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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

#221

Post by skybrian »

lebovic wrote: post #188
eries wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 tha…

Do you think their dispute with the Department of Defense would have gone the same way? We didn't see that at OpenAI or Google.

(Although it does remind me a bit of Google pulling out of China back in the day.)

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

#222

Post by ngriffiths »

eries wrote: post #187
ngriffiths wrote: post #178

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 mak…

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…

The LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/incorruptible-spotify-brendan...

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

#223

Post by eries »

altairprime wrote: post #102
eries wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" yo…

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…

All we have to do is apply this same parable to the "engineering" of organizations, and you'll be on the right track.

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

#224

Post by danielmarkbruce »

Boxxed wrote: post #110
nradov wrote: post #87

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-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.

Actually you can have your cake and eat it too. Market incentives aren't awful in most cases. The worst incentives are actually stock standard owner/manager misalignment (or "principal agent problem") whereby the agents are short term oriented because they are comped that way.

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

#225

Post by jvidalv »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #213

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,…

Bit of an stretch here.

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

#226

Post by eries »

coderintherye wrote: post #34

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?

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.

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

#228

Post by raincole »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #35

> 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…

> We are losing our rear ends.’ And he said, ‘If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you."

It sounds like a really toxic working environment. I sincerely hope they made up this story as an ad about how cheap their hot dog is.

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

#229

Post by eries »

i_like_waiting2 wrote: post #21

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?

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.

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

#230

Post by patcon »

eries wrote: post #174
lebovic wrote: post #168

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…

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.

> 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.

With respect to OP (who has a unique vantage from inside), I do agree with this on principle. When there are uncommon outcomes, there must be uncommon structure imho. A "good structure" is like oxygen, water, or peace: When it's well-maintained and well-distributed, one might not even notice it's there, nor spend much time being grateful for it. It's banal, but "what do you mean? isn't this just how things would always have been?" is both beautiful and tragic.

Imho if we could figure out how to have a "loud peace" (in all the ways that this might mean), we'd have figured out an important way of sustaining the world and ourselves.

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