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

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

#441

Post by floxy » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 12:43 AM UTC

eries wrote: post #257

damnitbuilds wrote: post #195

Books 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…

The original poster wasn't very tactful. But let's see if we can turn some lemons into lemonade. I do think there are a plethora of popular / best-selling "business" genre books that do have the vibe that the OP was hinting at. Reading the book description for "Incorruptible" at Amazon doesn't make me think that this book stands out from that crowd. How could the blurb be rewritten to emphasize that this book is truly different? Just including the sentence "This isn't another book of relavent-sounding platitudes" might help. Are there any falsifiable core principles in the book? If so, could you list those in the blurb? The blurb itself sounds kind of AI-ish:

"Incorruptible argues that this failure is not primarily ethical. It is structural."

...and with at least five em-dashes. Let's assume its not AI, but even then the blurb is very business-esque generic:

"Drawing on two decades"

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22drawing+on+two+decades%22

"a clear-eyed diagnosis and a practical blueprint for change"

...all sounds cliche. Your comments here on HN make it much more likely for me to read the book than the blurb ever would. But I'm not a best-selling author and maybe this is the sort of blurb that sells books to certain readers? Maybe authors don't have much of a say in how the blurb is worded?

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

#442

Post by willsmith72 » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 12:49 AM UTC

Thanks for all your work and books, Lean Startup was invaluable to me starting my career in 2017 working in a feature factory.

You've probably talked about this before, but with AI speeding up product "delivery" (especially prototypes), what changes have you seen to the lean startup methodology? Is it possible to supercharge the build measure learn loop?

And what good uses for AI have you seen to keep teams "building things people want"?

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

#443

Post by rashidae » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 12:53 AM UTC

clarkdale wrote: post #383

eries wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't understand your comment, so let me try and recapitulate what I think you're saying and what I think I was saying, and then you can tell me where I missed the mark. What I hear you saying is that the original comment simply said that leadership by itself is enough to preserve the Costco ethos. It didn't say anything about size or Wall Street or anything else. Is that right? The reason I responded the…

This reply genuinely reads like AI and I don't mean to insult you. Perhaps large language models have been trained too much on your books. Your first 2 to 3ish paragraph (explanation and rephrasing) is very characteristic of an AI when they're pressed (e.g. on why they recently hallucinated).

That’s on you. If a person has good grammar and knows how to articulate his idea, it doesn’t make him an AI.

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

#444

Post by trinsic2 » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 12:55 AM UTC

I appreciate that you are looking at this problem and I hope you found some interesting things to help point to something worth bringing awareness to. I don't like the business perspective on things and that sounds like the perspective you are coming from. IMHO the world is too focused on business and not enough around creativity, kindness and helping the world heal.

IMHO we are dealing with a cultural domination movement centered around authoritarianism and its engulfing everything. The business world is being used as a weapon wielded against the world, I don't think this is a leadership problem, its a problem with selfishness and whats going on in the heart.

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

#445

Post by altairprime » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 1:00 AM UTC

eries wrote: post #223

altairprime wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One can dream :) I’m glad you put in the effort to do so!

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

#446

Post by eries » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 1:06 AM UTC

trinsic2 wrote: post #444

I appreciate that you are looking at this problem and I hope you found some interesting things to help point to something worth bringing awareness to. I don't like the business perspective on things and that sounds like the perspective you are coming from. IMHO the world is too focused on business and not enough around creativity, kindness and helping the world heal. IMHO we are dealing with a cultural domination mov…

I understand where you're coming from, and if you read the later chapters of the book especially, you may find the book surprising. I won't say more to avoid spoilers.

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

#447

Post by frankest » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 1:06 AM UTC

eries wrote: post #179

frankest wrote: post #160

I’ve been thinking about what objective harnesses can be put around governance for companies and governments as well. Transparency dashboards, clearer real-time feedback mechanisms. What do you suggest especially for governments (local, or even larger). Keep thinking AI might actually help improve our feedback mechanisms given all the noise.

Yes, I do think this is something that LLMs should be very good at. As I've said in a couple of the comments in the thread, summarizing is LLMs' greatest superpower. But I have a whole chapter in the book about the use of metrics and, of course, their misuse. I'd be very cautious here. Government reformers have often assumed that just having better data will cause agencies to make better decisions, but this is simply…

Not just data but transparency of actions. Open source governance is interesting with some examples through git contributions for code and transparency of contributions to wikipedia, and things like Kanban boards and other lessons from project management. What if required government actions and requests are done with transparency - and so is the spending ledger. Public comments can be public too. It doesn’t replace human judgement but it provides direct feedback and clear sight into things that are normally hidden and deliberately obfuscated.

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

#448

Post by andyferris » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 1:06 AM UTC

milesvp wrote: post #232

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…

They study aspects of this phenomenon in UI design. There is a constant struggle between power users and novices, and a good UI absolutely cannot cater to both. Which means that over the life of a product, its UIs will tend to get more complicated and inscrutable as your user base levels up. Adobe products are often cited as prime examples. This, of course, makes on boarding and new user acquisition harder, and can s…

> a good UI absolutely cannot cater to both

So make two UIs? Or an API and a novice user / mass market UI, and let the open source community serve fussy power users (and borrow some of their good ideas as a return on your show of good faith)?

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

#449

Post by eries » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 1:08 AM UTC

willsmith72 wrote: post #442

Thanks for all your work and books, Lean Startup was invaluable to me starting my career in 2017 working in a feature factory. You've probably talked about this before, but with AI speeding up product "delivery" (especially prototypes), what changes have you seen to the lean startup methodology? Is it possible to supercharge the build measure learn loop? And what good uses for AI have you seen to keep teams "building…

We're certainly seeing a lot of speedup for certain kinds of products, and I expect to see far more. But some of these speedups are dramatically overstated because people are measuring only the time to produce the prototype or the cool demo, not actually the time to get through the full build/measure/learn feedback loop. In fact, if you think about it, I think it's pretty clear that it's the learn step of the feedback loop that has always been and will always be the bottleneck.

In terms of good uses for AI to figure out what people want, I really think the best advice is to focus on your own skills and agency. In other words, never ask the AI to make an artifact for you. Instead, ask it to teach you how to make the same artifact.

If you do this over and over again, if you do it step-by-step, having the AI as a teaching companion, critiquing mistakes that you make, breaking the problem down into smaller sub-problems, making sure you've mastered each step before moving on to the next, pretty soon you'll be able to create some really awesome artifacts.

Is this approach, in some sense, "slower" compared to vibe coding everything? Yes. But I think, at least in my experience, this is a go slow to go fast kind of situation. Now I had the benefit of being able to use a completely custom AI rig made by the company I help co-found, Answer.ai (with Jeremy Howard). If you want to learn more about that, you can access it at solve.it.com.

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

#450

Post by awwyeah » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 1:17 AM UTC

Hi Eric,

I like the phrase "financial gravity" as a way to frame the phenomenon in a way that avoids the darker (and broader) connotations of "corruption". At Humanitix we spend a lot of time thinking about this, and have much respect for the likes of Patagonia, Thank You, and others. We took the "charity path" so to speak, which has been both challenging and rewarding. Watching OpenAI's charity orbit decay into IPO fireball has been somewhat depressing, but I think it highlights one of the keys to our own continued success in resisting the pull; we don't need much in the way "capital" from the "ism". We don't need to build data centres, or produce and warehouse goods.

Having said that I don't mean it to undermine your points of "strong ethos". Simply existing in the tech world as a charity takes great strength of ethos. Try explaining to AWS that you should be eligible for "start up credits", but no, you don't have "investors" to prove you're going to the moon.

So I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising that so few other companies have tried low-overhead tech start ups as charities. The ecosystem works against it in many ways, but it has become one of our missions to prove that it can work as a business model.

Anyway, thanks for the book (and this thread). I'll be passing it around on the work Slack.