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

How would you expect this dynamic to change considering potentially "consistent" actors in AI / Automation?

How do you imagine companies with staying power will be shaped in the future? Will we see new paradigms in management? ie smaller teams, jack of all trade types of individuals vs specialists, potentially the elimination of middle management all together

I'd say yes, but it's harder. It's actually what I plan to do very soon.

He's not exactly an introvert, but one good example is from the founder of my client. He wanted to stay doing the technical work he enjoyed, so he recruited a CEO above him (although he actually still shares a lot of that role and now they nominally share the role), and also hired others the lead the development teams, leaving him to focus on the one specific area of tech that he really enjoys. I'd say his job is about 80% tech and about 40% CEO (and total 120% load because he never seems to sleep!)

I guess the point is to try to fight the urge to do everything yourself. If you're not an extrovert, you'll need to hire a good sales and marketing team to take that side of the business, or you'll end up hating it and/or having no customers no matter how good your product is.

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I worked for a lean startup that built a very expensive hardware product. The company kept the team as small as possible and took a ship fast and iterate approach. They shipped hardware that had numerous design and manufacturing defects and failure rates were very high, over 50% required replacement after 2.5 years. For a while the company was relatively generous with out-of-warranty replacements, which helped mitigate the issue, but that became too expensive. So customers spent thousands of dollars on a hardware product that was likely to fail in the year after the warranty expired. The company was also very reluctant to spend on customer service and QA, but spent very generously on marketing.

I'm curious how you would think about this situation from the lean startup perspective. With hardware products, if you don't do lots of initial testing, the scale of problems might not become apparent for years. You can't just fix a problem with a software patch.

Can't say I agree with Costco anymore, staff are now rude and needlessly petty at multiple locations which I can only assume is because they're getting squeezed from the top in a similar way to the grocery stores.

It used to feel completely different a decade ago, no teenagers that couldn't care less, now few of them seem to care.

Tyre centre moved to bookings only but you can't call because there's never anyone on the tyre desk. I know because it's always unattended whenever I walk past.

Gas station staff just chat to each other and put out the traffic cones 30 mins before close leaving a small gap.

Everyone now has to scan their card with a single scanner leaving a huge queue outside just to get in.

Register queues go right down to the back of the warehouse with half the registers closed.

Queue again to get your receipt checked and all you get is departing grunt if you're lucky.

It's sad because I used to rave about Costco and bring the cool new snacks to share at work.

Prices are mostly comparable at the grocery store if you are willing to wait until they go on special so I've given up on Costco.