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.
I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
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Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#62[dead]
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#63I 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?
Intellectual dishonesty is corruption
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#64Huge 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?
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Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#65Any 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 Goog…
> 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.
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#66A 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?
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#67I 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?
Intellectual dishonesty is corruption
Right, and we developers will rant about it over beer, but the dishonest ones stumble into their next success before we know it.
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#68[edit] Removed as my link was to a different Eric Ries.
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#69Hi 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?
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#70The question has been also on our mind. We restructure now towards a 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?