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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

#451

Post by eries »

bilater wrote: post #210
eries wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of them? Really? What's funny is when the book was published, I remember someone telling me that I should have included more examples of failed startups in the manuscript. I remember answering them, "Oh, I have. We just don't know which ones yet." This is the difficulty of writing any kind of business book. There's just no way to use any company as an example to illustrate some principle without people misunderst…

That's fair but I felt you held up these companies and founders as these demigods running this well oiled operation and yet I remember looking up those companies and all quietly folded within a few years of your book coming out. My point is you were not able to demonstrate any correlation with your suggested methods with startup success. A company could do the exact opposite of what you recommend and be successful. O…

Academics have spent the last 15 years attempting to measure these effects, and it's just a very hard measurement problem. There are so many confounding variables. I would say the early evidence is supportive of the thesis, broadly speaking. In the long run, I expect we will eventually be able to speak about this in a much more nuanced way. For example, some of the elements of LS are much easier to test than others, and those have been found to be broadly effective.

This project may take decades, and yet leaders need guidance and useful mental models in the meantime. So, to me, the much more useful data is the literally thousands of founders (and other leaders) who have reported that they have found the framework useful in their own lives and companies. They may all be deluded, of course, but at some point I think we have to acknowledge that _something_ useful is going on here.

In any event, I don't give it that much thought. If a new theory emerges that proves more useful, or if new research gives entrepreneurs new and better tools, I'd be delighted. My only loyalty is to the truth.

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

#453

Post by eries »

damnitbuilds wrote: post #180
eries wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of them? Really? What's funny is when the book was published, I remember someone telling me that I should have included more examples of failed startups in the manuscript. I remember answering them, "Oh, I have. We just don't know which ones yet." This is the difficulty of writing any kind of business book. There's just no way to use any company as an example to illustrate some principle without people misunderst…

You should, however, ( assuming your ideas are correct ) be able to look at a company and tell if it is following your ideas or not and will therefore ( assuming your ideas are correct ) be successful or not, and therefore make billions investing. Have you done that ?

as nate bargatze says, if only it were that simple!

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

#454

Post by eries »

Lionga wrote: post #405
eries wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you meant this comment as a criticism, but it actually raises a really interesting point of what we mean by "real success." I hope you will elaborate.

[flagged]

I guess then the jury is still out, then

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

#455

Post by eries »

awwyeah wrote: post #450

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…

There's actually a whole chapter on this in the later parts of the book. I talk about the phenomenon of non-profit-run companies (think credit unions or Signal or Wikipedia) and how many of us simply treat them as one-offs or singletons. As I write in the book, we admire them but we do not emulate them. I think this is a major blind spot, and I try to explain why it happens and what we can do about it.

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

#456

Post by boca_honey »

eries wrote: post #353
madibo3156 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your comment made me smile because the book hasn't had a one-star review yet. Maybe you'll get to be the first.

It's not about the reviews on some boomer platform like Amazon/Goodreads. It's about how out of touch this kind of book is. You hit the jackpot in the 2010's and because of that you might get some mainstream press and support from hardcore tech-bros for now but... I think you have no idea how culturally irrelevant (ie. uncool) a book like this is in 2026.

This is like an aerobics VHS in the 2000's. You might still get some sales because of older people... but you're done. You're no longer part of the culture. Get your speaking gigs / paid mailing list subscriptions while you can, I guess, because you'll sell 1/5 of what you sold before (being generous). It's all downhill after this.

Noticed how your HN submission is greyed out because of all the downvotes? That rarely happens in this site.

You should watch The Social Reckoning trailer which just came out. Check out the comments.

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

#458

Post by lmm »

eries wrote: post #161
minkzilla wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent comment didn’t say anything about size or wall street. It said leadership is what has preserved it. Which it doesn’t seem you have refuted in any meaningful way. You just restated what the parent comment is responding to with no further reasoning as to why leadership doesn’t account for it.

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…

> the claim that something by itself is enough has to explain why most companies are able to be destroyed, even though they have really good leadership

I think most of us are happy to believe that most companies simply have bad leadership, that leadership quality really is the axis on which Costco differs from others. If you want us to believe that other (destroyed) companies' leadership is just as good as Costco's, you need to make that case.

> Costco is protected by a very distinctive thing I call a "governance fortress." This fortress (and not merely their leadership) is the reason why they have been able to endure for forty years.

Can you sketch out your actual argument here (I think doing so would help rather than hinder your book sales, though of course that's a biased judgement)? What is this "governance fortress", and why should we believe that that, rather than the personal qualities of this one guy, is the reason they kept the hot dog?

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

#459

Post by abustamam »

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).

I think it's kind of counterproductive to call out "this comment sounds like AI."

If you're right and it is AI, the comment only points out what many of us can already see. If you're wrong and it isn't AI, then the commenter you're responding to can either argue with you about how it's not AI or just say nothing because there's nothing of substance to say.

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

#460

Post by danhudlow »

1. Why is the scrolling hijacked (in a super frustrating way) on incorruptible.co? 2. Why do the photos look like they've been mucked with by generative AI?

Okay, I know these questions don't seem like good faith engagement — but it actually is hard for me to separate decisions like these from my assessment of whether a book like this is worth my time! (And you did say to ask you anything...)

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