Hi Eric, I enjoyed the book during "solve.it" course (Closed reading). Reading it again second time.
I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
281–290 of 618 posts
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#282Books like this are for tech bros what horoscopes are for sad old ladies. They are full of platitudes that sound relevant to people's problems and desires, that pretend to be based on science but have no actual basis in facts, provably do not work, and yet are still popular amongst the people they let down again and again. Anyone who could write a book with advice that worked the way this purports to would be too ric…
My friend, I know you think this is a criticism. It's pretty obvious that you haven't read the book. I'd encourage you to do so, or at least ask yourself, "Why are you commenting on a book you haven't read?" The answer must be that you're upset about a different book or about a whole class of books that have done you wrong. That's fair. I know what you're talking about. But for what it's worth, I tried really hard to…
My friend, I know you think you're defending your position well, but you've done the opposite. Scrolling to the bottom of the comments and seeing this response from you is like speedrunning your books' one-star reviews and coming to the definitive conclusion that it's not for me. Thanks for saving my time.
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#283It 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 doubt there is a statistical correlation between stock market performance and "avoiding doing awful things," though obviously we would need some way to quantify "avoiding doing awful things" before we can evaluate this hypothesis.
If the definition of "awful" is broad enough, I imagine most public companies will fall in the "awful" bucket, probably with the same distribution of stock performance as the whole market. If "awful" is going to mean something truly extraordinarily bad like dumping mercury into a well or whatever, I would still guess there is no correlation as I've read horrifying stories of corporate behavior at companies with unremarkable stock performance.
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#284> 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.
I'd be more likely to assume that it's a really great one, where folks like and trust each other enough that they can give each other crap like this and everyone understands and appreciates it, like good friends trash-talking each other on the basketball court. I've thought for years that the way you can tell acquaintances have become friends is if they start insulting each other.
Or, as you say, it could be a really horrible environment - but I don't think you can tell from one anecdote.
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#285It's all about specific people at the leadership. No structure is immune to corruption because people come and go all the time. The reason why Nintendo is so resistant to slop for so long is because their key leadership people were homegrown all the way from entry-level jobs and are still there.
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#286Thanks for doing this, Eric. I'm about halfway through Incorruptible and loving it so far. Do you have any recommendations for entity formation infra that caters to mission driven companies? Something like Stripe Atlas that can form the more complex structures? Forming a PBC is becoming more standard but tthe other structures seem more esoteric (and expensive).
I got so frustrated that this is so difficult for people at the early stages to do with most law firms that I actually helped start a new law firm (called Virgil) to do it properly. Virgil is an AI-powered law firm, but it doesn't let the AI do the legal work for you. It actually hires and trains human lawyers to become AI-powered superhumans. It handles lots of the really unpleasant back-office crap that early-stage…
I might be missing something here but the Virgil website doesn't appear to have a CTA / Get Started / Sign Up / Contact Form or any other way to get in touch?
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#287My book arrived today. Q1: You have done a few friendly interviews on YouTube, but I haven't seen one that challenges you much. Do you know if there are upcoming interviews that you found pushed back? Q2: Is the idea of shareholder supremacy fundamentally at odds with your with your preferred alternative governance structures, or is it just a time preference and risk attitude issue? Q3: You will get sympathetic ears…
Honestly, there hasn't been that much pushback, and I've done something like 200 interviews for the book. I think it might have to do with the fact that we all secretly kind of agree with this thesis, even though we know we're not supposed to say so out loud. I'm sure there will be some pushback coming, especially if the book starts to become more popular or gets more famous. Though I did get a pretty funny piece of…
The shareholders have little to do with this, ultimately. You see the same rot happen in private companies where the main investor really has full control.
It doesn't take much time seeing companies grow to see the cultural differences take hold when a company goes wrong. You end up with execs and middle management that do not want to rock boats, and where any disagreement is clearly career suicide. At that point, people push for what is good for them and is not good for the company, and people realize that letting things decay is in their best interest. Once your org has enough levels of management, anyone that is part of the big decisions and isn't a team player has already been filtered out, so you see large meetings where hundreds of millions are supposedly distributed, yet not one person is ever going to complain about obvious grift, or decisions that will harm the company in the long run. Open discussion is too dangerous, and coordinating action against bad behavior becomes more and more expensive. Therefore, the company just naturally erodes.
You can get there too with just a bad enough leader that values sycophancy enough... and after enough billions, basically every leader ends up having a lot of trouble accepting news of bad behavior from their advisors.
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#288Hey Eric! How often do you see companies recover from financial gravity? Or is it mostly irreversible? How much do you attribute worsening of company values to things like professional managers, too much hierarchy, and less founder-mode; versus financial gravity? In a case like GitHub where their focus seems less on open-source these days, should developers try to help GitHub better support open-source or should the…
You've framed this question as if these things are separate phenomena, but from my point of view, they are all symptoms of the same underlying cause. The sad truth is that, as I say in the book, "It's always too early until it's too late." The truth is we don't ever know if something is too late until we try. If you love an organization and you think you have the opportunity to try to help them get better, go for it.…
Would you relate this phenomenon to entropy?
Ie founders create order out of chaos, then entropy slowly creeps in due to X,Y,Z?
I loved the lean startup I'll be reading this book as well :)
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#289The lean startup methodology is fundamentally antithetical to companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Antares, etc.
How do you resolve the difference between the short term nature of the lean startup, and the long term optimistic nature of LTSE?
Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So I had to be very careful what I wrote about Google Can you say more about this? Do you think those tender feelings towards Google track some strain of values which Google still carries? Or does this statement reflect some fear of retaliation or conflict that would drown out the rest of your message? Genuinely interested in how you think about this, especially in the context of this new book’s topic. Thank you fo…
> Do you think those tender feelings towards Google track some strain of values which Google still carries? I suspect that it's largely just that brand reputation tends to be very sticky in the minds of people. It's the same reason that Pyrex, Harley-Davidson, and Dyson are still high reputation brands even though the product they make today is tragically worse than what gave them their initial reputation. (I tend to…
I agree with your take on reputation as a lagging indicator, and your take on PE. But a writer could also feel (if the reputation is truly out of date with the reality) that they ought to point out the disconnect, rather than triangulate between the two.