples of corruption are rare. I imagine that many of the perpetrators move on to other boards and profit off of the decline at the expense of others?
  • heyitsdaad 4mo ago
    Intellectual dishonesty is corruption
    • johongo 4mo ago
      Right, and we developers will rant about it over beer, but the dishonest ones stumble into their next success before we know it.
  • eries 4mo ago
    I am confident that if you read the book to the end, you will not only know the answer to this question, you will even know what we can do about it.
• partsch 4mo ago
  What have you always wanted to achieve but haven't managed to do (yet)?
• alphaomegacode 4mo ago
  I'm about to launch a startup, do you do consulting for small companies with what I'd like to think is a big mission (likely similar to all startups lol)? In other words, is there some way to contact you and do you work with non-billion dollar startups if you find it worthwhile? Or is it more in line with 'read my books and call me when you raise your first million'?
  • eries 4mo ago
    Yes, I'd be happy to help you. Just drop me an email, and I can connect you to a variety of resources that might be stage appropriate for you.
    • alphaomegacode 4mo ago
      Thank you. Going to buy your books to read up first. Thanks again for the AMA and all your thoughtful responses for the HN crowd
• keiferski 4mo ago
  Any thoughts on bootstrapping a SaaS in the AI era? Is it more manageable because a single person can leverage more? Or more difficult because of increased resource needs and customer demands? And also how that factors into starting an "incorruptible" company today.
  • eries 4mo ago
    Any time you have a technological change, it's kind of confusing to figure out how it can apply to entrepreneurs. On the one hand, it makes it so much easier to create a new MVP, makes it easier to create distribution and to get connected to customers, to do many of the techniques that lean startup demands. On the other hand, that same capability is now in the hands of thousands or even millions of other people, including other people creating startups to compete with you and the incumbents you're trying to disrupt. It's always an open question whether the so-called attacker's advantage will overcome the so-called defender's advantage with any given technology. In terms of the thesis of Incorruptible, though, I do think that LLMs in particular should be really, really advantageous for managers and leaders who want to create alignment and coherence within their own company. If there's anything that LLMs are extremely good at, it's summarization. So much of the modern leadership challenge is simply figuring out the answer to the question: what is my organization actually doing right now? That's a summarizing problem.
    • sidchilling 4mo ago
      Isn’t “what” the easy part? I thought the leadership is more about why they are doing what they are doing and why is that important/not important. Something which LLMs are not great at today, but aren’t terrible and can make some good guesses at times.
      • eries 4mo ago
        I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "what" I would not think that LLMs would make very good leadership decisions, mostly because they're too malleable and too easy to manipulate. I do think they're very helpful in helping leaders assess their own context and situation and thereby make better decisions.
• keybored 4mo ago
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• lesinski 4mo ago
  A lot of big organizations have absorbed a Lean Startup POV -- don't debate, just ship an MVP and measure. But in practice, we're usually measuring a proxy metric, it's a short-term test, the audience may be unrepresentative and because of all this, the result doesn't generalize. What do you think an experiment needs before it can actually be called learning? And what kinds of product questions should not be done as experiments at all?
  • eries 4mo ago
    There's a whole chapter on this question in the new book, so I won't try to summarize it here, but just encourage you to check it out.
    • lesinski 4mo ago
      Amazing! I will check it out. Thanks Eric.
• pbiggar 4mo ago
  [edit] Removed as my link was to a different Eric Ries.
  • migueldeicaza 4mo ago
    Wow I didn’t know that. That is deeply disappointing.
  • gcheong 4mo ago
    Wrong Eric Ries? The writer of that blog claims to be a 65 yo Baby Boomer (would be 67 today), the one here is much younger than that iirc.
    • willguest 4mo ago
      yes, this is the author: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Ries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Ries
    • spencerflem 4mo ago
      Yeah, the bio in About specifically mentions that they are not the famous one
    • pbiggar 4mo ago
      Thanks for catching that, should have done a better job vetting that. The rest of my post is still true.
• bensyverson 4mo ago
  Hi Eric, former IDEOer here. I know you spent some time at IDEO observing how we work. In my time there (2014-2024), it felt like most clients misinterpreted "MVP" to mean "the absolute lowest-effort barely-working code that we can rush out to say we shipped something." When they did manage to ship a low-quality MVP, they had no budget for maintenance or iteration. Basically, they shipped a rushed, crappy product, and some of them concluded "well, Lean, Agile and Design Thinking are all BS. We should go back to waterfall." Sometimes clients asked IDEO to design under this shitty-MVP model (we generally refused), other times we were brought in to clean it all up. Why do you think the concept of "MVP" was almost universally misunderstood? And, thinking about Incorruptible, how did the best companies out there internalize it?
  • realty_geek 4mo ago
    Good question - I hope he gets to answer this. Right now I actually think an MVP should be Maximum Viable Product. Partly because of AI but also because it shifts one's perspective to what Viable means.
    • bensyverson 4mo ago
      "Viable" is the core of the misunderstanding. I think some business leaders took "minimum viable" to mean "bare-minimum." It doesn't. In my mind I think of it as a live prototype shipped to real users, built out just enough to answer a clear learning objective. I agree that AI makes the MVP easier to build, but it makes things so easy to build, there is a slight risk of overbuilding the wrong things, which can distract from the learning goals.
      • eries 4mo ago
        Well said on both counts.
  • eries 4mo ago
    Man, "universally misunderstood?" That's harsh. I don't think you can put an idea out into the world without understanding that some people are going to willfully misunderstand it. We live now, especially in the age where literally ignorance is optional. When you see someone who misunderstands what an MVP is, you know that they haven't spent even five minutes reading the Wikipedia page or made any effort to try to understand it. I don't consider such people to be good faith interlocutors, and therefore I don't really think the fact that they criticize or don't understand the concept is that relevant to the rest of us who are capable of thinking for ourselves. At the end of the day, I try to lay out in my first book the reasons why the theory that gives rise to MVP and the rest of the Lean Startup makes sense, is logical, and is consistent with a set of first principles. As a result, that theory is capable of making predictions which you can test for yourself. Writing now for other founders who might encounter this page: If you look elsewhere in this thread, you will find lots and lots and lots of entrepreneurs who are saying how much they found these concepts helpful. You shouldn't do it because other people said so. Rather, you should take that as inspiration to think for yourself, try it, and see if the theory strikes you as valid.
• mklarmann 4mo ago
  The question has been also on our mind. We restructure now towards a https://steward-ownership.com/ https://steward-ownership.com/ company structure (in CH). The hard challenge will be fundraising - so we are actually considering selling "Partizipationsscheine" which are stocks without a vote, but still a dividend. On a open market (maybe through polygon / base coins). I just wonder how to resolve the initial funding question on those companies. Any ideas?
  • eries 4mo ago
    Don't think you need anything like polygon or tokens for this. I think you just have to have the courage to ask investors to play the proper role within the governance of your company and, frankly, have the business results such that they are willing to accept those terms.
• volandovengo 4mo ago
  Thanks Eric - been a fan of your work for years! I remember Steve Blank bragging in his early courses that you evangelized his work to the masses. I applaud writing a book on the challenges of making a business that is net good for society. I've personally found that there are just so many forces pushing towards the status quo (make more $$), that it's really hard to create a company that prioritizes public good. How much do you blame our values of our society for creating corrupt businesses? Are corrupt businesses just a mirror of our own values?
  • eries 4mo ago
    Yes, that's right. But I also think that business can be the catalyst for getting us out of this mess too, because ultimately, mission-driven companies are a source of tremendous and surprising power.
• mrprincerawat 4mo ago
  yoo, what's up gng, had breakfast?? (Can't think of any questions to ask)
• Ozzie_osman 4mo ago
  Just dropping in to thank you for writing this book and raising awareness around it. A lot of builders are really disillusioned by how "corruptible" the tech industry has been. I wrote a blog post called "Revenue Model is More Important than Culture" (it made the #1 spot on HackerNews a few years ago) arguing that the way to avoid that corruption is by making sure the business model is immune to it, but having read your thoughts, I'd say your argument (structure being the dominant term) is even stronger.
  • eries 4mo ago
    I wish I had read that blog post because that is one of the chapters in the new book. I actually think that the phrase "mission-driven" for most companies is a total lie. They are at best "mission-hopeful". In fact, I tried to create a new term for the work that is required: the management system, leadership techniques, and structural elements that are required to 100% align the business model with the mission. I call it "mission drive," as if it was an engine you could install and maintain.
    • ryandrake 4mo ago
      Maybe "mission-chauffeured." Revenue/business model is in the driver's seat and the mission just comes along for the ride and adapts to wherever the car is going.
      • eries 4mo ago
        An entrepreneur I used to admire a great deal was once described to me this way: "So and so doesn't do what's right. He makes whatever he does right." Ever since I heard that phrase, I haven't been able to unsee it in so many founders who I think sincerely want to do the right thing, but their ego gets in the way.
    • Ozzie_osman 4mo ago
      I like the mix of management/leadership/structure. I do think leadership is an important aspect, and leaders who are uncompromising can have a big impact. It's funny we both land on Google as a main example. I had this quote "I’m going to pick on Google a little bit here, but I do love that company. I think there’s a lot it can improve on, but it’s still one of my favorite and least “evil” large tech companies.", and honestly and sadly, I don't even know if I'd agree with the latter part of that statement anymore.
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• edoceo 4mo ago
  I've noticed a lot of founders are building bigger and bigger things and still calling it MVP. Thoughts on how to focus the energy to more customer development than product development early on? Wasn't that the point? Focus on the high risk part?
  • eries 4mo ago
    I think you need the "always has been" meme.
    • edoceo 4mo ago
      oof.
• imjonse 4mo ago
  To what extent are the mechanisms you identified causing companies to go bad the same for non-profits, associations, political parties, etc.?
  • eries 4mo ago
    100% the same. Some people see this as the darkness at the heart of the for-profit sector metastasizing and affecting the other sectors. I think that's a reasonable first approximation of what's going on. But in the book, I tried to make a more intellectually complete case that part of the issue is that our current distinctions that we make between, for example, for-profit and non-profit, are intellectually incoherent. That might be part of the problem, too.
• Aarav03790 4mo ago
  does this apply for a company of every type? does it work for companies like apple as well?
  • eries 4mo ago
    I don't see any evidence that these tools or principles are especially limited.
    • eries 4mo ago
      Of course, we won't know until you try.
• orliesaurus 4mo ago
  What does "Best Seller" mean in this context? Who says it's a best seller?
  • christoff12 4mo ago
    "Instant New York Times Bestseller" [0] [0] https://www.amazon.com/Incorruptible-Good-Companies-Great-Stay/dp/B0FWZZBPZB https://www.amazon.com/Incorruptible-Good-Companies-Great-St...
  • eries 4mo ago
    Thanks for asking. In fact, you can find all the evidence that it's a best seller on howisincorruptiblegoing.com or you can look at this handy infographic: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/eries_incorruptible-new-york-times-bestseller-activity-7469795646028550144-Grc8 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/eries_incorruptible-new-york-...
• p2hari 4mo ago
  First, I have not read the book. You mentioned Novo Nordisk, but given the current context and so many changes that employees/company has undergone recently and the way it is performing, do you still think that it was a good example to include here. What factors played for it to suddenly undergo so much when you have mentioned they have been structured to resist gravity and thrive for decades -- or even centuries?
  • erikgaas 4mo ago
    I've been reading the book. The important part is in 2004 they were offered to be acquired by serono. Because of their governance they were able to say no to the acquisition. Meanwhile serono was later acquired by merck and largely shut down. Back in 2004 novo was about $2.5 a share. Now at its current price even after a huge downturn it is $43.3 So that 17x gain you can attribute advantages with how they governed themselves at that time. Is it a silver bullet or always make stock go up and to the right? No of course not. Are they making governance mistakes now? I'm not sure. But most companies probably would have sold for a ton of cash and if so everyone would have missed out on huge gains, not just in money but in technology and public good.
    • eries 4mo ago
      You said it pretty well here. I'm not claiming that any company I profile is perfect, only (in this case) that they've had incredible longevity.
• nradov 4mo ago
  It will be interesting to see how many of those companies remain "incorruptible". Your new book seems a bit like a sequel to Jim Collins's 2001 book Good to Great. Several of the "great" companies including Circuit City, Fannie Mae, and Wells Fargo later ran into serious problems. And from an investor perspective, as a group they have underperformed the S&P 500. https://www.harpercollins.com/products/good-to-great-jim-collins?variant=32116997292066 https://www.harpercollins.com/products/good-to-great-jim-col...
  • eries 4mo ago
    yeah, this is very much the challenge with writing any kind of business book: the book is frozen in time yet the companies grow and change. I tried really really hard not to put any company up on a pedestal, or even make any forward-looking predictions, but merely to show how each company illustrates a specific concept from the book.
  • Boxxed 4mo ago
    > And from an investor perspective, as a group they have underperformed the S&P 500. This should be kind of obvious -- if they are avoiding doing awful things in the name of money, then they are leaving something on the table. You can't have your cake and eat it too. This is why the real solution is some kind of governance/regulation, because otherwise the market incentivizes being awful.
    • mtoner23 4mo ago
      well, eric's book tries to make the point that these good companies DO overperform the market. after reading the book this past week, im not convinced. feels like heavy selection bias.
    • nradov 4mo ago
      I don't understand your comment. Companies like Netflix, Old Dominion Freight Line, Nvidia, Comfort Systems USA, and Intuitive Surgical have all significantly outperformed the S&P 500. What "awful" things have they done in the name of money?
• pikann22 4mo ago
  Hey Eric, I loved The Lean Startup! One of my favorite books. Really looking forward to reading Incorruptible.
  • eries 4mo ago
    Thank you and thank you!
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• hendler 4mo ago
  A company's values become even more important with AI accelerating and expanding the mission of traditional Delaware Corporations. Do you have advice on how to use AI to help teams stay true to their values? Having not read your book yet, in my mind there's the obvious legal support AI can provide to help navigate complex situations, but maybe there's some other groundwork in the value creation and implementation itself?
  • eries 4mo ago
    If those are your questions, I'm confident you're going to like the book a lot as it gets into precisely those topics. I will say, in general, I think AI is an amplifier of values, and so it will make the good companies better and the bad companies worse. Or maybe more accurately, it will make the good parts of companies better and the bad parts of companies worse. Either way, I do think that LLMs can solve many of the leadership challenges that we have to solve today with hierarchy and dashboards and bureaucracy, because LLMs are extremely good at summarizing the context of a given situation. One of the hardest leadership challenges of all is simply answering the simple question: What is my company doing right now? That is a summarization challenge.
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• imdsm 4mo ago
  You said build-measure-learn principles survive AI. But when an MVP costs hours instead of months, doesn't the bottleneck move entirely to distribution and customer development?
  • eries 4mo ago
    I would say that learning is still the biggest bottleneck and the one thing that can never be outsourced.
• rib3ye 4mo ago
  Hi Eric, I worked for IMVU shortly after you left and tbh I didn't see a ton of "lean startup" ideas implemented well. And today, company is not healthy. Why do you think IMVU never hit escape velocity?
  • eries 4mo ago
    Well, there is a reason that I left after all. What's funny is that, although IMVU is today mostly famous because it appears in "The Lean Startup," many of the people who were there at the time were quite annoyed with me and found the ideas grating or even irritating. It reminds me of that old quote that "nobody is a prophet in their own hometown." Well, that kind of happened to me. What happened in the years since? I don't really know. The company has not been in close touch with me, so I can only speculate or guess.
• willguest 4mo ago
  Coming from the blockchain space, but wanting to build something with bright patterns, while also using DLT and crypto, has been painful, to say the least. I would like to know how best to stand out from the toxic, finance-driven world that is defi and crypto generally, without getting rolled in with all the clowns. Of course, I know that clear messaging and verifiable, evidence-driven claims are good, but I am thinking about the more abstract, strategic side to things, which I still feel under-prepared for.
  • eries 4mo ago
    I appreciate that you're being honest about this challenge. In the book, I actually say that one of the problems with our modern economy is that we've created too many ways to make money without creating any value at all, in fact sometimes even by destroying value. When I give this talk in public settings, I'll sometimes have someone yell out "crypto" from the audience. That is how the public perceives the whole sector. The good news is that we all know that being a bold contrarian is the key to returns. If you can figure out a way to structure your initiative such that it literally cannot betray the public, it literally cannot betray your mission, it literally cannot betray human values, you might be able to create something that people are awfully excited about.
• byoung2 4mo ago
  I haven't read the new book yet, but I'd be interested in your take on Disney's trajectory over the last, say, 2 decades. It seems to have strayed pretty far from Walt's original vision, largely due to the actions of Bob Iger. He took what used to be a company that was fueled by creativity and turned it into a machine that strip mines IP and extracts value. Iger purchased IP (Pixar, Lucasfilm, Marvel, Fox) as a risk mitigation strategy since you get an established brand you can exploit on day 1. But in doing so he killed the soul of Disney, which was built on big creative bets (literally sell the car to make a movie, mortgage the house to build a park).
  • eries 4mo ago
    I recently had the chance to meet Abigail Disney, who has been a very vocal critic of what's happened to her grandfather's ethos. It sounds quite sad.
    • byoung2 4mo ago
      I recently left Disney after working there for almost 5 years. It's much worse on the inside than people realize. Very sad indeed.
      • th0raway 4mo ago
        Disney has an especially difficult problem, as optimizing for revenue for an org might actually lower total revenue for the entire company. See how many movies do badly because people expect them to see them in D+ quickly. A company this complicated need a very special kind of leadership, along with creative teams that reliably deliver hits. Now the batting average is way worse than it needs to be, and a lot of the leadership is just uninterested on the bigger problems, and more focused on personal strip mining. How many RSUs you get becomes more important than making sure the stock ever goes up (and it's not going up)
        • byoung2 4mo ago
          In some ways that “problem” is an escape hatch for Disney. Other studios have to write off huge losses for underperforming movies (and Disney definitely does this too). But even a flop can drive Disney+ subscriptions, park visits, merchandise purchases, hotel stays, cruise bookings, etc. Star Wars is an excellent example, even though many of the Disney era movies underperformed (it’s hard to say flop), Disney has made back more than the purchase price of Lucasfilm, the budgets of all movies and shows, and construction costs of 2 Galaxy’s Edge lands and turned a profit. They’re like Costco in that way where the food court doesn’t need to profit as long as they sell memberships.
• jdcaron 4mo ago
  You frame corruption as financial gravity, fixable by governance design at the firm level. But the dollar's strength has been reinforced for fifty years by oil trading in dollars. Tying our money to a conflict asset implicated in war, pollution, and enormous suffering. Can any company be incorruptible inside a monetary system that isn't?
  • eries 4mo ago
    I think the evidence shows that the answer is yes.
• kidsil 4mo ago
  Eric, The Lean Startup had a huge influence on how I think about startups and product work, so first: thank you. Given the current wave of AI-assisted coding (Claude Code/Codex) and the broader enshittification of SaaS/platforms, do you think B2B SaaS founders now face a new "we can just build this ourselves" problem? How would you think about testing for that risk early?
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• theuri 4mo ago
  What type of software businesses survive and thrive in the era of AGI? Which ones get wiped out? Is there any moat in the era of AGI?
  • eries 4mo ago
    You need to learn the parable of picking up dimes in front of the steam roller, which I think originally is attributed to Jean-Louis Gasset, the founder of BOS. The idea is that in a genuine platform war (which in the tech industry we haven't had for a while), new business opportunities are kind of like little dimes you see in the street in front of a giant platform steam roller. If you're agile enough, you can jump into the street, grab the dime, and jump out. In fact, you can do it repeatedly. The only problem is that if you stumble and fall once, you die. There used to be a lot of wisdom in the entrepreneurial ecosystem about how to survive such a platform in a more durable way. For example, if you own the customer, then you can play the major platforms off against each other. Or, if you study the case, for example, of Intuit, which survived the attempt of Microsoft to absorb that product feature into their own platform monopoly at the time, there are lessons to be learned. But of course, every platform war is different, and I'm sure there will be new lessons that we will learn from this one.
• mandeepj 4mo ago
  Eric - enjoyed your talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VKliOQXQ9M&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VKliOQXQ9M&t=1s . What can a founder do to safeguard his position, interests, and company? A couple of things that come to my mind are: have an aligned/friendly board who believe in you; second, have dual-class shares (like Meta, SpaceX, Google). Anything else you would like to add?
  • eries 4mo ago
    I wrote a whole book about it :)
    • mandeepj 4mo ago
      Ha! I should have seen that coming :-)
      • eries 4mo ago
        you walked right into it. but happy to answer questions about the details anytime
• joshmarlow 4mo ago
  This feels like this is exploring the reasons for what Doctorow calls "Enshitification" which is really exciting.
  • eries 4mo ago
    yes, indeed! not only exploring, but (in the long run) fixing!
• david_shi 4mo ago
  As AI becomes more capable, it seems like a company can be a founding charter and a pool of cash to be spent on tokens to achieve the aims of that charter. How do you feel about these AI only companies, and how do you think they could affect the wider market? ref: https://www.ft.com/content/b8cc4bf4-6d3c-4974-8428-9a091983c473 https://www.ft.com/content/b8cc4bf4-6d3c-4974-8428-9a091983c...
  • eries 4mo ago
    I expect many of these so-called AI-only companies will actually involve quite a few humans. I think the general idea that AI could be really useful at helping an organization stay true to the mission or purpose in its charter is quite right. Although I still think, at the end of the day, humans should be in the loop and not just as an accountability sink, but really truly providing the creativity, the vision, and the direction of the whole organization.
• tonymet 4mo ago
  AMA, AN
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• namidbglobal 4mo ago
  "Darkness we don't talk about" — sir, that's just every Slack thread after an all-hands. Pre-ordering anyway!!
  • eries 4mo ago
    Then I'm going to call this a marketing success story. In all seriousness, Thank you.
• jamisteven 4mo ago
  Your first book was my like my bible, used many of the concepts when building gomacro.ai, at the same time found it so easy to get sucked into non-lean methodology. Very hard these days to come up with a sound idea, so many people building things that nobody asked for to begin with and in the age of AI its even more so the case. Best of luck with the new one, will give it a read!
  • eries 4mo ago
    Thank you and good luck!
• mehulashah 4mo ago
  Eric - I've worked for NASA, ATT, IBM, HP, Amazon, and Google, not to mention a couple of startups that I started in between. None of them (except the startups, but they were brief) stayed true to their original mission. I haven't read your new book, but IMO, it's because the founders leave and the next leadership don't share the vision or values of the founders in the same way. After all, a company is a collaboration among people who want to make a contribution. When the people change, the company changes. It's inevitable. That said, you seem to have archetypes above Costco, Patagonia, and Novo Nordisk that avoided it. Can you comment on not what it takes to build such a company, but rather how to transform companies like those that I worked for into ones that resist gravity? Or is it too late?
  • eries 4mo ago
    One of the sad truths that the book tries to confront about the world we live in today: that most companies simply fail the test of succession. This does not have to be the reality that we live in. It is absolutely 100% possible to build organizations to resist gravity and even to transform organizations that have fallen into its clutches. The fact that this is rare tells you something about the incentive design and values of our current financial system. This is not a law of nature. I don't really think there's a short way for me to answer this question without having to summarize the entire book. This is what it's about. I'll simply say that the second part of the book, what I call "The Blueprint," is about both the governance and leadership tools that we have available to us to turn these organizations into the long-term, mission-driven, incorruptible places we all want to work at.
    • mehulashah 4mo ago
      To be clear: yes, it’s possible, it’s not too late. Read the book.
    • zaphar 4mo ago
      Like a lot of things, bad actors only have to get you to fail the test of succession once while the company has to succeed at it every time. Time is not on any companies side here and the longer it goes the more failing that test of succession starts to look like a law of nature.
• nunez 4mo ago
  Hey, Eric! I read Lean Startup many years ago when I was in my "let's do a startup" phase. My idea didn't make it, but I learned a lot and am glad I took the chance. Thanks for the motivation! You said to "Ask You Anything," so here's my question: I have mostly stopped buying from Amazon. That includes books. I'd like to buy your next book. What's the best way to support you if I don't want to purchase through them? More generally, what's the best way to support authors that _only_ publish on Amazon without supporting Amazon itself?
  • eries 4mo ago
    Luckily, many of us publish in many places other than Amazon, and in fact the best way to support any author is to buy the book from your local independent bookstore. In fact, if you want to do me a big favor, you'll call your local independent bookstore, ask them if they carry the book, and if they don't, berate them for not doing so. But please do it in a polite way. In all seriousness, I actually made a list of bookstores that are selling the book that are not part of the big chains, and you can find all that on my website, incorruptible.co.
    • nunez 4mo ago
      Thanks for doing that!
• TheAceOfHearts 4mo ago
  What do you think are the most important problems that the US is currently facing?
  • eries 4mo ago
    Uhhh, read a newspaper or look at the news. It's pretty dark, man.
• palidanx 4mo ago
  Just curious what other types of 'gravities' exist in organizations? In a negative gravity example, something I've seen as a social contagion is when some people start resigning it tends to spread and then the organization slowly decays (or quiets quits)
  • n-exploit 4mo ago
    Gravity toward ads/ad-related revenue.
    • eries 4mo ago
      Ain't that the truth? At the very end of the book, I call these companies "addicts creating more addicts." You might enjoy that part.
  • eries 4mo ago
    I try to work through a few of these in the book. For example, the "social contagion" theory of layoffs from Stanford Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer. Also, in my previous book and this one, I draw on a concept I call "career equity," which has to do with the fact that people's perception of what will get them ahead in an organizational hierarchy is, in very many ways, more real to them and more valuable to them than any kind of bonus incentive or financial equity you offer them. More importantly, my goal in the book is to teach the reader how to see these deeper underlying forces that operate below the surface of most organizations. Once you see and identify them, you can learn how to wield them.
• jppope 4mo ago
  Eric, really interested in how you pick the things you work on. I'm a really big fan of the concept of the Long Term Stock Exchange, but projects like that seem to me at times like paddling a canoe upstream using a spoon. Whats your criteria? Is there an analytical component? Are you willing to work on something even if "success" is unlikely? And with all of this going on how do you have time to work on books! thank you for your work by the way. It continues to be useful year after year to me and people around me!
  • eries 4mo ago
    I tend to use the metaphor of trying to carve the Grand Canyon with nothing more than water and gravity, but I appreciate you honoring and acknowledging the difficulty of this. Honestly, I don't have formal criteria. I have young kids now, and I try to ask myself every once in a while, when they're old enough to really understand what I do for a living. When they ask me: "at that moment in history, what were you doing?" I want to be able to answer them and give them an answer that I and they will find satisfying. I'll also be honest that I've my fill of conventional "success" in my life. I don't feel obligated to use the likelihood of success as a criterion anymore. I tend to just do the things that, in the moment, seem right to me. Or where it seems like, for whatever reason, no one else is willing or likely to try it, and I have been given that lonely assignment. Many of the things that I've tried haven't worked out, but that's okay. I accept that that is a precondition of the kind of work I like to do.
    • eries 4mo ago
      Oh, and thank you for the kind words. It's much appreciated.
      • jppope 4mo ago
        well, thank you for kicking ass and doing great work!
• realityfactchex 4mo ago
  Do you think that building what the "market wants" (finding traction/gold, and leaning into that) comes at the cost of people (not) making and promoting "things that should exist" (e.g., companies and products/services aligned with ideal visions of the world they want to be in)? If so, how is the tradeoff justified? (Make money first, then do "ideal" things?) If not, why not? (Other than that it's unsuccessful strategically/statistically and wasteful, I guess.) Any elaboration/response on this theme would be appreciated. Thanks!
  • eries 4mo ago
    I'd encourage you to study the story of Tony's Chocolonely. I included a version of that story in chapter 12 of the new book. Tony's make some of the most delicious chocolate in the world, but their mission is actually to eradicate child slavery in the production of cocoa. I bring this up because before Tony's, it was widely assumed that "the market" didn't care about child exploitation. They just wanted delicious chocolate. Yet Tony's found a way to prove that this was not true. The more general lesson is that many of the stories we tell ourselves about "what the market wants" are mere fabrications or just-so stories designed to make us feel better about how crappy our alternatives are. Sometimes it just takes a bold entrepreneur to show us that we already collectively are committed to a different set of ideals. We've just never had the opportunity to vote with our wallets to make it happen.
• sidchilling 4mo ago
  In your view, which are couple different companies that aren’t very big (not FAANG level yet), but you think will become quite successful? Which of them are mission driven and you’d be sad if they later become “corrupted”?
  • eries 4mo ago
    I'll just mention two which are also profiled in the book: 1. Devoted Health 2. The AI Underwriting Company (AIUC)
• arunc 4mo ago
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• bilater 4mo ago
  Hey Eric - does it bother you all the startups in your first book you held up as examples are dead?
  • eries 4mo ago
    All of them? Really? What's funny is when the book was published, I remember someone telling me that I should have included more examples of failed startups in the manuscript. I remember answering them, "Oh, I have. We just don't know which ones yet." This is the difficulty of writing any kind of business book. There's just no way to use any company as an example to illustrate some principle without people misunderstanding that you're holding them up as the perfect or even great company. I use case studies to illustrate the concepts that I think are useful. I can't guarantee success any more than an athlete can tell you that if you study the way that Tony Gwynn hits the baseball, you too will be able to hit 300 in the big leagues.
    • damnitbuilds 4mo ago
      You should, however, ( assuming your ideas are correct ) be able to look at a company and tell if it is following your ideas or not and will therefore ( assuming your ideas are correct ) be successful or not, and therefore make billions investing. Have you done that ?
      • eries 4mo ago
        as nate bargatze says, if only it were that simple!
    • bilater 4mo ago
      That's fair but I felt you held up these companies and founders as these demigods running this well oiled operation and yet I remember looking up those companies and all quietly folded within a few years of your book coming out. My point is you were not able to demonstrate any correlation with your suggested methods with startup success. A company could do the exact opposite of what you recommend and be successful. Or follow it to a tee and fail which is what all of them did (happy to hear about any counter examples here from the original book). So what exactly is the point if you can't even move the needle a little bit?
• frankest 4mo ago
  I’ve been thinking about what objective harnesses can be put around governance for companies and governments as well. Transparency dashboards, clearer real-time feedback mechanisms. What do you suggest especially for governments (local, or even larger). Keep thinking AI might actually help improve our feedback mechanisms given all the noise.
  • eries 4mo ago
    Yes, I do think this is something that LLMs should be very good at. As I've said in a couple of the comments in the thread, summarizing is LLMs' greatest superpower. But I have a whole chapter in the book about the use of metrics and, of course, their misuse. I'd be very cautious here. Government reformers have often assumed that just having better data will cause agencies to make better decisions, but this is simply not true. The choice about which data to pay attention to, whether to make decisions in a scientific or humane way, are values questions, not just data questions. They require the installation of a specific ethos in the organization to stay true to those values. Without that, more data will not have any effect whatsoever.
    • frankest 4mo ago
      Not just data but transparency of actions. Open source governance is interesting with some examples through git contributions for code and transparency of contributions to wikipedia, and things like Kanban boards and other lessons from project management. What if required government actions and requests are done with transparency - and so is the spending ledger. Public comments can be public too. It doesn’t replace human judgement but it provides direct feedback and clear sight into things that are normally hidden and deliberately obfuscated.
• lebovic 4mo ago
  I worked at Anthropic, and I wouldn't attribute much to the structure itself – so I'm wary of using it as a positive example here. I do attribute a lot to specific people. Concretely, to much of the intitial team, who they recruited on the research/infra side, and some very close personal relationships within research/infra. That dynamic, paired with their unwillingness to accede to something against their values, is what I credit for some atypical decisions and outcomes [1]. Things regulary go "corrupt" in parts of the company; it's hard to scale without importing culture from big tech. Sometimes, the defense was ICs escalating issues, Dario talking to ICs, and then shaking things up. But this process takes time, and it doesn't lead to a full reversal; a bad/misaligned hire has reverberating impacts. Many folks are still driven by values (even if their values are not your values!), but scaling dynamics seem to be evolving like any other org – just at a higher employee count and revenue numbers. I do place trust in specific people who work at Anthropic, but I wouldn't place trust in Anthropic the organization. It's an organization that's wont to change, regardless of its structure. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47174423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47174423
  • eries 4mo ago
    Your comment is very astute. A structure is like a shell. It can only protect what is within. It does not cause what's within to be vital, healthy, or unhealthy. But if you think that the courage that Dario has regularly shown would be possible with a conventional "best practices" structure, I think you're kidding yourself.
    • lebovic 4mo ago
      > If you think that the courage that Dario has regularly shown would be possible with a conventional "best practices" structure, I think you're kidding yourself. Is there something that happened which you don't think would have come to pass with a standard PBC/C-Corp (without the LTBT)? I'm trying to think of one, but nothing is coming to mind. I think the structure attracted many people to Anthropic (e.g. an RSP that could only be overridden by the LTBT), but I'm not sure it has demonstrated a practical impact. As an aside, I think a lot about this problem too! But the answers that don't reduce to something like "the people, and the people to whom they give power" seem to break down when I look closely.
• roggenbuck 4mo ago
  Hey Eric! How often do you see companies recover from financial gravity? Or is it mostly irreversible? How much do you attribute worsening of company values to things like professional managers, too much hierarchy, and less founder-mode; versus financial gravity? In a case like GitHub where their focus seems less on open-source these days, should developers try to help GitHub better support open-source or should the focus be on building alternatives? Thanks, Jake
  • eries 4mo ago
    You've framed this question as if these things are separate phenomena, but from my point of view, they are all symptoms of the same underlying cause. The sad truth is that, as I say in the book, "It's always too early until it's too late." The truth is we don't ever know if something is too late until we try. If you love an organization and you think you have the opportunity to try to help them get better, go for it. If you decide they've abandoned their ethos, I definitely think you should help support and build the alternative. For reasons I try to explain in the book, open source in particular is an example of the kind of mission-driven positive externality type of business that our modern best practices make it hard for people to see and understand. This is going to be a recurring problem in the free software and open source movements for years to come unless we get smarter about these forces.
    • otterdude 4mo ago
      Would you relate this phenomenon to entropy? Ie founders create order out of chaos, then entropy slowly creeps in due to X,Y,Z? I loved the lean startup I'll be reading this book as well :)
      • eries 4mo ago
        I don't love entropy as the metaphor, because entropy is inevitable. And yet, some organizations seem to not experience it. These exceptions demonstrate that there must be some other variable involved.
    • roggenbuck 4mo ago
• arpinum 4mo ago
  My book arrived today. Q1: You have done a few friendly interviews on YouTube, but I haven't seen one that challenges you much. Do you know if there are upcoming interviews that you found pushed back? Q2: Is the idea of shareholder supremacy fundamentally at odds with your with your preferred alternative governance structures, or is it just a time preference and risk attitude issue? Q3: You will get sympathetic ears easily due to the subject matter. But the same book about non-profits would be a harder sell. Do you agree, and if true does that say something about the marketplace of ideas?
  • eries 4mo ago
    Honestly, there hasn't been that much pushback, and I've done something like 200 interviews for the book. I think it might have to do with the fact that we all secretly kind of agree with this thesis, even though we know we're not supposed to say so out loud. I'm sure there will be some pushback coming, especially if the book starts to become more popular or gets more famous. Though I did get a pretty funny piece of pushback on one consulting company's podcast. The person said, "But wait a second, I learned in business school that everything you're saying here is wrong. Are you asking me to rethink that?" Something like that. I said, "Well, are you interested in looking at the evidence that what I'm saying is the truth?" I think he was really genuinely struggling, because I don't think he was that interested. Many of us are not that interested in seeing the evidence that the things we believe or were taught are not quite true. Q2: shareholder primacy is a bad idea on its own terms, as I lay out in the book. It doesn't prevent people from adopting any of governance structures I recommend, it just makes it more difficult, by creating career incentives that add friction to doing the right thing. That's partly why it's so value-destroying. Q3: I don't understand this question, sorry. Maybe it's because I've spent many lonely years being berated for this subject matter and am only getting the sympathetic treatment lately...
    • arpinum 4mo ago
      Q3: Direct question: Have journalists and their industries been similarly corrupted from their proclaimed mission to communicate the truth? Do the issues in other groups of people (charity, religion, sport league) share the same root causes, or is the source of corporate corruption unique or at a different scale?
• stackbutterflow 4mo ago
  Most books, guidance and wisdom about startups appeared during a ZIRP era. How relevant all of this remains today?
  • eries 4mo ago
    Most? I don't think that can quite be right. But I do think the stuff I'm writing about has held up pretty well through many, many cycles of boom and bust. In fact, Steve Blank has a great new essay out about the coming crash and how ideas in the new book might be useful in helping us reorganize our economy afterwards, kind of the same way The Lean Startup did after the dot-com crash.
• ngriffiths 4mo ago
  My biggest struggle with this question is that "going bad" sometimes coincides with not just financial incentives, but also more people getting value out of it. For example Spotify gradually shifting from "we make it easy to curate and share playlists" to "we make them for you to use as background music constantly." Sometimes what's bad for the early power user is great for the late adopter, and it's difficult to make any kind of broad judgment about whether the change is better or worse. What do you say to this interpretation? In particular do you think most cases could be framed as "the key audience/customer/market has shifted"? Is it possible to find greater financial success while doing things the primary audience doesn't like?
  • eries 4mo ago
    I don't have the link in front of me, but someone who used to work at Spotify wrote a really nice reflection about this change through the lens of incorruptible over on LinkedIn. If someone can find it and post it here, that'd be great. If not, I'll try to remember to come back and post it later. I think these changes very rarely have to do with what customers want shifting, but when people say "the market," they are often confused about whether they're talking about customers or our financial markets. Frankly, it's far more often for this kind of correction to originate in the pressure from financial markets than any other single source.
    • ngriffiths 4mo ago
      I'm not just talking about where the initial pressure comes from, but the effects of the changes. I guess the question becomes about how easily these layers get disentangled. E.g. things investors like that then result in lower sales? Things that result in greater sales but that the customers don't actually like? Naively of course it seems like investors don't like it when sales go down, so there'd be an extremely tight link between financial market and product market feedback. But I imagine you disagree, that this breaks down easily and creates problems?
      • eries 4mo ago
        Just look at the evidence. Investor holding periods are going down, and there's less and less correlation between value creation and stock price movements.
• dude250711 4mo ago
  Why are CEOs/CTOs not being fired or put on PIP for the ill-conceived internal AI push?
  • eries 4mo ago
    I don't remember the exact number, but I read somewhere that when Jack Dorsey announced a 40% layoff and claimed it was being caused by AI, his personal net worth went up something like $2 billion. When we outsource judgment to what "the market" wants, this is the result.
• damnitbuilds 4mo ago
  Books like this are for tech bros what horoscopes are for sad old ladies. They are full of platitudes that sound relevant to people's problems and desires, that pretend to be based on science but have no actual basis in facts, provably do not work, and yet are still popular amongst the people they let down again and again. Anyone who could write a book with advice that worked the way this purports to would be too rich to need Kickstarter to fund his books, for a start.
  • eries 4mo ago
    My friend, I know you think this is a criticism. It's pretty obvious that you haven't read the book. I'd encourage you to do so, or at least ask yourself, "Why are you commenting on a book you haven't read?" The answer must be that you're upset about a different book or about a whole class of books that have done you wrong. That's fair. I know what you're talking about. But for what it's worth, I tried really hard to make this book different. If you check the end notes, you'll see that I drew on quite a lot of research to try and make a series of evidence-based claims. And if you really want to live in a world where people should be listened to on the basis of how rich they are, well, you don't really need to change anything, now do you?
    • damnitbuilds 4mo ago
      [dead]
    • madibo3156 4mo ago
      My friend, I know you think you're defending your position well, but you've done the opposite. Scrolling to the bottom of the comments and seeing this response from you is like speedrunning your books' one-star reviews and coming to the definitive conclusion that it's not for me. Thanks for saving my time.
      • eries 4mo ago
        Your comment made me smile because the book hasn't had a one-star review yet. Maybe you'll get to be the first.
• jpadkins 4mo ago
  I don't have any questions for you. Just wanted to thank you for writing Lean Startup, it was very influential to me.
  • eries 4mo ago
    You're so welcome. Thank you for writing such a nice comment, especially in a situation like this when other people have been... less generous.
• mustaphah 4mo ago
  I finished The Lean Startup a few days ago, and I really felt the power of the ideas you've shared there coming from a heavily technical background; incredible work. It's already been 14+ years since you wrote the book; I wonder if a second edition is something you have in mind, or at least on your consideration list
  • eries 4mo ago
    I've thought about it over the years, but never pulled the trigger. This used to drive me crazy when I was younger. When an author who became "older and wiser" decided to make a new edition of the book in which they hedged all their bold claims with all the caveats that they had gained through experience. I always thought such old people were cowards. Of course, now I understand why they do it.
    • eries 4mo ago
      If I was going to do a new edition, what would you want to see in it?
      • mustaphah 4mo ago
        [flagged]
• dbingham 4mo ago
  Eric, it's interesting the companies you've picked that "structurally resist gravity" and the ones you've left out. Costco, Patagonia, and Nova Nordisk are all interesting cases. But you're missing Mondragon, Equal Exchange, King Arthur Flour, and many others. Basically, you appear to be focusing on investor owned companies and missing the entire class of worker cooperatives where the financial gravity you're talking about isn't merely resisted -- it doesn't exist. These companies have other challenges, to be sure, but if you're going to write a book called "Incorruptible" talking about businesses, not including these seems a significant oversight (at the least). Do you address these in the book and just fail to highlight them here or is this really something you missed entirely?
  • eries 4mo ago
    Both Mondragon and King Arthur Flour are in the book. I'm not familiar with Equal Exchange, but now that you've mentioned it, I'm going to go learn more.
    • dbingham 4mo ago
      Cheers! Glad to hear you covered them. I'll check out the book when I have some reading bandwidth. I'm working on applying the lessons of these companies to tech, basically hoping to start a tech Mondragon. It's extremely hard, because there's (almost) no infrastructure for it and funding is all but impossible to come by. The evidence is pretty strong that once cooperatives get going they are more resilient and far more pro-social than capital funded businesses. They are that structure your book seems to be alluding to that resists corruption. There are two main reasons there aren't more of them: lack of awareness and lack of capital to fund them. If we want a truly pro-social economy, we should really work on fixing those two problems!
• FiatLuxDave 4mo ago
  Hi Eric, I enjoyed The Lean Startup. You used the phrase "our industry". Personally, I'm not a huge fan of the 'tech industry' concept, simply because a lot of startups are not in software/computing, and a lot of new technology isn't either. But I get what people mean. I notice that the companies you mention like Costco and Patagonia are not in the tech industry. Does your new book have any examples which show how to stay incorruptible in the face of the network effects that drive monopolization in the tech industry? Alternatively, have you seen workable ways to split network effects amongst networked affiliates, to spread out the market power? I know that most founders aren't exactly looking to make a startup with a lot of competition (I'm sure not), but it would be nice to know if someone is fixing problems specific to the 'tech industry'.
  • eries 4mo ago
    Yeah, I did my best in the book to find that balance between tech and non-tech stories. You'll find a few tech stories in there, for example Anthropic, GitLab and Cloudflare. And if you want all the horror stories, you can read Cory Doctorow. I wanted to have a wide variety of stories in the book from many different industries to show just how pervasive these forces are that we're doing battle against. While there are some things that are unique to the tech industry, I think we have more in common than what sets us apart. FWIW, I wish people would talk about the "startup movement" rather than the "tech industry" for what we do. But maybe that ship has sailed.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago
  The founders and business models of Costco, Patagonia and Novo Nordisk are so radically different from so-called "tech startup" founders^1 that one must consider this in any analysis 1. Who lack a legitimate business model hence have resorted to "data collection from/about computer users, surveillance of computer users even when engaged in non-commercial activity and online advertising services" with generally free, so-called "products" and "services" offered as bait "There's a darkness in our industry that we often don't talk about." It's "talked" about on HN but voters and commenters working for or aspiring to start/work for these companies don't like the discussion 100% probability this comment will be greyed out to try to hide it from people using graphical web browsers (no effect on monochrome text-only browser users) The people that start "tech" companies are often soulless and maladapted to society, having hid behind computers to escape their inability to deal with the real world. There are also "tech startups" founded by people who want to take advantage of those who have hidden behind computers and lack social skills, using them as pawns These founders and pawns do not start, nor do they want to work for, companies like Costco, Patagonia or Novo Nordisk because they only believe in what they see on a computer screen not the real world. They want to operate in Silicon Valley fantasy land It really isn't surprising what happens to so-called "tech" companies over time considering what they start from The author worked for Kleiner Perkins, SillyCon Valley VC After listening to this guy you may feel like you need a shower
  • jvidalv 4mo ago
    Bit of an stretch here.
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  • danielovichdk 4mo ago
    "The people that start "tech" companies are often soulless and maladapted to society, having hid behind computers to escape their inability to deal with the real world". Yes. Of course. You cannot trust anyone to have a rounded mind unless they have actually done more than one thing, broadly speaking. Having worked at one of these companies, I don't buy for one second, that these companies are not obsessed with financial benefit. You would be an absolute idiot to believe that.
• jh00ker 4mo ago
  I'm glad you're doing this. I am aware of _Incorruptible_ from seeing posts on LinkedIn, but from your description here, I now realize I'm going to love this book! I wasn't going to make time to check it out, but I will now! Where does Apple fall on the Incorruptible spectrum? Is it covered in the book?
  • eries 4mo ago
    Apple is not covered in the book (except via a few Steve Jobs anecdotes). I'm just not plugged in enough to their internal culture to be able to comment intelligently. Tell me what's different about this page vs what you've seen on LinkedIn? maybe I can learn how to promote the book better!
    • jh00ker 4mo ago
      Honestly, I think on LinkedIn, I'm usually in doom-scrolling mode, whereas on HN, I'm more likely to read a post in-depth. I think it was smart to come here to reach out on multiple modalities!
• storus 4mo ago
  Wouldn't simple (political) ponerology describe why does this happen to companies? It's the source of "hard times produce strong people, strong people produce good times..." cycle, and the observation that people who want to live easy lives embracing dark triad patterns slowly rise to the top, gaming perf stats, "playing the game", transforming the company/society underneath in the process.
  • tonymet 4mo ago
    that's cynical. companies aren't monoliths. there are constant struggles over priorities, resources , etc.
    • storus 4mo ago
      It might be somewhat cynical yet it seems to be fitting what is happening right now at Meta and previously happened at Amazon.
• redmonduser 4mo ago
  Can a 50yr old + introvert be a successful tech founder or is it best they stick to their corporate job at a soulless megacap? haha.. thanks
  • ralferoo 4mo ago
    I'd say yes, but it's harder. It's actually what I plan to do very soon. He's not exactly an introvert, but one good example is from the founder of my client. He wanted to stay doing the technical work he enjoyed, so he recruited a CEO above him (although he actually still shares a lot of that role and now they nominally share the role), and also hired others the lead the development teams, leaving him to focus on the one specific area of tech that he really enjoys. I'd say his job is about 80% tech and about 40% CEO (and total 120% load because he never seems to sleep!) I guess the point is to try to fight the urge to do everything yourself. If you're not an extrovert, you'll need to hire a good sales and marketing team to take that side of the business, or you'll end up hating it and/or having no customers no matter how good your product is.
  • eries 4mo ago
    In some industries, older entrepreneurs have a big advantage over younger entrepreneurs, so it kind of depends on what you've been doing and what you're good at.
• coalstartprob 4mo ago
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• mannanj 4mo ago
  Hi Eric. In this day and age, and in the next year or two, what do you foresee as the most practical first steps for someone to work towards delivering a startup for income they can sustain themselves on? And how has the traditional loop of validation, delivering and iterating on products, and getting your first paid customers changed since fast output is now possible with AI and technology? Please structure this for someone with no startup experience, and such that event a child can understand. And please create a version that works for someone to begin to validate their idea right now and measure progress, and modify/iterate towards a goal of money generation for themselves or a team now and long-term. (And would you also describe then how this person can work on attracting a team for someone who has never successfully navigated choosing their own team before.) (And would you also accept my thanks, this is very kind of you)
  • eries 4mo ago
    This is kind of a big and deep question, more than I can get into with so many other questions pending, but let me see what I can offer. First of all, we are living through a golden age of entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, because times of tremendous turmoil are often times of tremendous startup opportunity. But in particular, this moment, the capabilities of individual people are being amplified thanks to all these new technologies. You have the opportunity to be an early adopter of a technology that billions of people will use just a few years from now, but you get it first. That probably means that the things you care a lot about or know a lot about, you could do something about it that would have been absolutely impossible even five years ago. Now, you have to avoid that feeling that you're too late. I remember feeling, in 1998, that I'd already missed the internet. The vast majority of people have never used Claude Code. The vast majority of people have no idea how LLMs work or what they do. The vast majority of people simply don't even know that starting a company is something you could use this technology to do. As inexperienced or behind as you might feel, just the fact that you're here having this conversation right now proves that you are way, way, way ahead. All you have to do is use that advantage.
    • mannanj 4mo ago
      It was a lot, I see that now. I appreciate you responding anyway! Thank you for the words of encouragement. Personally, I think my challenge is less on starting, and more on finishing, and on the pieces of extending it from personal project to something others use and pay for. A bootcamp I did inspired by your methodology was still running on old paradigm and had us doing a lot of validation before building a thing; it didn't make sense when I can quickly development and produce with AI. Would love to hear more if you would speak to that and I can clarify and focus my question(s) later. Thank you so much.
• logannyeMD 4mo ago
  No question, really - just wanted to say thanks for evangelizing this topic. I'm originally a medical doctor who converted to the ways of computer science, now a founder in the bio space. One thing I've consistently wrestled with is how to structurally defend our company's ability to "first, do no harm." I think the misguided incentives you raise warning about are also the primary reason for the defects we see in our (American) healthcare system today, particularly with the grievances toward big pharma and the insurance industry. So I was pumped watching your interview with Garry a few weeks back, currently working on applying it to our own little lemonade stand.
  • eries 4mo ago
    thank you! Healthcare is a recurring topic in the book, for the reasons you specify. In fact, I call for the adoption of a Director's Oath similar to the Hippocratic Oath for boards. They can do just as much - or even more - harm.
• dzonga 4mo ago
  hi Eric, the 'lean startup' & the work you & Steve Blank did was revolutionary in terms of getting products to market quicker. what are the 'slower' go to market channels that you've seen produce sustainable results also producing sustainable businesses. not the come fast, die fast kind ?
  • eries 4mo ago
    One of the least read parts of The Lean Startup is the chapter on what I call engines of growth. This is my attempt to elucidate what I call the law of sustainable growth, meaning a situation where new customers come as a necessary side effect of the actions of past customers. Not really related to your question, but Steve recently wrote a great article about the new book that, if you're a fan of his, you might like too: https://steveblank.com/2026/06/09/incorruptible/ https://steveblank.com/2026/06/09/incorruptible/
• weirdmantis69 4mo ago
  Novo Nordisk is a good company? News to me.
  • eries 4mo ago
    I didn't say they were good, only that they are exceptionally long-lived. Don't you want to know why?
• snapetom 4mo ago
  Costco is interesting. I've always find it an interesting dichotomy between their public image, retail worker reputation, and corporate reputation. The former two are fantastic. I live in Seattle metro area where they are headquartered, and the last is horrible. I've had more than one recruiter tell me it's a classic, blue collar, "we've always done it this way" environment since many of their corporate people rose through the ranks in stores, not tech. As I believe Warren Buffet put it, "every company is a tech company these days," so this creates problems. I met someone at a party there about three years ago tell me a data migration went so poorly, they'll have to use two financial systems for at least ten years because the previous system was homegrown with ancient tech. As an ENTJ, the later would drive me crazy, and I've declined when recruiters want to talk to me about such and such manager position at Costco.
  • eries 4mo ago
    I definitely don't want to paint Costco as perfect. It wouldn't surprise me at all if their ethos is not especially attractive to people who want to work on the tech side of their business. I can easily imagine that at some point that is going to cause some kind of problem for them. But I can also imagine that it's just a very distinctive culture that's not for everybody. The truth is, I don't really know because I've never worked there.
    • snapetom 4mo ago
      Yep. Along with your other comment, I also think they're too big to be messed with for now. Last company I was at maybe serves as predictions of what's to come. It's also blue collar tech, thirty years old, was the first or second player in the market. It fell behind quickly, but served a niche. The market completely changed on them in the last 15 years or so, lots driven by private equity. The company never changed. Customers kept telling them the old "hookers and blow" sales pitches (literally) isn't going to win renewals and new customers, but they never listened, never fixed things. Now the new PE owners don't know what to do with this boondoggle that never made money.
• haensi 4mo ago
  Reminds me of the question “why do good people go bad?” What are invisible forces? What is good? What is evil? Physicists, philosophers and theologians alike think about those questions. Do those questions need a foundation on which they stand to be answered? What is that foundation (are there relative foundations or are they by definition absolute?)?. Is there a moral standard that those handful of companies share? Similar to “success factors”, are there “success ethics” in your perspective? What would be the elements of success ethics that others can learn from?
  • eries 4mo ago
    Yes, ultimately this is a deep philosophical question. I know most people think it's foolhardy to traverse such waters in a "business book" but I don't mind. If you pay careful attention to the structure of this one, you'll see it's not really a business book at all, at least not in the way the form is normally understood.
• bwhiting2356 4mo ago
  not a question just a comment - I read The Lean Startup years ago, still think about it about once a week. I regularly give away copies to people starting companies who I see going down a bad path with no tight feedback loop.
  • eries 4mo ago
    Thank you so much.
• davecyen 4mo ago
  What are your thoughts on the big tech CEOs and the current administration?
  • eries 4mo ago
    Not great, Bob!
• pradeep1177 4mo ago
  Hi Eric, I enjoyed the book during "solve.it" course (Closed reading). Reading it again second time.
  • eries 4mo ago
    thank you! and thanks for being an early adopter twice over. respect
• elisbce 4mo ago
  It's all about specific people at the leadership. No structure is immune to corruption because people come and go all the time. The reason why Nintendo is so resistant to slop for so long is because their key leadership people were homegrown all the way from entry-level jobs and are still there.
  • eries 4mo ago
    Everything you say is true, but I might like to ask you this question: who chose those specific people at the leadership?
• kva 4mo ago
  The lean startup methodology is fundamentally antithetical to companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Antares, etc. How do you resolve the difference between the short term nature of the lean startup, and the long term optimistic nature of LTSE?
  • eries 4mo ago
    I'm not sure I would group all those companies in with each other, and if you read the book, you'll see that I attempted to make at least one important distinction among them. And it's interesting that people see Lean Startup as short-term; that's really not what's in the book. I tried really hard to make clear that you need a foundation of long-term thinking in order to make any kind of rapid iteration system, whether that's Lean Startup or Lean manufacturing, work. By the way, this is an old finding that shows up in a lot of the management literature going back to the people who originally studied the Toyota Production System. But all that said, I'm really glad that you feel LTSE embodies a long-term optimistic view of the future. That was absolutely my goal in starting it.
    • kva 4mo ago
      Big big fan of LTSE; The core tension I point out is simply that the epistemic crux of TLS -- short term validation -- is a poor proxy for the core risks in frontier companies. The cultural result of that is most people refuse to start long term companies since there is no short term way to validate the demand, which may in turn reduce demand for the LTSE itself :) Looking forward to reading Incorruptible.
• otterdude 4mo ago
  How would you expect this dynamic to change considering potentially "consistent" actors in AI / Automation? How do you imagine companies with staying power will be shaped in the future? Will we see new paradigms in management? ie smaller teams, jack of all trade types of individuals vs specialists, potentially the elimination of middle management all together
  • eries 4mo ago
    yes, certainly. There's a section in the bonus content of the book about Answer.AI and how we have attempted to use LLMs to create a company of "management without managers" and how it's going.
    • 2001zhaozhao 4mo ago
      I wonder whether a layering like "Human -> LLM -> Human -> LLM -> Human" would work and provide the best of both worlds if designed and enforced well.
      • eries 4mo ago
        what else could the answer be? I feel like this is almost overdetermined, but we will have to slog through a lot of gyrations as people try to make some other answer fit...
• lb1lf 4mo ago
  Not relevant at all, but would you happen to be a descendant of Heinz/Henry Ries, the photographer? (Reading Joseph Pearson's book on the Berlin airlift, in which he features prominently, do your last name stood out...)
  • eries 4mo ago
    nope, it's a coincidence
• jgafni 4mo ago
  I've read the Lean Startup several times, and I'm a huge fan. Have been wondering this over the past year: Has the notion of MVP changed at all, given more experienced or knowledgable customers, higher expectations, AI decreasing costs, and more saturated markets? Seems like what you could get away with 15 years ago might not fly with customers today
  • eries 4mo ago
    Absolutely. 100% true. But on the other hand, the tools have gotten a lot better, so it's much easier to build a high-quality MVP than it was back then. But in any era, the most important thing to remember is that quality is defined by the customer. Meaning, if you don't know who the customer is, you literally don't know what quality means. So don't fall into the trap of assuming you know what would fly or would not fly with customers today. Test. Experiment. Learn.
• r2ob 4mo ago
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• apical_dendrite 4mo ago
  I worked for a lean startup that built a very expensive hardware product. The company kept the team as small as possible and took a ship fast and iterate approach. They shipped hardware that had numerous design and manufacturing defects and failure rates were very high, over 50% required replacement after 2.5 years. For a while the company was relatively generous with out-of-warranty replacements, which helped mitigate the issue, but that became too expensive. So customers spent thousands of dollars on a hardware product that was likely to fail in the year after the warranty expired. The company was also very reluctant to spend on customer service and QA, but spent very generously on marketing. I'm curious how you would think about this situation from the lean startup perspective. With hardware products, if you don't do lots of initial testing, the scale of problems might not become apparent for years. You can't just fix a problem with a software patch.
  • eries 4mo ago
    I tried to address this in The Lean Startup and also in the follow-up book The Startup Way. Cutting corners, making crap does not help you test your thesis. What's needed is not to ape the techniques and tactics that work in another industry like software, but to really think from first principles about what will create sustained iteration speed even in a hardware context. In The Startup Way, in particular, I give a bunch of examples, including a bunch from old school manufacturing contexts that have applied these techniques successfully.
• cube00 4mo ago
  Can't say I agree with Costco anymore, staff are now rude and needlessly petty at multiple locations which I can only assume is because they're getting squeezed from the top in a similar way to the grocery stores. It used to feel completely different a decade ago, no teenagers that couldn't care less, now few of them seem to care. Tyre centre moved to bookings only but you can't call because there's never anyone on the tyre desk. I know because it's always unattended whenever I walk past. Gas station staff just chat to each other and put out the traffic cones 30 mins before close leaving a small gap. Everyone now has to scan their card with a single scanner leaving a huge queue outside just to get in. Register queues go right down to the back of the warehouse with half the registers closed. Queue again to get your receipt checked and all you get is departing grunt if you're lucky. It's sad because I used to rave about Costco and bring the cool new snacks to share at work. Prices are mostly comparable at the grocery store if you are willing to wait until they go on special so I've given up on Costco.
  • eries 4mo ago
    I never said they were perfect! Only that they have maintained their autonomy for 40 years.
• ako 4mo ago
  Most relevant question in today's world seems to me how to create incorruptible governments?
  • eries 4mo ago
    Organizations are organizations in the end, so hopefully you'll find something relevant in the book too.
• mattio 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• meerab 4mo ago
  Read 'The lean startup' - it has shaped the way I think about building products! With big companies with large budgets bulldozing smaller players - any advice on finding a niche that is worth pursuing?
  • eries 4mo ago
    I've talked about this in a couple of recent interviews, and if you can't find one, I'll try to find you the link. This question about what it's like when you're in a platform war and the platforms are like these massive bulldozers is kind of an old bit of entrepreneurial lore that, at least when I first came to Silicon Valley, I was taught many years ago. We haven't had a bona fide platform war in a while, so I think some of that lore has passed out of common memory. Generally speaking, what you want to do is what's called a market resegmentation, where you find some section of the market that the bulldozers are not going to pass over, or where you control the customer because they are loyal to you and you can play the platforms off each other.
• hopechong 4mo ago
  Time flies! Can't believe it's been 15 years already. Congrats on publishing your new book!
  • eries 4mo ago
    Thank you. I can't believe it's been this long.
• mekoka 4mo ago
  I haven't read the book, but I've thought about similar problems. Sharing my attempt at a solution. First, the organization must have an original steering body made up of "true believers" in a shared mission and vision. This body must make preventing the short or long term erosion or dilution of its mission a priority. Meaning that there's awareness that this particular corruption is a possibility from the start. Also, an understanding of the typical mechanisms through which it can happen (usually very human). Second, as part of its survival strategy the steering body has the responsibility to identify other genuine true believers and integrate them in its makeup. There must be built-in assumptions that many outsiders will be attracted to its powers of influence and will try to infiltrate it. Joining the steering council should thus be done primarily based on "culture fit". Admittedly a rather segregating practice, but one which in this case comes with the advantage that certain signals are just hard to fake on the long run. So, although many could try to dress, look, talk, or walk the part for a while, there will always be some shibboleth that trips up impostors. I foresaw some problems to this structure that I haven't yet worked out, but it feels like a step in the right direction, if I had to come up with a solution.
  • eries 4mo ago
    That sounds very similar to the Alibaba Employee Voting Trust (EVT). That's one of many, many structures that I cover in the book. I would say, in general, one of the reasons that people have a hard time thinking through these structures is that today we treat the leadership/operation side of things as a different discipline/different problem than the governance/structural side of things. In fact, they are two sides of the same coin.
• wilkommen 4mo ago
  Good companies go bad because the American financial system and thus the companies that live within that system are geared for "shareholder returns" as the primary objective of existence for the corporation. If the objective of the corporation was simply to protect its continued existence, more akin to a nation-state or a club, then it would be possible to have a wider variety of corporations which each behave differently and behave more according to their own internal rules and principles instead of behaving according to the demands of external shareholders who only want money, even if it distorts or kills the company in the long run.
  • eries 4mo ago
    What's interesting is that this is not a long-standing pillar of the American financial system but a relatively recent addition that was done without any democratic legitimacy whatsoever. I think it's pretty clear that if we go a different direction, we can have a different outcome.
    • bo1024 4mo ago
      Is it much different in other countries?
      • wilkommen 4mo ago
        Yes, it's much different in other countries. See https://substack.com/@doks/p-198191751 https://substack.com/@doks/p-198191751
  • dakolli 4mo ago
    In America it's more important to maintain or grow shareholder returns than it is to not poison your customers. Its perfectly alright to give your customers cancer (Roundup, Fracking, Massive amounts of sugars which lead to metabolic disease)as long as it makes someone rich and they can donate to a political campaign. We really are the most evil and corrupt country to ever exist. We need a Mao, Stalin type figure to set things straight.
• thevibesman 4mo ago
  "The Lean Startup" was recommended to me about 10 years ago in the short phase when I was trying to build a startup (cool prototypes, no business model or product market fit, and starting the project with half the seed money I thought I needed to get it off the ground made it a short project). It was a big influence on me and something I recommend and quote often. I'm curious if your perspectives on the topics of "The Lean Startup" have changed I the era of AI tools. Particularly curious what you think about the role of MVPs to test a market. This has been on my mind the past few weeks because of a recent experience during a company hackathon: A few years ago I gave a talk about prototyping and MVPs at the Audio Developers Conference and in this talk to explain the concept of an MVP I proposed a silly idea for an audio plug-in (that replaces a singers voice with the sound of flamingos) as a demonstration of how we might test that there is a market for this plug-in before building it. I gave some examples of how we could test this like a landing page MVP, concierge MVP, etc. Recently during the two days of this company hackathon I was too busy to do a project of my own because I was helping on-board colleagues with Claude and getting sucked into some leadership meetings. During the demos meeting I decided to try to build my voice replaced with flamingos plug-in and built a working plug-in in under two hours and this got me thinking: If I can build a real functioning plug-in that a user can try in their host application in less than two hours why would I use non-software MVPs to test a market when I can build working software just as fast or faster than I could setup a non-software MVP a few years ago. Of course there is more to learn from "lean" than just MVP (I'm also a big fan of the andon cord and the 5 why's) (to anyone commenting on vibe coding I looked at the code and while not all of it was ideal I wouldn't consider this "vibe coded" and for serving the purpose of an MVP a couple things in the code that were a little funny are not a problem)
  • eries 4mo ago
    Definitely, AI makes certain kinds of MVPs a lot easier to produce, so that's great. Unfortunately, some people are being encouraged to outsource their own thinking to the AI. For them, it doesn't seem to make the learning any faster. In fact, I know some people that it has made the learning quite obviously slower.
• jv22222 4mo ago
  Generally speaking if a company can game the system they will game the system.
  • eries 4mo ago
    But should they want to game the system? Do you want to game the system? If the answer is no, maybe you have some interest in learning how to build a company that would be able to resist that temptation in the future.
    • jv22222 4mo ago
      I do not want to game the system, I hate the idea of gaming the system. I just want to be nice, and I think that is precisely the reason why I'm not very rich.
• dcarmo 4mo ago
  It's interesting how none of the top comments mentions capitalism as the reason for companies losing their original mission. It's the same force that causes enshittification: the (unachieavable) infinite pursuit of profit. Sooner or later all companies will fall into the "financial gravity". The ones the author mentioned just haven't gotten there yet.
  • eries 4mo ago
    I know this is a common belief, yet the data doesn't really support it. There are truly exceptions. If you study how they became exceptional, you'll find that they defy so many of the so-called best practices we teach today about how companies should be built, structured, and governed. I don't think this is a coincidence.
• mzelling 4mo ago
  Look forward to reading the book.
• burnto 4mo ago
  Hm, so it’s almost like the corporation is not an ideal format for long-lived values driven institutions?
  • eries 4mo ago
    You might be surprised to learn that some of them are, but not if done according to today's so-called "best practices" about how to structure corporations
• _el1s7 4mo ago
  Cool, I got "The Lean Startup" as a gift, but haven't read it yet. Who is the target audience for your books? Is it founders? Or is it for people who want to be founders?
  • eries 4mo ago
    y not both?
• kortilla 4mo ago
  From the outside it seems like the long term stock exchange was a flop. Why do you think it failed to gain traction? Is it that HFT just isn’t relevant to enough key decision makers?
  • eries 4mo ago
    Not sure I agree with your assessment. From my perspective, it’s actually doing well: appropriately funded, its proposal for companies to optionally move quarterly earnings to semi-annual is supported by the SEC, and it trades the same stocks as the other two major exchanges. But it takes time to build something new and innovative.
• alalonde 4mo ago
  Was Frederic Laloux's work (Reinventing Organizations) an inspiration at all in your journey exploring these topics? Seems like very similar territory, albeit from a different perspective.
  • eries 4mo ago
    Not directly, although many people have pointed me towards his work since the book came out. I look forward to diving in.
• RedMagicBox 4mo ago
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• charles_f 4mo ago
  Hi Eric! Sounds like an interesting topic! > Why do good companies go bad I find interesting the systemic explanation of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith in "The Dictator's Handbook"^1: In any publicly traded company, if the executives (or the board) are not ready to do whatever it takes to maximize profit, they will be replaced by people who are. It becomes a selection process creating tyrants. If you're lucky (as employee, customer, or human living on the same planet), whatever it takes might be aligned with employees and customers' interest. When times are bad, whatever it takes has no limits, it becomes a question of survival or progression for business leaders. I'm curious to see how much that maps with what you identified in your new book! Patagonia is private and under the control of a few benevolent dictators ; Costco and Nordisk are a bit more surprising, I'm keen to know more. ^1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dictator%27s_Handbook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dictator%27s_Handbook
  • eries 4mo ago
    The fundamental question is what the people who work at an org are incentivized to maximize for "whatever it takes." Today, by default, orgs are aligned to maximize shareholder value (even at the expense of long-term viability) but there is nothing natural or logical about this.
• sbinnee 4mo ago
  Congrats for publishing a new book. When I jumped into a startup, everyone seemed to have different definitions of MVP. So I just had to read your book The lean startup and realized that there is no one definition of MVP because every successful business can be different. The book also made me think a lot about profitability and got me into indie hacking mind. Although I read it just three years ago, it still held and helped me shape my views. Thanks. I will try to grab your new book someday for sure. Now, here is my question. I personally got disappointed in how most “early” and “small” startups operate. I have short experience to be fair but their sole goal seems to be how to get funds and grants and how to get higher valuation. They didn’t have visions and sustainability in mind. It felt like they are doing gambling rather than running a business. What do you think of this and how would you explain?
  • eries 4mo ago
    If you've been around the ecosystem long enough, you eventually realize how these cycles go. When startups are seen as trendy and a good/easy way to get rich, you get a lot of this gambling behavior in response. When the crash comes (just wait) a lot of those people get flushed out of the ecosystem, and things return to the original motivations: building, exploring, discovery. I was talking the other day to a Silicon Valley OG and he expressed total disgust to me about the "mercenaries" who have overrun the valley right now and who are destroying the very things that made it great in the first place.
    • sbinnee 4mo ago
      Thanks for answering. A crash happened recently to me and I got myself voluntarily flushed out of the company. Mercenaries is a good way to put it. I guess I will have to keep searching for right people.
• deweywsu 4mo ago
  I'd love to know how you got your book into the public eye. What kind of marketing and sales channels did you target to get noticed? Thanks
  • eries 4mo ago
    I am finding this exceptionally difficult, to be honest. It has been nearly impossible (so far) to get traditional media to take the book seriously (there have been a few exceptions). And the perversity of the modern social media algorithms means that it is extremely difficult to get discussions of the book to break through that barrier. I've had people who follow me say their feed is absolutely saturated with content about the book, and others who have no idea the book has come out. The algorithm decides all, having hundreds of thousands of followers is next to useless anymore. So, to the extent the book is getting attention at all, it's being driven primarily by word of mouth. People who read the book are inspired to become evangelists for it, far more than my prior books. I think this one is more emotionally resonant for folks, and has applicability way beyond founders or even product people. So I'm extremely grateful for all that support. I've also done a metric ton of podcast interviews, many of which you can watch here: https://howisincorruptiblegoing.com/ https://howisincorruptiblegoing.com/ But if you look at the view counts on YouTube, you'll see that they are all also suffering from the algorithm's fickle attention. Most have very few views (with a few notable exceptions).
• _HMCB_ 4mo ago
  Awesome. Can’t wait to read it. And thank you for your service.
  • eries 4mo ago
    /salute
• meteor333 4mo ago
  Hi Eric, very excited to read your book. Im fan of The Lean Startup and it helped shape my couple of startups that I did (and got successful exit). Recently i've been having crisis and loss motivation on starting a new one after seeing SV getting corrupted in recent years, but im hoping your new book helps me revive the fire and show that starting a startup with the right ethics is possible. Anyway, my question is - Have you had a chance to research OpenAI and it's path to getting "corrupted" i.e. going from Non-profit to this weird structure to then, what it looks like, absolutely regular for-profit company? whats your take on it? what are the lessons of the convoluted company structure they persuaded?
  • eries 4mo ago
    Thanks for your kind words. Don't let the mercenaries get you down. They're depressing a lot of us, but they're not here to stay. People always want to judge these trends in the middle of a cycle, but during the hype cycle you can't really tell what's real and what's not. Give it a couple years and then let's revisit, shall we? It's a really complicated and confusing company to draw lessons from, partly because there are such big ego, larger-than-life people involved doing crazy stuff. A lot of the inner details have not yet been made public, so I don't think we really, really know what was going on behind the scenes. There have been quite a few factional struggles there, and I'm sure you can find bad behavior on all sides. That's not that uncommon when so much money is at stake. In the book, I try to get into the structure that seems to be stable over long periods of time, which, because I know more about the details, I felt more comfortable illustrating by telling the story of Anthropic. I had to pick one difference that seems to really matter in these so-called complicated structures. It's whether there is one central point of control or more than one, i.e., if there are checks and balances. That when an outside board of trustees has the power to hold the for-profit board accountable to the mission, that seems to produce more stable results. Check out the research of Steve Thompson at the Copenhagen Business School, who has been a pioneer in developing the data from which these conclusions are drawn.
    • meteor333 4mo ago
      Well said. Thanks for the pointer. I’ll check it out. Excited to read the book! Ordering mine today…
• insaider 4mo ago
  Hi Eric, thoughts on capitalism? Call it 'financial gravity' but I think capitalism is the underlying insidious force. Obviously there's nuance but a world ran by companies with shareholders and profit margins isn't going to be a good one, is it?
  • eries 4mo ago
    I do make critiques of capitalism in the book, but I try to be very careful when using that word, since at this point most people can't even agree on what the word means. Here are some things that seem to me unequivocally true if we look at the historical record and the data available to us: 1. These kind of value-destroying actions in the name of profit have been going on for a very long time, at least 200 years. 2. The problem seems to be getting worse in recent decades. 3. The problem seems to be highly correlated with the increased financialization of our economies and the advent of a relatively recent set of so-called best practices about how companies should be built, run, and governed. 4. Companies seem to vary widely in the degree to which they are vulnerable to these forces. 5. I think to be learned by studying the companies that have been able to resist-- as a collective set
    • _doctor_love 4mo ago
      Hey Eric, I have a degree in economics and to me it’s very simple. Look up “creative destruction” and Joseph Schumpeter. Whether someone likes it or not, this pattern is the defining feature of capitalism. The market is very good at solving certain types of problems and not so good at others.
    • keeda 4mo ago
      > 3. The problem seems to be highly correlated with the increased financialization of our economies and the advent of a relatively recent set of so-called best practices about how companies should be built, run, and governed. I have the seeds of a theory that might explain this: this is the inevitable outcome of technological progress. Like the American democratic system, Capitalism works best when all major parties involved in the system have comparable power and can keep the other in check. The major parties here are the capital class and the labor class, because Capitalism was conceptualized in an era when value creation could not happen without human labor. As such there was some measure of power available to workers, the logical extreme of which were such distasteful words like "unions" and "strikes". Nevertheless, earlier there was some balance and everyone benefitted (after that messy little Gilded Age affair was sorted out.) However, technology, in the form of automation, has essentially been a force of labor displacement. Yes, we got amazing improvements in quality of life, but every advance also chipped away at the influence and power held by workers. On the other side, the capital class have not been idle. Money attracts money... and power and influence. Capitalists have been using those levers to ensure most of the gains of technology accrue to themselves. Lobbying is of course the most obvious example, influence campaigns is another. But relevant to your post, another way this surfaces is the "so-called best practices" you mentioned. There is no "collusion" to suppress wages, just "best practices" of amorphous origins. Which somehow always benefit the shareholders. Funny that. As you said this has been going on for a long time. But technology is amongst other things, an accelerant, and these trends have simply been amplified to become more noticeable. And now there's GenAI, which is the ultimate accelerant. Contrary to most media and HN, however, I think GenAI is not just the ultimate win for capitalists. If you think about it, by the same token(s) that GenAI disintermediates labor, it also disintermediates capital! (Who needs VCs when 1 - 2 motivated folks can launch ambititious projects with GenAI and public clouds? GenAI is a unique opportunity to restore balance, and could actually be the thing that ushers in the post-Capitalism age... whatever that looks like.
• sizzle 4mo ago
  “We've all experienced watching a company we love or admire be warped and broken beyond recognition; until it's a husk of its former self, or worse. I wanted to understand why. And I wanted to know what all of us can do to stop that from happening.” Enshittification and maximizing founder/shareholder/c-suite profit?
  • eries 4mo ago
    Those are symptoms. The real question is, what are the deeper causes? I think the book gives a pretty clear and convincing answer, but then again, I wrote it, so you'll have to judge for yourself. Most of all, I want to restore people's sense of agency to do something about this. We are not helpless in the face of these forces. In fact, we are the originators of them.
• willsmith72 4mo ago
  Thanks for all your work and books, Lean Startup was invaluable to me starting my career in 2017 working in a feature factory. You've probably talked about this before, but with AI speeding up product "delivery" (especially prototypes), what changes have you seen to the lean startup methodology? Is it possible to supercharge the build measure learn loop? And what good uses for AI have you seen to keep teams "building things people want"?
  • eries 4mo ago
    We're certainly seeing a lot of speedup for certain kinds of products, and I expect to see far more. But some of these speedups are dramatically overstated because people are measuring only the time to produce the prototype or the cool demo, not actually the time to get through the full build/measure/learn feedback loop. In fact, if you think about it, I think it's pretty clear that it's the learn step of the feedback loop that has always been and will always be the bottleneck. In terms of good uses for AI to figure out what people want, I really think the best advice is to focus on your own skills and agency. In other words, never ask the AI to make an artifact for you. Instead, ask it to teach you how to make the same artifact. If you do this over and over again, if you do it step-by-step, having the AI as a teaching companion, critiquing mistakes that you make, breaking the problem down into smaller sub-problems, making sure you've mastered each step before moving on to the next, pretty soon you'll be able to create some really awesome artifacts. Is this approach, in some sense, "slower" compared to vibe coding everything? Yes. But I think, at least in my experience, this is a go slow to go fast kind of situation. Now I had the benefit of being able to use a completely custom AI rig made by the company I help co-found, Answer.ai (with Jeremy Howard). If you want to learn more about that, you can access it at solve.it.com.
• trinsic2 4mo ago
  I appreciate that you are looking at this problem and I hope you found some interesting things to help point to something worth bringing awareness to. I don't like the business perspective on things and that sounds like the perspective you are coming from. IMHO the world is too focused on business and not enough around creativity, kindness and helping the world heal. IMHO we are dealing with a cultural domination movement centered around authoritarianism and its engulfing everything. The business world is being used as a weapon wielded against the world, I don't think this is a leadership problem, its a problem with selfishness and whats going on in the heart.
  • eries 4mo ago
    I understand where you're coming from, and if you read the later chapters of the book especially, you may find the book surprising. I won't say more to avoid spoilers.
• awwyeah 4mo ago
  Hi Eric, I like the phrase "financial gravity" as a way to frame the phenomenon in a way that avoids the darker (and broader) connotations of "corruption". At Humanitix we spend a lot of time thinking about this, and have much respect for the likes of Patagonia, Thank You, and others. We took the "charity path" so to speak, which has been both challenging and rewarding. Watching OpenAI's charity orbit decay into IPO fireball has been somewhat depressing, but I think it highlights one of the keys to our own continued success in resisting the pull; we don't need much in the way "capital" from the "ism". We don't need to build data centres, or produce and warehouse goods. Having said that I don't mean it to undermine your points of "strong ethos". Simply existing in the tech world as a charity takes great strength of ethos. Try explaining to AWS that you should be eligible for "start up credits", but no, you don't have "investors" to prove you're going to the moon. So I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising that so few other companies have tried low-overhead tech start ups as charities. The ecosystem works against it in many ways, but it has become one of our missions to prove that it can work as a business model. Anyway, thanks for the book (and this thread). I'll be passing it around on the work Slack.
  • eries 4mo ago
    There's actually a whole chapter on this in the later parts of the book. I talk about the phenomenon of non-profit-run companies (think credit unions or Signal or Wikipedia) and how many of us simply treat them as one-offs or singletons. As I write in the book, we admire them but we do not emulate them. I think this is a major blind spot, and I try to explain why it happens and what we can do about it.
• deleted 4mo ago
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• vianarafael 4mo ago
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• danhudlow 4mo ago
  1. Why is the scrolling hijacked (in a super frustrating way) on incorruptible.co? 2. Why do the photos look like they've been mucked with by generative AI? Okay, I know these questions don't seem like good faith engagement — but it actually is hard for me to separate decisions like these from my assessment of whether a book like this is worth my time! (And you did say to ask you anything...)
  • eries 4mo ago
    I genuinely do not understand what you are asking, but I'd be happy to try and answer it. If you prefer a website not created by humans, you might prefer: https://howisincorruptiblegoing.com/ https://howisincorruptiblegoing.com/ instead
• jameslk 4mo ago
  Eric, thank you for taking time to answer questions! I read The Lean Startup early in my career and it shaped a lot of it. I’m keen to read your new book As I read through your comments, one question popped into my head: what’s your thoughts about the Friedman doctrine? Do you address it in your book? Specifically, the Friedman doctrine makes the argument that the social responsibility of the firm is to increase its profits. That policy making should be left to governments. Milton Friedman states in his essay: Insofar as [a business executive's] actions in accord with his "social responsibility" reduce returns to stockholders, he is spending their money. Insofar as his actions raise the price to customers, he is spending the customers' money. Insofar as his actions lower the wages of some employees, he is spending their money. His theory was introduced in 1970 and it seems has since become the standard for the corporate world How does this square with what you present in your book? Do you disagree with his theory?
  • bruce511 4mo ago
    I'm not Eric, and I'm not an economist, but I'd suggest this quote is mostly used to drive up profits for shareholders, and not for the benefit of the other two constituencies. For example, we bought a company, and over the next year or so doubled wages in that company. Our "social responsibility" in that case was to spend shareholder money so that workers had a living wage. That doesn't seem to be the story I hear about say Amazon. Yes, we've also spent money outside of those 3 groups. We contribute to charity. We spend money encouraging staff (and customers) to get cancer screenings etc. We spend (I guess shareholder money) on lots of things that are adjacent to our actual business. Frankly, in the long run, I think it ultimately helps the business. It makes us "human" and reminds us that we control money, the money does not control us. This permeates through employee relationships, it permeates customer relationships. Ultimately that makes for a stronger company, built to last. We've had acquisition offers. The shareholders have resisted them so far (despite easy riches) because we've seen what happens to other companies our size when they get acquired. Shareholder interest flows up. Staff (and by extension society) interest goes down. Ultimately most everyone leaves.
    • logifail 4mo ago
• valisvalis 4mo ago
  What's the first, most practical step a founder can take if they want to start "gravity-proofing" their company today, something they could do by next week?
  • eries 4mo ago
    By far the easiest thing is to file a "public benefit corp" form in Delaware. Two pages, extremely easy, your lawyer can have it done for you by next week without breaking a sweat. By itself, it is not enough, but it solves a genuine problem and has almost no cost/drawback.
• CopperBayTech 4mo ago
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• jkingsbery 4mo ago
  Not a question, just thought I'd throw out that I worked through Black Art of Java Game Programming when I was learning Java in 1997 or so. I still have my copy because I don't like getting rid of books. I found it really helpful for learning patterns for building medium sized software projects. I hadn't realized that you wrote that until years later when you mentioned something about it in The Startup Way.
  • eries 4mo ago
    No way! I would absolutely love to hear what you thought of that book. In fact, you may be the first person I've ever interacted with who actually read it!
    • jkingsbery 4mo ago
      I was in middle school at the time, learning programming. I think by that time, we had home Internet, but it was really slow, and so a lot of my learning about programming was either from the help files that came with the IDE (at the time for me learning Java, that meant Microsoft Visual J++) from books I convinced my dad to get me from Barnes and Noble as a reward for doing the "important" summer reading. I had a couple Java books before, but they were more focused on the mechanics of the language. Your book was the first that talked about how to put together a system. As a specific example, I had never been exposed to much in the way of networking concepts before. Black Art has a chapter in adding networking functionality to a game which was my introduction to networking concepts and how to build networking software. Until much later when I learned about higher-level frameworks, I used the design patterns for network programming in several projects in school over the next several years.
• hanzeweiasa 4mo ago
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• IIAOPSW 4mo ago
  I'll give you a read. If you haven't read it already, I strongly recommend the Knapp Commission Report. Its about police corruption in New York City in 1972, but its lessons on systemic and institutionalized corruption are highly transferable to other contexts. Probably the most common naive mistake I see is people thinking their subfield is special and they are the first to really notice / understand fraud within it. I've certainly seen people in the "sleuth community" (scientific fraud whistle blowers) reinvent the wheel a few times. All fraud is basically the same. Financial, scientific, police corruption...it almost doesn't matter. I'm not even the first to say this. A really good summary can be found in Ashforth 2003 ("The Normalization of Corruption in Organizations"). So, with the caveat that I haven't read your work yet and maybe you already know, I'd say look at past corruption far outside your area of interest / expertise. There's a lot you can learn there. Police corruption reports are usually great because of how accessible they are in several senses (more numerous, usually simple to understand), but I have no police related agenda to push here and it really doesn't matter where you decide to look. Just pick any Commission and read their findings. In the opening words of the Knapp Commission "We found corruption to be widespread".
  • eries 4mo ago
    Thanks for the suggestion
  • laszlojamf 4mo ago
    gotta love HN. Top comment on an AMA with an author who's actually written books is "Here is a book you should read".
    • ChaitanyaSai 4mo ago
      [flagged]
      • alexey-salmin 4mo ago
        > Here's where I thank AIs for the small mercies of slopping on pleasantries on otherwise tone deaf emails and messages. God I hate that, please send me more to-the-point tone deaf emails and messages.
• samiv 4mo ago
  Was it "financial gravity" that made the decision at VW to install emission cheat devices? Was it "financial gravity" that made the decision at Google to cheat at the ad exchange? Was it "financial gravity" that made the decision at DuPont to dump toxic sludge in the environment and make unsafe products? Or perhaps was it just a group of immoral people chasing more personal gain and wealth? Humans are too weak and too easily corrupted by wealth, power and shiny things and our political and economic systems place way too much power in the hands of fallible individuals. I expect it to be our downfall.
  • Akranazon 4mo ago
    Answer: the cause was financial gravity, rather than immoral people, because the former is what selects for the ladder.
  • jimbokun 4mo ago
    Those all sound 110% like "financial gravity" to me? I mean, all of those are examples motivated by sacrificing other principles to make more money.
    • samiv 4mo ago
      so let's call it what it is then? Corrupt individuals instead of "financial gravity"
      • eries 4mo ago
        By this logic, there are no such thing as psychological forces or institutional structures that affect human behavior unconsciously. I don't think that can quite be right. If you read the book, you can see the much more detailed and (I hope) rigorous argument, and then judge for yourself.
• Lucasoato 4mo ago
  > co-founded an AI R&D lab called Answer.AI with Jeremy Howard How is Jeremy Howard doing? I remember studying machine learning with his videos, he’s been so inspiring!
  • eries 4mo ago
    He's every bit as brilliant and generous as you remember. You can still learn from him, btw, once we re-open the solveit course: https://solve.it.com/ https://solve.it.com/ stay tuned
    • Lucasoato 4mo ago
      May the sun shine bright on your projects!
• mastermage 4mo ago
  Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
• dstephy19 4mo ago
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• camillomiller 4mo ago
  >>I kept watching good companies drift away from the missions they were founded on. Not because anyone woke up one day and decided to be evil, but because the structure they were built on slowly pulled them there. I call that pull "financial gravity." Mate, tried as hard as you like, it's called "fundamental laws of capitalism". I understand that won't sell books, and denial does, but c'mon. >> We've all experienced watching a company we love or admire be warped and broken beyond recognition; until it's a husk of its former self, or worse. I wanted to understand why. And I wanted to know what all of us can do to stop that from happening. Because it's a systemic set of capitalistic incentives, where either you find a way to be ok to forego growth for a different set of non-capitalistic values, which can only work if you're self-bootstrapped and have no investor pressure, or you go the way that making more profit pushes you towards. You can try as hard to reframe the picture, but those are the objective incentives of the capitalistic market, and what you're selling is illusions for entrepreneurs that want to delude themselves away from personal responsibility in order to sleep at night. >> My new book _Incorruptible_ is my attempt to explain the invisible forces that shape organizations, and how a handful of companies (like Costco, Patagonia, and Novo Nordisk) have successfully been structured to resist gravity and thrive for decades -- or even centuries. LOL, Costco? Really? The only good example here is Patagonia, and it's because they hacked the stakeholder system with a two-entities solution. Good luck with your book, I'm sure that you'll find enough capitalists that want to hear just another fable to make it successful.
  • eries 4mo ago
    And they say people on HN are all negative without having read the source material. What an exaggeration! I hope you decide to read the book, and then come back and share whether it meets your expectations or defies them. The fact that you know about the "hack" of the two-entities solution indicates to me that you might well be surprised. There is a whole chapter on that "hack" and how (and why) to implement it. I'd also ask you to re-examine whether the "objective incentives of the capitalistic market" are a law of nature (and thus, immutable) or something that is subject to human agency. If the latter, maybe we should exert ourselves towards changing it, rather than simply denigrating those who attempt to change it as naive or hopeless. In fact, I address this question directly in the later chapters of the book, including why (I think) people make comments like this to me. So, in a way, you're in the book! I hope you'll check it out. But either way, thanks for stopping by and dropping a comment.
• hopefulobject 4mo ago
  Is the most important decision to avoid corruption choosing a good business to go into in the first place? Because I feel like some businesses, like free social media which make their money off of ads, are more corruptible than others.
  • eries 4mo ago
    Of course that's true, but then don't forget that business model is a choice.
    • wrsh07 4mo ago
      How do you think founders should feel about advertising then? Eg Ben Thompson always argues that consumer products where you want to maximize audience (eg to distribute fixed costs, benefit from scale, power a multi-sided flywheel) should prefer advertising, but obviously this forces a specific trajectory to the business. If you run into a product with this type of dynamic is your advice just to run? Or is there strategy innovation we can do here to monetize businesses shaped like this to get a flywheel without ads?
• ianberdin 4mo ago
  «Please shut up and take my money». Jokes aside - can’t wait. Your book The Lean Startup helped me so much. I read it tens of times. It’s one of the reason I got great traction with mine startup https://playcode.io https://playcode.io - AI App Builder on our custom cloud. Thank you Eric.
  • eries 4mo ago
    Thank you. That's very nice of you to say.
• nicksbg 4mo ago
  I think that for example Zuckerberg has built a structure where he is basically irreplaceable. It had to do with A/B shares where, while having a lot less shares, he made sure to have the controlling ones. While this is good while the founder is alive, it sort of begs the question how long will the company that has structure like that run after the founder is gone. I believe it could go to some family foundation that controls the company, but I guess that is still prone to corruption. I think that there are a lot of interesting examples in gaming industry - founders start something and they are pushed from the company due to acquisition or by the shareholders. Let us not forget hostile takeovers too. As for startups - I think that it depends a lot from where you come from. For example, being in Europe, Serbia, it is a lot harder to bootstrap startup or to find investors. The best bet is organizing startup as a C corp in Delaware via something like Stripe Atlas in order to get (hopefully) some foreign investors interested. Investors here want to extract value before there is one there, which is a short term thinking. This in turn lead to risk aversion, opening the country for outsourcing model which is now collapsing and where there is small percentage of product based companies.
  • dominicrose 4mo ago
    > this is good while the founder is alive Are we still talking about Facebook?
    • nicksbg 4mo ago
      More or less unless you are considering Zuckerberg a cyborg. But jest aside, I was referring to a unique legal setup where he can not be forced out even if his decisions are catastrophically bad like whole thing with VR or good for shareholders.
  • eries 4mo ago
    I cover this topic extensively in the book. I think the fact that founders are increasingly turning to the political solution of "despotic emperor for life" tells you more about how bad standard governance is than anything else. I think vesting this power in a singular person or small group of people has all the downsides you'd expect from studying history. In the psychology literature, they literally have a name for "hubris syndrome." That is a mental illness that sets in when people have too much power. In the book, I make the case for what I call constitutional governance, which I see as a third way in between standard governance and founder-controlled governance. I think it is both more effective and more long-term. After all, a company that is tied to the human lifespan has a built-in expiration date.
• Tanzeel19 4mo ago
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• arpinum 4mo ago
  Eric, do you recommend, as you hinted in the book, that half of board seats should be appointed by a workers council? Do you think Six-Sigma is net destructive to a company, and why? Which examples in your book do you recommend readers further research and understand? I read the book last night. While the topic is important, I was disappointed in the content and format of the book. Scatterbrained. Some of the most important questions get a page of content. Scores of offhand comments and examples that get no serious treatment, sometimes contradictory. The topic would have been better served with less examples.
• TonyStr 4mo ago
  I think what I liked the most about The Lean Startup was how he would reduce experiences into patterns, and then define them. You get a bunch of concrete ideas that look simple enough to add to a checklist. I do think the book dragged a bit toward the end, but I appreciated the humility of the writing. Incorruptible sounds interesting - I've long thought about how much companies and their output are defined by their social structures. Microslop doesn't produce broken software because they hire stupid or evil people for example.
• PlasticTank 4mo ago
  Let's say you're only allowed to write one more book for the rest of your life, what topic would you write about?
  • eries 4mo ago
    I just did. I can't really imagine what I would want to write about next. I guess if I'm lucky enough to live long enough, we'll see.
• spgorbatiuk 4mo ago
  Now, that development and prototyping is way cheaper than before, how would you say an approach to ideas validation change? Which types of hypotheses are better and faster tested using via vibe-coding, and which should still be verified like we used to?
• juliedufour 4mo ago
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• pramodbiligiri 4mo ago
  Have you been interviewed by any of the top talk shows? Would love to see this discussed on Bill Maher, for example.
  • eries 4mo ago
    So far, no, it's been a complete blackout from the major podcasts and major TV programs.
• Tanzeel19 4mo ago
  What's the single biggest mistake you've personally made when advising a company on governance, something you'd do differently today?
  • eries 4mo ago
    All the mistakes, pretty much, are in the category of not fighting hard enough to protect the company or the founder. I tell a couple stories like this that still haunt me to this day, where I just feel like maybe, maybe, maybe if I had laid down across the tracks and made a big histrionic stink about it, maybe I could have gotten them to take it a little bit more seriously. On the other hand, maybe I just wasn't strong enough and didn't have the power, and there was nothing I could do. I'll never know.
• bsenftner 4mo ago
  Eric, Serious question: I find that the core issue in corruption, and the corruptibility of an individual and then the groups they are a member relies on plain spoken communication skills, and the ability or inability of an individual to protect themselves from self deception. A "uncorrupt person" does not choose to be corrupt, they lie to themselves with little corruptions until "it is too late" and then with no (self assessed) alternative they commit to their situation. As well as a group of people knowingly engaged in less than ethically honest activities must impress their ethical failures on all their peers, to insure their safety if the corruption is exposed, and they then bully their uncomprehending peers into corruption. All of this is caused to the educational hole that is effective communications: people are not taught how to identify honest and dishonest self conversation, people are not taught how to communicate without information mistakes they refuse are mistakes, omissions of critical information, and then deferment of blame when half considered strategies are met by complex reality. I've been working in tech, at all levels, since the 70's. The #1 characteristic of every single organization I have been a member and interacted with is poor communications, weak documentation, and nobody able to discuss the topics at hand without technical pretension, omissions, misdirections, and misinformation. This nonsense is all due to no real emphasis on communicating to mutual understanding anywhere in the verticals of technical and science educations. And that includes the communications in people's heads that drive them to comforting non-solutions they attempt and fail.
• sgsvnk 4mo ago
  Not all business have great defensible moats. What are your thoughts on companies getting bankrupt when they go against financial gravity in highly competitive industries?
• systems 4mo ago
  its 43 CAD at amazon so no a book like this should be 20-25 CAD max specially since its clearly a pop corn read .. "I won't pretend I have this all figured out" .. I don't think anyone should pay 43 CAD to read you thinking out loud (the lean startup is 25 CAD by the way, with a 10% discount) if ever it goes on discount on amazon, maybe
  • kshahkshah 4mo ago
    You can always use the library
    • eries 4mo ago
      Strongly endorse this way of thinking. If your local library doesn't have enough copies, I'd be glad to donate one.
• frankieg33 4mo ago
  This is a fantastic topic to cover. I have been lately talking about Costco being one of the best companies today. They are not erroding trust and somehow resisting the ratchet of optimizing for the next quarter (I mean its culture and norms). That trust allows me to spend so much more on my trips than I would at any other store. I really look forward to reading this book.
  • eries 4mo ago
    That's it exactly. Trust is part of a virtuous performance cycle that causes them to both be more true to the mission and also to make more money and therefore be able to invest more in the mission, etc.
• manassehermans 4mo ago
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• evolve2k 4mo ago
  A core principal from Toyota Lean Production and Demings TQM, is that a critical way to increase quality is to address waste coming upstream, including the waste of fixing defects. The argument that “AI runs so quickly” reminds me of the American manufacturing technique of making a machine lunch out widgets whether they were needed or of not to maximise throughput. As any lean practitioner knows this leads to multiple additional wastes including excess work in progress and wasted movement. How do you see this principal lines up with current AI arguments?
  • eries 4mo ago
    Oh my God, we're seeing this kind of waste of overproduction everywhere with AI. In fact, I've noticed that even when I vibe code a product, I often wind up adding tons of additional features that I didn't plan to, simply because the AI makes it convenient to do so. I even feel the vision for the project starts to drift in line with what the AI wants rather than what I want.
    • eries 4mo ago
      I guess I should also say that the one tool that I've used that doesn't do this is the one made by my friends at Answer.ai called solveit. You can check it out here at solve.it.com
• mentalgear 4mo ago
  > Mondragon, the Basque worker cooperative network founded by a Catholic priest after the Spanish Civil War, employs 90,000 people and is one of Spain's largest companies, spanning industrial equipment and grocery retail. Internally it is a network of roughly 80 to 90 independent cooperatives that self-govern through a congress of representatives. Ries uses it as a data point rather than a template: collectively, what he calls "alternative structures" (cooperatives, mutual ownership models, long-term benefit trusts) control roughly 5% of world GDP. His point is that most founders have never been given permission to even consider these options, not that every founder should replicate Mondragon. > When founders raise the idea of mission-protective governance structures early, lawyers and bankers typically tell them it's too soon. Then, by the time it matters, the control has already shifted. Ries has watched this play out repeatedly, including once in a room where a CEO turned to their CFO, GC, and bankers and asked whatever happened to that mission-protective provision thing — only to be told it was now too late. Exemplary for how Big Finance tries to keep the levers of powers in the hands of a tiny sliver of elites. https://www.tbpndigest.com/story/2026-05-26/eric-ries-on-incorruptible-why-corporate-governance-is-the-most-important-decision-a-founder-will-make https://www.tbpndigest.com/story/2026-05-26/eric-ries-on-inc...
• Maestro_dev 4mo ago
  Hi Eric, Im a 17-year-old student working on launching my first startup. The idea is about improving the reliability of AI agents solving the issue of them ignoring instructions, lying, generating code that doesnt match what was requested and is broken. I am a first-time founder with basically no practical startup experience, Im trying to figure out where to focus my time and effort. Given your experience helping early-stage companies, what would you recommend a young founder to validate first: customer demand, technical feasibility, or something else? I'd really appreciate any advice. Thanks for your time. Alex
• jadecarter68 4mo ago
  Curious if Eric actually addresses the argument that Costco's resistance to corruption is more about leadership than structure. That hot dog story is a powerful counterexample to his structural thesis.
  • eries 4mo ago
    Yup. The hot dog story is in the book, and although it is a leadership story, that leadership is protected by a unique structure. Without which, I think it's very clear that it would be insufficient. You'll have to read the book to get al the details :)
• oscarcooper257 4mo ago
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• adamwright326 4mo ago
  The meta discussion about HN culture where a book recommendation became the top comment on an AMA is more interesting than the actual topic. People here love to analyze each other more than engage with the author.
• PrimeOS32 4mo ago
  Eric – Is Anthropic betraying its core values by going public in the current environment?
• mdnahas 4mo ago
  I am interested in your opinion of Southwest Airlines. It had a very specific culture and acted differently than most USA-based airlines. But it was recently bought and changed to behave like all the other airlines. Was that a good thing?
• televibad 4mo ago
  Should a company has all its founder(s) need to get PMF and persistent user base, but still cannot convince the environment (all infrastructure of a region or nation) that eventually killing a prosperous and an economically helpful nexus point?
• inthepond 4mo ago
  I read The Lean Startup when I first started working a decade ago. It's great! The methodology and philosophy guide my agentic workflow construction.
• billbrown 4mo ago
  I didn't see that anyone had done it (and I think the commentary has died down entirely) but here's an Artifact that extracts Ries' responses plus the original question into a table: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/0f204165-e363-4553-a4ce-4d2059b42460 https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/0f204165-e363-4553-a4ce-4...
• dilipdasilva 4mo ago
  I just finished the book. It took a while, but was well worth it. Thanks for writing it. I founded a company that grew from 1 person 26 years ago to 850 people and is now 270. I think about the topics in the book quite a bit. And a while back I reached the same conclusion that companies need a different governance structure to not succumb to financial gravity. I feel your book overlaps with Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux. His book explores how organizations can move beyond traditional command-and-control management toward self-managed, purpose-driven, and more human-centered ways of operating. It gives a number of examples of companies operating in this way. But it does not focus on governance structure. In fact, one of the companies died because of a change of ownership. Your book also provides many examples of which I was not aware. It is always inspirational to hear of other companies trying to do things differently, even if it is not directly applicable to your business. I like your use of gravity as a metaphor and particularly that you can harness it to your advantage. I also believe strongly that we should not accept the way things are and we can change them. You mention in the book that companies in the s&p 500 live about 18 years, when in the past they would live 60 years and one of the reasons for this is financial gravity and in particular the change that happened in the 1980s where companies started solely serving investor interests. In thinking about companies, I use the metaphor of waves and surfing. I feel 100 years ago the waves were very infrequent. What has happened in the last several decades is that the time between waves has shortened. Companies have had to deal with changes like the internet, smart phones and social media, and now AI. Alvin Toffler in Future Shock (written in 1984) argues that the accelerating pace of technological, social, and economic change can overwhelm people's ability to adapt. Toffler calls this condition "future shock"—a state of stress, confusion, and disorientation caused by too much change in too little time. He predicted exactly what we are experiencing now. I think companies are also going through this kind of shock and likely the average life span of companies will continue decreasing. Going back to the waves and surfing. A company is a bunch of people on a surf board and the waves are coming faster and faster. Waves can be opportunities or they could kill the company. And so we need to think about how to structure a company so that it is agile and can catch waves or get out of the way of waves. I feel companies need to be much more fluildly structured so they can adapt to fast moving changes in the environment. Most companies are structured too rigidly. Another metaphor for thinking about companies is as a multicellular organisms, where individual cells are people. As with multicellular organisms, companies will need to evolve into more advanced organizations. The way this happens with organisms is through death and mutation and can take millions of years. The same thing happens with companies, they die, and people leave to join or start another company, taking some of the lessons with them. This rate of evolution is very slow, so we need to think about how we can change the dna of an existing company. I feel structure and environment within the company can play a role here. Also, I feel gravity applies to individual self-interest of which financial is a subset. With any organizational group, you are trying to take individuals with their own self-interest and are trying to align them to achieve something that is greater. If you can pull it off, each individual can realize much more of their potential and the group can achieve far more. But the force of self-interest is always pulling to break things apart, and for this you need to put in structures that maintain integrity. Again, thanks for writing the book. I enjoyed it.