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)
I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
141–150 of 618 posts
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#142Just 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 y…
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 cal…
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.
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#143A 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 its…
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.
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#144I'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 t…
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…
> 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?
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#145Hi 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, an…
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.
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#146Eric, 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!
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#147It 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-j…
> 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.
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?
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#148> 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 au…
I love that you asked this question, although, of course, you didn't actually phrase it as a question, because this quote is literally in the book. I addressed this particular misconception as it relates specifically to Costco, because I myself once fell victim to the same misconception. If you think Costco has endured only because of leadership, because of its strong ethos and its immense size, because you think it'…
The parent comment didn’t say anything about size or wall street. It said leadership is what has preserved it.
Which it doesn’t seem you have refuted in any meaningful way. You just restated what the parent comment is responding to with no further reasoning as to why leadership doesn’t account for it.
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#149Thanks 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?
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 no…
Gotcha; good call. Thanks for getting back. :)
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#150Just 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)
Gravity toward ads/ad-related revenue.