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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

#431

Post by eries »

meteor333 wrote: post #423

Hi Eric, very excited to read your book. Im fan of The Lean Startup and it helped shape my couple of startups that I did (and got successful exit). Recently i've been having crisis and loss motivation on starting a new one after seeing SV getting corrupted in recent years, but im hoping your new book helps me revive the fire and show that starting a startup with the right ethics is possible. Anyway, my question is -…

Thanks for your kind words. Don't let the mercenaries get you down. They're depressing a lot of us, but they're not here to stay. People always want to judge these trends in the middle of a cycle, but during the hype cycle you can't really tell what's real and what's not. Give it a couple years and then let's revisit, shall we?

It's a really complicated and confusing company to draw lessons from, partly because there are such big ego, larger-than-life people involved doing crazy stuff. A lot of the inner details have not yet been made public, so I don't think we really, really know what was going on behind the scenes. There have been quite a few factional struggles there, and I'm sure you can find bad behavior on all sides. That's not that uncommon when so much money is at stake.

In the book, I try to get into the structure that seems to be stable over long periods of time, which, because I know more about the details, I felt more comfortable illustrating by telling the story of Anthropic. I had to pick one difference that seems to really matter in these so-called complicated structures. It's whether there is one central point of control or more than one, i.e., if there are checks and balances. That when an outside board of trustees has the power to hold the for-profit board accountable to the mission, that seems to produce more stable results.

Check out the research of Steve Thompson at the Copenhagen Business School, who has been a pioneer in developing the data from which these conclusions are drawn.

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

#432

Post by eries »

sizzle wrote: post #430

“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.” Enshittification and maximizing founder/shareholder/c-suite profit?

Those are symptoms. The real question is, what are the deeper causes? I think the book gives a pretty clear and convincing answer, but then again, I wrote it, so you'll have to judge for yourself.

Most of all, I want to restore people's sense of agency to do something about this. We are not helpless in the face of these forces. In fact, we are the originators of them.

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

#433

Post by eries »

insaider wrote: post #427

Hi Eric, thoughts on capitalism? Call it 'financial gravity' but I think capitalism is the underlying insidious force. Obviously there's nuance but a world ran by companies with shareholders and profit margins isn't going to be a good one, is it?

I do make critiques of capitalism in the book, but I try to be very careful when using that word, since at this point most people can't even agree on what the word means.

Here are some things that seem to me unequivocally true if we look at the historical record and the data available to us: 1. These kind of value-destroying actions in the name of profit have been going on for a very long time, at least 200 years. 2. The problem seems to be getting worse in recent decades. 3. The problem seems to be highly correlated with the increased financialization of our economies and the advent of a relatively recent set of so-called best practices about how companies should be built, run, and governed. 4. Companies seem to vary widely in the degree to which they are vulnerable to these forces. 5. I think to be learned by studying the companies that have been able to resist-- as a collective set

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

#435

Post by eries »

2001zhaozhao wrote: post #382
eries wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, certainly. There's a section in the bonus content of the book about Answer.AI and how we have attempted to use LLMs to create a company of "management without managers" and how it's going.

I wonder whether a layering like "Human -> LLM -> Human -> LLM -> Human" would work and provide the best of both worlds if designed and enforced well.

what else could the answer be? I feel like this is almost overdetermined, but we will have to slog through a lot of gyrations as people try to make some other answer fit...

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

#436

Post by zaphar »

eries wrote: post #363
zaphar wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like a lot of things, bad actors only have to get you to fail the test of succession once while the company has to succeed at it every time. Time is not on any companies side here and the longer it goes the more failing that test of succession starts to look like a law of nature.

That's true, and yet the evidence shows that some companies have been able to do it. I think there's something to be learned by studying those companies as a data set.

They have been able to "so far". This isn't to say that we shouldn't learn from them how to push the failure date as far into the future as you can. I just don't think you can truly make something incorruptible.

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

#437

Post by zaphar »

eries wrote: post #354
zaphar wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The structure requires maintenance and that is done by an individual or individuals. The real reasons a good company stays good is because the leadership stays good. When the leadership begins to disengage or leaves or changes in some way then the structure will begin to break down. You can't fix it with a "better" structure. It will decay over time unless someone is actively maintaining it.

What you say is true, but there is more to it. Decay is not the only thing that can happen to a structure. It also can be actively destroyed from the outside. Rather than ask whether a structure is right or wrong, good or bad, we instead need to learn to ask whether it is strong or weak.

This framing I agree with.

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

#438

Post by zaphar »

patcon wrote: post #276
zaphar wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The structure requires maintenance and that is done by an individual or individuals. The real reasons a good company stays good is because the leadership stays good. When the leadership begins to disengage or leaves or changes in some way then the structure will begin to break down. You can't fix it with a "better" structure. It will decay over time unless someone is actively maintaining it.

I think I agree..! I get the sense you were feeling at odds with my framing? I wonder if it's that you're picking up that I believe "structure" is above any one person or set of people. In my conception, leadership is just part of structure, a key maintainer. Leadership are pieces of the structure, but subordinate in scale. They sometimes seek outside help in shaping structure (e.g., ppl like eries), and the structur…

I think it's more that I was putting emphasis on a different piece of the puzzled than you and less that we disagreed.

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

#439

Post by sbinnee »

eries wrote: post #418
sbinnee wrote: post #414

Congrats for publishing a new book. When I jumped into a startup, everyone seemed to have different definitions of MVP. So I just had to read your book The lean startup and realized that there is no one definition of MVP because every successful business can be different. The book also made me think a lot about profitability and got me into indie hacking mind. Although I read it just three years ago, it still held an…

If you've been around the ecosystem long enough, you eventually realize how these cycles go. When startups are seen as trendy and a good/easy way to get rich, you get a lot of this gambling behavior in response. When the crash comes (just wait) a lot of those people get flushed out of the ecosystem, and things return to the original motivations: building, exploring, discovery. I was talking the other day to a Silicon…

Thanks for answering. A crash happened recently to me and I got myself voluntarily flushed out of the company. Mercenaries is a good way to put it. I guess I will have to keep searching for right people.

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

#440

Post by _doctor_love »

eries wrote: post #433
insaider wrote: post #427

Hi Eric, thoughts on capitalism? Call it 'financial gravity' but I think capitalism is the underlying insidious force. Obviously there's nuance but a world ran by companies with shareholders and profit margins isn't going to be a good one, is it?

I do make critiques of capitalism in the book, but I try to be very careful when using that word, since at this point most people can't even agree on what the word means. Here are some things that seem to me unequivocally true if we look at the historical record and the data available to us: 1. These kind of value-destroying actions in the name of profit have been going on for a very long time, at least 200 years. 2.…

Hey Eric, I have a degree in economics and to me it’s very simple. Look up “creative destruction” and Joseph Schumpeter. Whether someone likes it or not, this pattern is the defining feature of capitalism.

The market is very good at solving certain types of problems and not so good at others.

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