I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
It's been fifteen years since I wrote The Lean Startup, and in that time I've seen some things. In both big companies and tiny startups, NGOs and governments, in almost every industry you can name.
I've helped a lot of people create a lot of amazing companies, but I've also seen so many ways this can go wrong. There's a darkness in our industry that we often don't talk about.
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."
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.
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.
Along the way, I founded the Long-Term Stock Exchange, co-founded an AI R&D lab called Answer.AI with Jeremy Howard, and helped a number of notable companies with their governance (yes, including Anthropic).
I won't pretend I have this all figured out, but I've probably spent more time than is healthy on the "why do good companies go bad" question. Ask me anything!
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?
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.
Example of a company where this has happened?
You can also see the various accolades, reviews, and awards that it's accumulated so far.
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.
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?"
However, I have to express some skepticism that through regulations and reforms, we can reverse the entire incentive structure for public investment to be aligned with stewardship rather than extraction. How do you plan to defy the "financial gravity" between you and this dream?
Finally, I think that Claude Code has misinterpreted your request to summarize your interviews and events. Instead, it created a marketing and promotional website with not a summary to be found!
Your skepticism is well earned, and all I can really say is that I hope you'll read the book and judge for yourself. I tried really hard to lay out the evidence for two things that are necessary to address this skepticism:
1. We have to see that these structures are changeable. The economy that our grandparents inhabited is almost unrecognizably different than the one we inhabit today. So too, we can imagine that the economy that our grandchildren will work in may be unrecognizably different to us. Why does that necessarily have to be in a negative direction? What was once changed by human hands can be changed again.
2. I know this is hard to believe, but there's actually a lot of evidence that mission-driven, purpose-driven, trustworthy organizations outperform their conventional counterparts. The fact that this is so gives us a lot of tools we can use to drive the change we want to see.
On top of all that, we are living through a massive generational shift. The new generations have lived their whole lives under this maligned structure, and they are sick and tired of it. If you think they are going to sit quietly by and allow those structures to persist, I think that is very unlikely. Which means we're going to have change one way or the other; the only question is how violent and difficult is that revolution going to be? We'd be much better served to change proactively because we know what the right thing is.
I have to say, to your first point, that exploitation (of humans, labor, resources, consumers, etc.) has always been the primary driver of accumulating large wealth under capitalism. Sure, "innovation" sometimes has a role in softening the blow, but let's be real.
That was true in our grandparents' time... and their grandparents' time... and their grandparents' time. While their economies looked very different, the same structural incentives were in place and certainly did not curb unethical behavior one bit.
It has taken a long time for the piper to come for his full payment, but we can all see now that the world is burning, poisoned, and suffering as a result. We can no longer eat freshwater fish due to the massive amounts of PFAS in our lakes and rivers. The billionaires are trying to pretend they can escape the disaster by building their bunkers on remote islands or trying to colonize Mars.
I want to have some optimism in the newer generations to create positive change here, but I can't help but look at what happened to the idealism of the 1960s. The counter culture was right about the societal benefits of renewable energy, organic food, vegetarian diets, ecology, egalitarianism, civil rights, and more. But somewhere around Reagan many in that generation sold out and those great ideas were simply appropriated and fed back into the profit-machine that rewards exploitation. Today we have "certified organic" labels on food products, but that term has been watered down to almost nothing by the marketing departments, politicians, and lobbyists.
Anyhow, I obviously need to keep my pessimism at bay. LOL You have convinced me to give it a read!
Under all forms of human civilization, since the beginning of agriculture allowed one person to accumulate more cattle than another. Capitalism is actually a great equalizing force from that yoke - it allowed for the first time to get out of it through ingenuity and hard work. The rule for practically all of existence before that was "you do what the biggest baddest guy around tells you to do or you die", and your entire life and your children and their children's will be the exact same, with no hope of betterment whatsoever. It's what led to the rise of slave morality religions like Buddhism and the Abrahamics; if you have no chance at happiness in this life, best to believe there's something better after, and that those responsible for your suffering will be punished.
Evidence in support:
Compare the number of HN posts showing disfavor towards "billionares" and/or other markers of business success, and how this has changed over time.
See the popularity of this post from the other day as one example, on 'dopamine fracking' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48440792