AMA: I'm Eric Ries (The Lean Startup) & Author of New Bestseller Incorruptible

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? 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-col... 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. 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). 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. 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. 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/You can also see the various accolades, reviews, and awards that it's accumulated so far. 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? 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. > 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. > 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. 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? 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? 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? 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? 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. 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. :) 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? 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). 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. 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. > So I had to be very careful what I wrote about GoogleCan you say more about this? Do you think those tender feelings towards Google track some strain of values which Google still carries? Or does this statement reflect some fear of retaliation or conflict that would drown out the rest of your message?Genuinely interested in how you think about this, especially in the context of this new book’s topic. Thank you for this AMA. > Do you think those tender feelings towards Google track some strain of values which Google still carries?I suspect that it's largely just that brand reputation tends to be very sticky in the minds of people.It's the same reason that Pyrex, Harley-Davidson, and Dyson are still high reputation brands even though the product they make today is tragically worse than what gave them their initial reputation.(I tend to think of private equity as often existing as an arbitrage system to take advantage of the fact that they can buy a loved brand, slash the quality and increase the profit, and continue to sell at its original price based on that brand stickiness for a while until people eventually wise up.) > that incredible sense of idealismThe idealism that has been sucked out of the tech industry. It was so (naively) hopeful at one point, and now the arms race and profit-maximization has eroded it all. Your observations really resonate with me.I'm surprised I hadn't heard of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, it seems like a much healthier direction for the market. > 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.